Hyperspace

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osmium
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by osmium »

yeah I think Arioch's explanation makes it easily digestible, especially if you reference the whiff, doink, freeeeedoooooommmmmm plot. Although I'd say rather than putting, it's more like chipping onto the green from a bunker and hoping to roll into the hole with no line of sight to the green (when said green is undulating). I think it provides a more appropriate degree of dread / difficulty i.e. you can't *really* see what the green is doing even if you know what it should be doing, and if that approach angle of the ball hits a random wave the results would be unpredictable to say the least.

-O

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Arioch
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

Except that since gravity affects the curvature of hyperspace (in addition to realspace), the waves do more than affect your "landing" area in realspace; they can directly affect the ballistic trajectory of the ship through hyperspace.

Karst45
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Karst45 »

Arioch wrote:Except that since gravity affects the curvature of hyperspace (in addition to realspace), the waves do more than affect your "landing" area in realspace; they can directly affect the ballistic trajectory of the ship through hyperspace.
so it the example above but with constant variation wind.

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Mjolnir
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

Karst45 wrote:
Arioch wrote:Except that since gravity affects the curvature of hyperspace (in addition to realspace), the waves do more than affect your "landing" area in realspace; they can directly affect the ballistic trajectory of the ship through hyperspace.
so it the example above but with constant variation wind.
Well, with periodically oscillating wind. Perhaps with multiple overlapping periods and amplitudes, varying over time as closely-orbiting massive bodies affect each others' orbits.

If you had good measurements of the gravitational waves you'd be traveling through (decades to centuries worth, and more recent the deeper in you want to go) and a lot of confidence in your measurements and calculations, you might compensate. You would only be able to make such measurements in the first place from the vicinity of the source, though...you're measuring waves that are propagating outward at the speed of light, and which incoming ships would have to jump through. Perhaps the Well of Souls was constructed (or found and modified) with a purpose, to make a home territory that was difficult or impossible to navigate for anyone without recent navigational corrections from the Well.

Courses tangent to the direction of the Well would be more stable, cutting across fewer waves. Travel inward might be possible without up to date navigational data, using a very indirect inwardly spiraling path and estimates of the short-term future gravitational waves (that is, those that will cross that location in the immediate future, and which are currently between that system and the next one in). Ships traveling outward would always be traveling through waves they have records of, and would only need to return to indirect paths on the last leg of return, when they travel through newer waves that have crossed their origin point since they left (assuming their navigational data didn't come from even deeper in via outgoing ships). The innermost leg leading to the monitoring stations themselves might be couriers that jump out, make a transmission to other ships waiting to relay the data, and immediately jump back in to minimize the number of waves they must jump across based on models rather than measurements.

It's a double-edged blade, though. A disruption to the measuring stations or the ships moving outward carrying the navigational data needed to move freely in that region of space would paralyze interstellar travel in that protected territory, and if the capability for building advanced interstellar starships was lost, re-establishing it would be very difficult. The Soia might be stuck in those unnavigable systems near the Well, trapped by their own defenses due to having lost the technology needed to compensate for the interference.

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Trantor
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Trantor »

Looks like there´s a lot more busstations out there: http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.4678
:)
sapere aude.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

Given that the frequency of stars seems to go up as the size comes down, it's logical to expect that there are a significant number of brown dwarfs. Unfortunately I haven't seen much current evidence (or even much theory) that soldily predicts how many there are.

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Trantor
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Trantor »

Arioch wrote:Given that the frequency of stars seems to go up as the size comes down, it's logical to expect that there are a significant number of brown dwarfs. Unfortunately I haven't seen much current evidence (or even much theory) that soldily predicts how many there are.
Me neither, but related to that link i found an article in a german newspaper where they state that they found 100 new "suns"/brown dwarfs in a radius less than 40 ly around earth.
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/welt ... 08,00.html

And they say there´s the possibility of even more brown dwarfs, maybe even nearer than proxima centauri.
sapere aude.

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Arioch
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

That would be surprising, if there was one that close and we hadn't detected it. But you never know.

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Mjolnir
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

Arioch wrote:That would be surprising, if there was one that close and we hadn't detected it. But you never know.
These things are hard to spot...some are down to room temperature or so, and none are much larger than Jupiter (for bodies lacking the mass to start fusing hydrogen, gravitational compression squeezes heavier objects down to about the same size...a 90 Jupiter-mass brown dwarf will be about the same size as Jupiter) and such a nearby brown dwarf wouldn't be close to any sources of light to reflect. They'd be difficult to detect gravitationally because of their small mass, unless they were really close, or in a bound orbit which kept them in the neighborhood for an extended time. Instruments like WISE are about the only thing that have a chance of detecting them...ground scopes wouldn't see anything.

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Trantor
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Trantor »

Arioch wrote:That would be surprising, if there was one that close and we hadn't detected it. But you never know.
Another factor why hyperspacejumps aint no piece of cake. Works for the Outsiderverse.
Mjolnir wrote:These things are hard to spot...
Instruments like WISE are about the only thing that have a chance of detecting them...ground scopes wouldn't see anything.
Yes, and i´m looking forward to the next generation of infrared-satellites/space-probes.

Would also like to see if Nemesis is real.
sapere aude.

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Cy83r
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Cy83r »

Negative hyperspace... this is one of those brain-melting concepts like sideways time, isn't it?

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GeoModder
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by GeoModder »

Trantor wrote:Would also like to see if Nemesis is real.
The possibility of course is there, but I think not. If even medium-sized KBO's can be detected, I reckon an object the size of Jupiter with 80+ times its mass must be like the proverbial spotlight in our sun's neighbourhood.
Image

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Mjolnir
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

Trantor wrote:Would also like to see if Nemesis is real.
A red dwarf so close would have been blindingly obvious to IRAS and WISE and observable by ground scopes, if not a naked-eye object.
And in the case of a brown dwarf, we get into the "in a bound orbit" case. Such an object wouldn't sweep past withinin a orbit or two of Neptune and Uranus, it'd stick around and have a regular effect on orbits. Last I heard, such objects have been pretty conclusively ruled out.

Something like Tyche's a bit more likely...a medium-large Oort cloud gas giant. Cold, smaller than 5 Jupiters or further than 10000 AU. Not much support for the existence of such an object, though.

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Trantor
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Trantor »

YAY, necroposting!

Mjolnir wrote:Something like Tyche's a bit more likely...a medium-large Oort cloud gas giant. Cold, smaller than 5 Jupiters or further than 10000 AU. Not much support for the existence of such an object, though.
Surprisingly well guessed, mr Mjolnir!

Not exactly "cold", nor an Oort-object apparently, but a rogue planet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFBDSIR2149-0403

Even more busstations out there?
sapere aude.

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Arioch
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

CFBDSIR 2149-0403 is ~100 light years away. If there was an object that size in our Oort cloud only 1 light year away, we'd surely have seen it by now.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Dragoon »

I can;t remember or site the episode but was watching some hstory channel show... during a survey of the ort cloud they have discovered an unusual clumping of commets and other objects. This is believed by some astronomers to be signs of a "significant" large body in our extreme outer system.

I don;t believe they were implying it is a nemisis sized object or even a rouge planet but it is definately something large and distant..large enough to be classified as a near planet from what I can remember of the show..I'll see if can find the info and post it...I hate soundign like i am making stuff up :D :oops:

javcs
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by javcs »

I seem to recall something about a 'tenth planet' or planetoid having been found out in the Kuiper Belt. This was, of course, a number of years ago, and what few details I picked up at the time have long since become blurred.

Absalom
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Absalom »

There were several of those announcements back then, Sedna for example. I'm not certain that we'd be guaranteed to have actually seen any Earth-or-larger planets out in the Oort cloud (specifically, I'm not certain that we've observed enough area at the required detail), but am I safe in assuming that we've at least narrowed down the possible direction vectors when looking from the Earth?

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

Kuiper belt objects have irregular orbits, but they're still more or less in the plane of the rest of the system from 30-50 AU, and this is probably more or less where they formed. Oort cloud objects are things (mostly comets) that have been gravitationally ejected from the system, and they form a shell extending out in every direction into interstellar space as far as a light year (60,000 AU) or more. We've gotten pretty good at detecting Kuiper belt objects in recent decades (they've found dozens of Pluto-sized objects, hence the recent controversy over Pluto's planetary status), but for the Oort cloud you don't really know where to look. No direct observations of Oort objects have yet been made, as far as I'm aware.

Image

That said, the largest of the known Kuiper belt objects were predicted because of their observed gravitational effects on the other planets, and they are quite small (only a few are larger than tiny Pluto). A Jupiter-mass planet out in trans-Neptunian space would have a very significant, detectable, and predictable effect on the rest of the solar system, and would be easy to find once predicted. There may still be undetected larger-than-Pluto objects out there, but something like Nemesis really isn't possible.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Karst45 »

So why did they come with the oort cloud theory?

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