scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/4x5x7k.md

Hyperspace (A story Premise) [RT]

• Author: u/Sagebrysh Rank 7 Pragmatist*

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/4x5x7k/hyperspace_a_story_premise_rt/

• Score: 13

• Created: 2016-08-11T02:52:30

Post:

Hey guys, so in a burst of inspiration, I wrote up the first three pages to a semi-hard science fiction story. The initial premise is thus: something I will enjoy writing, that I can post here, and on /r/HFY which is a genre I think intersects with this one nicely. I drew some sketches of ships, and created a rough plot outline, so now I'm just looking to gauge interest.

The Premise: The year is 2219. Sixteen years ago, the first alcubierre drive was created, and for the first time in history, humanity was able to send ships out into nearby solar systems. Small colonies exist in other systems already, and the solar system is heavily populated, with a fleet of slower then light generation ships still bound for the stars, and now serving as floating cities and ports of call for the growing fleet of FTL vessels. There are many competing forces at work in this era. Corporations and Governments from both Earth and Mars are vying to get as big a slice of this new pie as they can. A massive boom in ships is underway, and a new age of exploration is beginning to dawn. This is a story, of how humanity takes its place on the galactic stage.

Some of the ideas I play with: This is not a very hard science fiction. The root idea was to create a world wherein hyperspace was a place that you could go and do stuff. I also toy with higher dimensional physics. I wanted it to have rationalist themes, which you can do with sci-fi in interesting ways, this is on the softer side, but I kept it self consistent enough for a rationalist to have fun with it, and I didn't cut corners by inventing 'gravity plating.' Gravity and spacetime are however, played around with quite a bit, on large scales, which combined with hyperspace will I hope present an interesting sort of 'space terrain.'

Here's a chunk of text I wrote and a little biop about the ship. I'll probably create a blog site to put this stuff on if I decide to get serious about it. Feedback welcomed.

Newton class starship

MSCV Empiricist

15 AU from Luyten’s Star

January 2219

The vessel appeared frail from a distance: a filigree agglomeration of modules, struts, tanks, and toruses, all spinning around each other with gyroscopic precision. Up close though, the thin webs resolved themselves to be thick steel frames and taut cables, presenting a sturdy feeling, if bizarre looking piece of equipment.

Mission Commander Ivy Czininski sipped her rapidly cooling coffee within the sturdy walls of this seemingly fragile vessel, held down by the rotation of the ship’s torus as the Empiricist coasted in space. The ship had only been out of Acidalia Orbital for three weeks and the list of breakdowns and errors in their system were already rapidly approaching a kilometer long. It was 0500, and she had just been awoken from the middle of her sleep cycle because the alcubierre drive had stopped working. For the third time that morning, she pushed her raven hair out of her eyes, narrowing them at the grey bearded man standing before her.

“What’s wrong with it?” She asked the chinese-martian: Mathias Corbin, her chief engineer.

“That’s just it,” He said grumpily, having been woken up several hours before Ivy was. “There’s nothing wrong with the drive. I looked over everything myself. The XM is cracking properly, the ring is charging, the warp fields are even being generated properly. But for some reason, when we perform the kick, the ship just doesn’t move.”

The original design for warp drive as proposed way back in 1996 by Miguel Alcubierre, or Gene Roddenberry, depending on who you asked, created a distortion wavefront ahead of the ship as it bent space around itself. The result of this was a potentially planet shattering amount of energy being released at the place you intended to travel to. In order to get around this, the ship first bent space, but then ‘stepped’ between the distorted space they were inside of, and the space they were traveling to. This allowed the distorted space to simply relax back into shape. The step, or kick as it was also called, pushed the vessel along an axis of space normally imperceptible to humans.The kick pushed the ship off the higher dimensional surface of spacetime, before it was drawn back down on the other side of the folds in space it had generated by the gravitational pull of all matter in the universe.

“You checked the boot I assume?” Ivy asked, referring to the XM fueled device buried deep in the hull that generated the kick.

“First thing I checked when I heard about the problem, it's not the boot, it's not the field generators, the damn ship just isn’t moving when we kick it.”

“I’m really sorry to wake you over this, I know I did just the other night when the transformer blew in the third ring but I really just didn’t want to risk some sort of acci--” Ivy held up her hand, cutting off the young Italian woman who had recently been assigned to her as XO.

“Jean, in the future, wake up Cale, not me, this is more of his thing.” Cale Rouschev was the ship’s Pragmacist, the problem solver. Nevertheless, Ivy was already awake and the coffee was already running through her brain. “Have you always been kicking in the same direction?” She asked Jean Paoloni.

“What do you mean?” The other woman asked, a worried realisation in her tone. She had been, it was obvious.

“Where exactly have you been trying to take us for the last few hours Jean?” Ivy asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Just 10 AUs closer to Luyten’s Star, standard flight plan, the one you approved last night.” The XO seemed to shrink a bit with each word.

Ivy just sighed and took a sip of her coffee. “Jimmy.” She said, turning to James Alderson, “Set in a new course, five AUs out from our current position with respect to Luyten’s Star, Charge up the ring and perform the kick whenever ready.”

She turned back to Jean even as Jimmy was telling her it would take 30 seconds to charge the ring. “In the future, you need to remember to expand your variable set when you’ve exhausted all the options within a current set. Mathias told you it wasn’t the drive, I’m sure, before you woke me up. The next step to take, is to see if maybe it’s the star.”

“I don’t follow your reasoning.” She said with a frown. “Luyten’s Star doesn’t have the mass to produce that sort of effect this far out.”

Mass deformed the geometry of spacetime, and thus made it difficult to perform a kick into a gravity well: because of how gravity interacted with the ship during the kick, it was like trying to roll a ball up a hill. Jean was correct of course, Luyten’ Star, being far smaller than Sol, shouldn’t produce that sort of spacetime geometry unless they were trying to kick the ship into the coronasphere. Still, it was worth testing if for no other reason than to rule out a variable.

“True of course.” She answered the Italian woman, “But this is space, and who know’s what else might be out there distorting spacetime.” Once she actually said the question, it sounded a lot more ominous, and the sharp bang that reverberated throughout the entire ship as if a taut cable had snapped under tension didn’t help matters. Ivy gripped her coffee tightly as the liquid tried to splash free of the tall sided mug. The wallscreens before them changed scenes abruptly, and Jimmy announced the kick was successful. Despite the relief upon knowing it wasn’t a problem with the ship that would leave them stranded in deep space, the strangeness of the event settled into Ivy’s stomach like a frozen comet core.

When Cale woke for his shift at 1000 and discovered the strange situation with the local gravity well, he was absolutely fascinated. The young Martian-Russian paced back and forth the length of the conference room, where he and Ivy were meeting. He was consuming donuts at a breakneck pace as he walked, while Ivy was working through her third cup of coffee of the morning.

“It can’t be a black hole, it’s not massive enough for that, whatever is generating the distortion. It’s more massive than the red dwarf though, and once I got a good look at its track through space up close, it’s pretty clear that whatever it is, Luyten’s Star is actually orbiting it. That has implications for its interaction with Procyon back during the age of sail. But more importantly, the spot Luyten’s Star is orbiting has nothing in it, there’s no visible source of mass.” That was often how Cale communicated, in a strange stream of consciousness composed of hypotheses, facts, and oftentimes pointless diversions.

“Is it a threat to this ship?” Ivy asked over the rim of her mug.

“I have no idea.” Cale answered honestly. “I do think we should investigate though. We should be able to warp to within 8 AUs of the object, and we can cross the rest of the distance using sublights.”

“That would take a frankly irresponsible amount of fuel. And several months of travel at 1 G burn. It would eat into our other survey time. We’re only supposed to spend a week on this star, then we move on to Capella.”

“Not if it’s aliens, if it’s aliens, then it’s worth the time and fuel spent getting there.” Cale said this in the same perpetually energized tone he used for everyone, and it was impossible to pick out sarcasm from the mix.

“Aliens.” Ivy deadpanned.

“Even if it isn’t literally aliens, this is an alien event. An honest to Banks OCP. We’re sitting on the edge of a very novel and never before seen astrophysical object. It doesn’t even fall into a class of object we theorized the existence of. From this distance, we’d be able to see even a totally inert object via the reflected heat from the red dwarf, it’s a gravity field without a celestial body generating it. That’s not something we’ve ever seen before Ivy. Lets go poke the new thing.” He said the last part with an almost childlike glee.

“That’s just it though isn’t it Cale. There’s no object. Our telescopes don’t see anything in any spectrum, the interferometers are registering the gravity field, but there’s nothing else there. You want me to spent a month and a half, burning fuel and time slogging it through this boring solar system so that we can look at a particularly interesting part of empty space.” Ivy sipped her coffee again, her stomach gurgled as if the hot liquid was interacting with the metaphorical comet core in her gut. The more she thought about it, the more the cold knot seemed to accrete.

“There might be an object, just one too small to detect. We know it isn’t a black hole, because the gravity waves we’re getting don’t match up with that, and we'd at least be seeing a black hole's electromagnetic field from this distance, but it could be some other very compact object, like a neutron core or a chunk of XM.”

“Neutron stars emit light and have powerful EM fields, and XM rapidly decays into hydrogen unless you keep it cryogenically suspended and held in a magnetic field, but...I see your point. This could be something totally new, and that makes me inclined to spend a bit of extra time investigating it. We can back the schedule up a week, skip say, Capella H, get in as close as our warp drive allows, and spend two weeks or so looking around, but we can’t hang out here for a month and a half.” Ivy rubbed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger.

“Unless it does turn out to be aliens.” Cale said with a smirk.

“Just go find me an object.” She said and shooed him out the door.

She sighed as she stepped back into the room alone. She sent a mental command through her implants, telling the wallscreens to stop showing the smooth wood panelling it had previously, and instead to turn transparent. The wood faded away, replaced by a starfield, and making it seem as if the table as floating on a platform through empty space. The dull red eye of Luyten’s Star shone dimly in the distance. It was nearly matched in brilliance by Procyon, off in another direction, and a practical stone’s throw away in warp drive terms.

Procyon had been surveyed six months ago by the MSCV Valley Forge who had found the system devastated by the recent passage of the red dwarf. Planets were cooked red hot and massive arcs of debris twinkled in stellar orbits. Two gas giants were in a tight unstable orbit with each other that would see them collide sometime in the next thousand years, and the ship had even witnessed two of the moons of those worlds slam headlong into each other, sending continent sized shards of rock tumbling in all directions.

Luyten’s Star, the nomad that had inflicted the devastation, was comparatively tranquil. It had one dead rocky world in its orbit, which bore a ring system and deep cratering on its surface, hinting at the violence it too had experienced in the recent stellar past. The existence of the new, invisible body within the system, did resolve a lot of questions about how something as small as Luyten’s star could have had the effect that it did. The conference table shuddered and the view shifted, the red dwarf growing suddenly brighter. Cale had authorized a kick to take them as close to the distortion as the warp drives would allow. Now it was just a matter of collecting the data. Ivy took another sip of coffee and continued in vain to try and melt the lump in her stomach.

Vessel Specifications

Martian Survey Corps Vessel 08 Empiricist

Manufacturer: SpaceX

Length: 1,200 M

Width: 700 M

Crew Compliment: 27

Armaments: One rack of 6x smart antiship missile launchers (subnuclear)

One axially mounted relativistic accelerator.

Constructed in 2209 as part of the Martian Commonwealth’s first interstellar exploration fleet. Although lightly armed and armored compared to contemporary Martian warships, its low mass allowed it to more easily use the Alcubierre drive without expending inordinate amounts of energy in the process. The vessel also boasts an impressive fuel efficiency in its fusion motors, allowing for up to eight months of 1 G burning on a single load of fuel. The design features three rotating torii stacked on one axis. The first torus is the largest and holds nothing but the 700 M diameter Alcubierre ring. The second two rings are smaller at 500 M, and connected together at the ring level by short passageways. These two rings provide spin gravity while the ship is not under thrust, as well as counter rotating to balance out the spin of the alcubierre ring. During periods of thrusting, the crew will migrate to the modules in the central axis, which are arranged so as to be useable in either freefall or while the vessel is under thrust. Both the ring and the axis are constructed of replaceable modules able to operate independently of one another to some degree. These modules hold crew quarters, the command structures, medical bays, and science labs, and can be swapped out as a mission requires.

Comments:

u/DCarrier [+3] (18 hours later)

There's some things that annoy me.

• An Alcubierre drive can be used as a time machine. They should be testing that.

• An Alcubierre drive is not a jump drive. I'm fine with using a drive that doesn't work with the known laws of physics. Just don't pretend it's a different one that sort of does.

• Black holes probably wouldn't naturally form that small. It would be pretty surprising, but they shouldn't eliminate the possibility of a black hole that formed from an unknown method without a better hypothesis.

• We've noticed planets by the tiny gravitational effect on stars. How did we not notice this?

u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (13 hours later)

It was a real slog getting through all that exposition. Is it really that important how the engine works? The main benefit of soft sci-fi over hard sci-fi is that you can sweep the physics questions under the rug and get on with the story.

Your readers either already know what an Alcubierre drive is (and they'll know it's subtly different from what you're describing), or they don't care.

I tittered at "Have you checked the boot?" when I realised it was a pun.

You write good dialogue. I got a nice sense of the characters voices and personalities from the way they talk.

I was a bit confused when we got seven paragraphs in without being told there was a third person in the room. Important detail, there.

and I didn't cut corners by inventing 'gravity plating.'

Not sure why you mention that. Is gravity plating more "cutting corners" than spinning the ship?

I'm curious what rationalist themes the story is going to touch on.

u/Sagebrysh [+2] Rank 7 Pragmatist (a day later)

It was a real slog getting through all that exposition. Is it really that important how the engine works? The main benefit of soft sci-fi over hard sci-fi is that you can sweep the physics questions under the rug and get on with the story. Your readers either already know what an Alcubierre drive is (and they'll know it's subtly different from what you're describing), or they don't care.

Knowing how it works lets me pull the sci-fi equivelant of magic A is magic A, wherein the characters can actually use technology to solve problems without it seeming nonsensical. That in mind, it does make for some clunky exposition.

I tittered at "Have you checked the boot?" when I realised it was a pun. You write good dialogue. I got a nice sense of the characters voices and personalities from the way they talk.

That's good, because that's something I worry about.

I was a bit confused when we got seven paragraphs in without being told there was a third person in the room. Important detail, there.

Yeah, that's just bad. lol.

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