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[Rolepgeek]

Yeah, if the fuel costs are massive, it's hard to have FTL couriers.

But then, if the fuel costs are that big, why would anyone trade? Like, either trade is common enough that messages can be sent along with it, or everyone has what they need already so there's not much if any reason for any interaction between worlds.

[Sheb]

Unless your FTL drives have a minimum size, you could just have a tiny, cheap courier drone.

Also, I don't see how the fact that communication is no faster than ships would be an issue. It was the case on Earth until the late 19th century, and it didn't prevent the  Brits from painting half of the map red.

[Rolepgeek]

Unless your FTL drives have a minimum size, you could just have a tiny, cheap courier drone.

Also, I don't see how the fact that communication is no faster than ships would be an issue. It was the case on Earth until the late 19th century, and it didn't prevent the  Brits from painting half of the map red.

He said Fuel Costs are the same no matter the size of what's being transported. Which to me, implies massive wormholes they have to tear open to get anywhere.

[Dirst]

Unless your FTL drives have a minimum size, you could just have a tiny, cheap courier drone.

Also, I don't see how the fact that communication is no faster than ships would be an issue. It was the case on Earth until the late 19th century, and it didn't prevent the  Brits from painting half of the map red.

He said Fuel Costs are the same no matter the size of what's being transported. Which to me, implies massive wormholes they have to tear open to get anywhere.

In that case you could probably send a radio transmission thru the wormhole at the same time as a ship, and it would get there SLIGHTLY faster.  Enough to announce the ship's arrival with the sending world's "signature" to verify the origin.

[Tuxfanturnip]

The FTL drive is something like an Alcubierre bubble with, if not a minimum size, a very large point where diminishing returns set in and before which a very small increase in cost can get a much larger bubble. It also typically has a travel time of a few months, similar to Earth sail ships, but the British empire never had any major colonies over a year's sailing away... There are just a lot of loosely connected settlements out there.

With trading, I'm honestly not sure. Whatever the margin is, it'll probably end up passed on to passengers. But there's always going to be a fringe lacking highly developed electronics/nanotechnology manufacturing, so high-tech goods could be traded directly for fuel at remote settlements. Fuel itself would probably become a de facto currency, with buying power measured in micrograms of exotic matter as produced by the system's plants. Information itself would sell well, and if you could turn any sort of profit hauling a load of platinum or dried fruit or kitschy keychains, that can go in as well. There would probably be some long-term hedge fund like organizations blindly trading bulk goods between systems and hoping they can unload as soon as possible. But passengers, to some extent or another, will always be willing to fly.

[wierd]

speaking of alcubierre metric devices...

Now that gravitational waves a "proven to exist" thing, it should be possible to create a "standing wave" in front of a ship, using a constant influx of low intensity waves that reinforce as they approach the target point.

Such things have been played with in analogous form using water ripples in a water tank. One can use sonic pulses in the water made with a transducer to make "permanent" dips and valleys in the water's surface, in arbitrary configurations.

According to wikipedia, something as banal as a spinning dumbell (going end over end) will produce low intensity (basically unmeasurable) gravity waves.  Since the waves have verified wave properties though, and we know the propogation speed to be C, we should be able to recreate the water tank experiment using rumblers, and timing the rumble rotations and their angled vectors to create a standing G-wave in space.

A standing G-wave in space would interact with the spacial "depression" made by the ship's mass, and slightly tug the ship forward.

You can look up the water tank research I am talking about-- It was a japanese team that used a circular pool surrounded by transducers to cause the ripple patterns to reinforce at arbitrary locations, which they used to spell out letters on the water's surface.

By contrast, we would want to have a spherical chamber instead of a circular pool, and would want the standing wave to be produced eccentric to the ship's center of mass, so that the ship will have potential energy to move toward the created spacial depression. (the ship will try to "fall into" the standing wave, but as the chamber moves, the wave's focal point will move, so the ship never reaches it, instead continuing to slowly fall forward, picking up speed.)

I am sure somebody will point out how this is impossible, but I think it would work.

[Tack]

The FTL drive is something like an Alcubierre bubble with, if not a minimum size, a very large point where diminishing returns set in and before which a very small increase in cost can get a much larger bubble.

Heh. "Bell curve bubble"?

[wierd]

Eagleworks theoretical propulsion people already did the math on alcubierre drives, and intensity/shape of the gradient slope.

[Tuxfanturnip]

Well, I'm already completely ignoring the causality problems caused by FTL....

[Tack]

So too, hopefully, is physics.

[wierd]

Here's a link to that wavetank I mentioned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WffR6HrEqTA

It's called FlowWave.

It can be used to produce arbitrary waveform interference/reinforcement using water's elastic properties.

I believe it should be possible to do "Similar things" with gravitational waves.  As you can see in the "Concentric Singularity" test, A pretty powerful wave can be generated form many very small wave emitters.

I would LOVE to see somebody make something similar using rotating massed objects to produce low level gravity waves around a spherical chamber to create similar "spike" wave singularities at the center.

[Amperzand]

Well, I'm already completely ignoring the causality problems caused by FTL....

Alternatively, you could make the setting more interesting by accepting them.

[wierd]

One interesting solution I have played with for paradoxes, is the "quantum universes" approach.

An event that would remove the causal forces that led to the event, (Such as inventing a time machine to save a lover from a tragic death-- Once you save them from the tragic death, the motivation to create the time machine goes away, and it never gets built, meaning you cant go back in time to prevent the tragedy-- Boom-- paradox) can be seen as both having happened, and having not happened. You wont know which universe this is until you measure. Very much like a quantum particle's state.  The two universes are in superposition until observed. You can expand this with Many Worlds type thinking, and say that both universes definitely exist-- the question is just which one you are currently observing. The universe that does invent time travel, does so, and saves the loved one from the universe that does not invent time travel. The major issue comes from trying to be rational with the preconceived notion that there is only one universe, and not many many universes overlapping each other in multiple levels of superposition. in this way you develop a complex causality that is fully deterministic, while still enabling time travel, just not back in the actor's own lightcone.

This makes "Time travel" more a kind of multiverse travel, with a "fuzzy" probability that you might or might not arrive in the desired universe, with absolute precision being impossible, due to physics induced uncertainty. For the vast majority of cases, this will not present a problem.  For instance, if you and a quantum duplicate you in a different universe exchange places as a result of FTL travel over your own lightcone, the vast majority of possible differences will be very similar, or not important.  EG, the photons emitted from the lightbulbs might be different, but the macro-events are the same. That is a sufficiently large enough difference to be a distinct quantum universe, but if you exchange places with that other you, neither of you will notice, nor care.

Your target location in time and space is going to be a fuzzy probability of potential universes meeting those criteria, and your arrival or lack of arrival is just going to be another probability function. In universes where "somebody" arrives, there's a specific probability that it will be you-- etc.

This leads to some interesting plot features that could develop.  Naturally, the more macro-changing the reason for the FTL travel (EG, are you going to pick up and deliver cargo-- or are you going to avert or cause a war?) the more affected the probability that a ship from a parallel universe is what will arrive at the destination-- and the more risky it is to engage in the FTL travel (If you  are concerned about the politics of who arrives)   This may lead to laws saying FTL is only for mundane trips, and not politically sensitive ones, to avoid having Bizzarro Superman arrive on the scene.  This self-feeds, because the most probable intersections for travel will be with universes that consider political FTL to be acceptable-- which are the most likely to have sent a shep, and be expecting one to arrive.  The deal is, you wont know WHO arrives, until they do.  When going to negotiate an essential peace treaty, the LAST thing you want is "Evil Kirk" showing up to do the negotiations. To prevent that, political envoys are forbidden from using FTL travel as a precaution-- etc. (this is amusing, because the last person that the Evil Universe wants to show up at the decisive space battle is pacifist spacehippy kirk.  When both sets of universes obey the law, the probabilities of these exchanges happens is diminished considerably.)

The best that the flight computer can do is attempt to navigate to a parallel universe where the known quanta are as close to a match to the universe of origin as is possible.   As I pointed out, most universes that intersect via FTL this way will have very small divergent features, and the people exchanging universes will not have anything to care about, other than on a philosophical level. (Is that really still my husband? etc.)  It is when there are huge potential ramifications to the interchange that things get dicey, and people obeying the kinds of civil laws I pointed out above would help alleviate that problem. considerably.  The universes that obey the law will intersect with those that dont, only on very rare occasions.

This sidesteps many issues.  For example, the cargo leaving one planet, headed for another, arrives at a universe different from its origin-- but a virtually identical cargo vessel arrives at the desired planet, and makes the delivery. To the people shipping the material, and the people recieving the material, it does not matter the subtle differences, and the reality that they are not, in actuallity, the "same" container. Do you care about the exact quantum states of the atoms in your ham sandwich before you eat it-- or are you more concerned it about it actually being ham, and not some mystery meat?  That's the takeaway there. You dont NEED the "same" container. You just need a container that has what you want inside-- FTL shipping and receiving of products and raw materials would still be very useful economically, even with this caveat.  The same would be true for sending people. Who cares if you get the Doctor Hawking from this universe, or the "basically identical universe except for the difference of spin state of a handful of photons someplace" version? Both have the same life experiences on the macro scale, both have the same intellect, and will behave in excactly the same ways.  They are virtually identical. The subtle reality that they are not, in actuality, the "Same Person" in the causal sense, allows FTL and timetravel to reconcile.

Some universes may discover that FTL travel in this fashion is possible-- and choose not to allow it at all. Those universes will not intersect with universes that do engage in it, except on very rare occasions. Others may decide that the practical benefits of FTL travel far outweigh the philosophical consequences, and engage in it vigorously. These universes will exchange matter and information via FTL incursions very regularly, and will likely be quite homogenous as a result.The vast majority of FTL solutions will fall in this space for these universes.  Then you have those that allow FTL for politically charged transport-- and those are where the interesting story can happen.

Once you eliminate the mental need for the universe to be a singular thing, and allow multiple possible origins and destinations, with fuzzy probabilities about which ends up tied to which, you obviate nearly all of the paradoxes involved, and still have "Functional" FTL travel.

[TheBiggerFish]

Honestly, I'm of the opinion that if time travel exists, paradox is going to be of the Bootstrap Paradox variety.  As in, you will learn to make the time machine because your future self has already saved your love interest of choice.

[Tuxfanturnip]

If I'm getting that correctly, it sounds like a recipe for incredible mind screw across the multiverse. If no-FTL universes can sometimes receive ships anyway, what's to stop a no-pol-FTL universe receiving a warship from a free-for-all universe, in flagrant violation of the compact, that was never sent? Then of course they can't send a diplomatic party quickly enough to do anything.