Tech Level 17 campaign: Warp Drive

[Werner]

In this campaign, the Jump Drive is never invented, instead the human race is stuck with sunlight drives until the invention of warp drive. Warp drives don't require jump fuel, instead they require an energy input from the ship's power plant and operate much like maneuver drives except that they tend to be energy hogs compared to them and they work well with antimatter reactors. Unlike maneuver drives, warp drives have a maximum warp speed that is some multiple of the speed of light. A Warp-1 drive can go up to 100 times the speed of light, A Warp-2 drive can go up to 500 times the speed of light, warp-3 can go 2500 times the speed of light. This motion is pseudo motion, there is no inertia involved, if the warp drive shuts down for whatever reason the ship resumes its previous sublight speed it had prior to engaging the warp. The 100 diameter limit applies to engaging the warp drive, as it fails to engages when too close to a gravitational mass. All other assumptions to a standard Traveller campaign remain valid, what are the main differences from the standard campaign that would result from the use of warp drives instead of Jump drives? When rolling tech levels for worlds, I suggest you use a 10-sided die instead of a 6-sided die and add all the modifiers listed in the rulebook to that.

 

[Werner]

Performances of various Warp Drives
TL 17
Warp-1: up to 100 times the speed of light.
Time to travel 1 parsec: 11.9 days at maximum speed

TL 18
Warp-2: up to 500 times the speed of light.
Time to travel 1 parsec: 2.4 days at maximum speed

TL 19
Warp-3: up to 2500 times the speed of light.
Time to travel 1 parsec: 11.4 hours

I have to think of the costs and energy requirements. I haven't stated any FTL radio, so the fastest messages are carried by the fastest ships.

I'm also thinking if just having a threshold energy requirement to enter warp, after that, it is just the endurance of the engine. Warping space in front of the ship causes an energy build up in front of the ship requiring a drop out of warp with every parsec crossed to release the energy accumulated.

 

[acgetchell]

“Realistic” warp drives (from the papers I’ve read) would require a large burst of energy to create the warp bubble, and then a constant source to maintain it. There would be a Warp-0 capable of travel up to light speed. Establishing/maintaining the various warp bubbles would cost energy proportional to the velocity of the warp metric (the velocity of the warp is directly readable off the metric). There would probably be an extra drag term from the Cauchy horizon which limited top velocity, as hinted at in the Tech Levels.

In all likelihood this points to the Dune Heighliner model of having massive warp capable ships carrying a fleet of smaller non-warp ones. Each “Warpliner” probably consumes years or decades of Resource Units from systems advanced enough to make them.

Applying the Kzinti lesson any given Warpliner could wreck any given non-GG planet, and it would be extremely difficult to stop. Whatever pilots a Warpliner would therefore have an incredible amount of security similar to how SSBNs are treated today.

Again paralleling the Dune universe; no one except a select few would actually be allowed entry onto a Warpliner, which implies some sort of restricted guild or order or extremely trustworthy AIs. Perhaps Warpliners don’t bother to come closer than the Oort Cloud of any given system; they’re too costly to waste on merely interplanetary travel. This also keeps them safely outsystem, where there’s a chance a stopping a rogue Warpliner.

Perhaps as a result the “rich” would prefer orbital habitats around gas giants or stars, rather than relatively fragile planets. They would then backup to multiple Habs, maybe including the less secure rocky core planets.