This is a thread to tease out unexpected consequences of me changing how spaceship travel works IMTU (Nova Roma).
Here's the synopsis of the technology.
Bubble
A ship creates a bubble around itself. The sphere remains in normal space (it doesn't reduce to a point) but warps light and space around it. Maybe it does weird gravitic things, like flinging light around it like a black hole.
Inside the bubble, the ship is basically in its own universe. There's nowhere for heat and gas to go. EM radiation doesn't get in, either.
The ship can oscillate the bubble. It does this to let in enough EM to run sensors.
Hackdrive
Using large amounts of energy, the ship can take advantage of "rounding error" in deep physical properties at the boundary between macro relativistic (continuous) effects and quantum (integer) effects. Handwavey stuff.
This is like a "hack" against the universe. It allows the ship to shift the bubble forward a tiny amount. By oscillating this effect very, very fast, the ship can translate its movement in any direction. This is not normal motion. It is truly a "cheat" of the universe and it is free of momentum. The ship can make perfect right-angle turns, for example, or (even more dramatically) reverse direction without a change in speed. UFO-stuff.
Current H-drive speeds are not FTL. The typical military hackdrive can navigate a 1 AU (1.5 x 10^8 km) distance in about 6 days (at a constant speed of just less than 0.1% c), so it would take 30 days for the same ship to reach Jupiter from the Sun.
A trip to Alpha Centauri, if there were anything interesting there, would take 44 years.
Ships often have a backup M-drive (typical reaction mass drive) for emergencies.
Power Plants
Current military starships use fission reactors. There are two, but only one is needed to supply sufficient power to the drives. They replace the nuclear fuel material every couple years.
Let's assume very, very efficient power generation. It's water-cooled steam generation, but somehow close to 99% electrical power conversion. That still produces a lot of waste heat that gets stuck in the bubble. It could be vented into space if the bubble is down, but that stops forward motion during venting. During battle (which really hasn't been a problem for Nova Roma, since they haven't met a serious interstellar enemy yet), no one wants shields down, so heat is an issue. Also, see below (sungates).
Bubbles are not perfectly impervious to the outside universe, but it takes a lot to break the barrier. Nuclear weapons will do it. A direct hit of plasma from a solar flare or other Sun-generated blast can do it.
Sungates
Astrophysicists discovered artificial wormholes in the Sun. They sent unmanned probes through them but lost contact with the probes. Almost a decade later, they picked up their signal from a nearby star. Mankind then asked for volunteers for the first manned mission through the wormhole, which they called a sungate.
Sungates are about 1 km in diameter and they're well hidden. To enter one, you must simply pilot your ship into them, dodging solar flare activity and other destructive forces, with a minimum of sensory data. Every time you take a sensor reading, you must drop your protective bubble long enough to let in enough light and other radiation. This causes you to take on heat. The last 30 seconds of the journey are usually done completely blind, so you aim the ship as best you can and pray. The Sun can produce forces that tear through a ship's bubble, but intense damage is more common than disintegration.
The wormholes are uni-directional but paired. That is, once you get to another star, you don't know how to get back until you discover the location of the paired wormhole. You're equally likely to find a wormhole to a new star as you are to find one back. Science teams ride along on all exploratory missions and it takes them months, even years, to find a way out of a new system.
Here's the synopsis of the technology.
Bubble
A ship creates a bubble around itself. The sphere remains in normal space (it doesn't reduce to a point) but warps light and space around it. Maybe it does weird gravitic things, like flinging light around it like a black hole.
Inside the bubble, the ship is basically in its own universe. There's nowhere for heat and gas to go. EM radiation doesn't get in, either.
The ship can oscillate the bubble. It does this to let in enough EM to run sensors.
Hackdrive
Using large amounts of energy, the ship can take advantage of "rounding error" in deep physical properties at the boundary between macro relativistic (continuous) effects and quantum (integer) effects. Handwavey stuff.
This is like a "hack" against the universe. It allows the ship to shift the bubble forward a tiny amount. By oscillating this effect very, very fast, the ship can translate its movement in any direction. This is not normal motion. It is truly a "cheat" of the universe and it is free of momentum. The ship can make perfect right-angle turns, for example, or (even more dramatically) reverse direction without a change in speed. UFO-stuff.
Current H-drive speeds are not FTL. The typical military hackdrive can navigate a 1 AU (1.5 x 10^8 km) distance in about 6 days (at a constant speed of just less than 0.1% c), so it would take 30 days for the same ship to reach Jupiter from the Sun.
A trip to Alpha Centauri, if there were anything interesting there, would take 44 years.
Ships often have a backup M-drive (typical reaction mass drive) for emergencies.
Power Plants
Current military starships use fission reactors. There are two, but only one is needed to supply sufficient power to the drives. They replace the nuclear fuel material every couple years.
Let's assume very, very efficient power generation. It's water-cooled steam generation, but somehow close to 99% electrical power conversion. That still produces a lot of waste heat that gets stuck in the bubble. It could be vented into space if the bubble is down, but that stops forward motion during venting. During battle (which really hasn't been a problem for Nova Roma, since they haven't met a serious interstellar enemy yet), no one wants shields down, so heat is an issue. Also, see below (sungates).
Bubbles are not perfectly impervious to the outside universe, but it takes a lot to break the barrier. Nuclear weapons will do it. A direct hit of plasma from a solar flare or other Sun-generated blast can do it.
Sungates
Astrophysicists discovered artificial wormholes in the Sun. They sent unmanned probes through them but lost contact with the probes. Almost a decade later, they picked up their signal from a nearby star. Mankind then asked for volunteers for the first manned mission through the wormhole, which they called a sungate.
Sungates are about 1 km in diameter and they're well hidden. To enter one, you must simply pilot your ship into them, dodging solar flare activity and other destructive forces, with a minimum of sensory data. Every time you take a sensor reading, you must drop your protective bubble long enough to let in enough light and other radiation. This causes you to take on heat. The last 30 seconds of the journey are usually done completely blind, so you aim the ship as best you can and pray. The Sun can produce forces that tear through a ship's bubble, but intense damage is more common than disintegration.
The wormholes are uni-directional but paired. That is, once you get to another star, you don't know how to get back until you discover the location of the paired wormhole. You're equally likely to find a wormhole to a new star as you are to find one back. Science teams ride along on all exploratory missions and it takes them months, even years, to find a way out of a new system.