The Why of the FTL Wave

[robject]

Three times now I've had to dig up the rationale for the Wave moving at faster-than-light speeds, rather than the 1C recorded in Survival Margin. Here it is.

These are quotes from an email discussion from Don McKinney, dated November 2010.

The fixed canon point is that in 1205, the EW crosses the Gvurrdon/Spinward Marches boundary.
That means it enters Gvurrdon in 1074...

It means that Zhdant itself has under 30 years left. How has the Consulate not already collapsed?

Here's what we "need" (?)...

1. The 5FW must occur against a Consulate which knows (only at the very top) that the destruction is coming, but is otherwise intact. Anything less, and the Consulate isn't an opponent for the Imperium.

2. The Imperium cannot know anything is happening within the Consulate outside of odd intelligence which doesn't fit together.

Then Don notes that the known timeline can be leveraged to support the accelerated Wave:

From MT and TNE, combat within the coreward portion of the Consulate starts as early as 1119 (in fact, there are strong arguments that have been made that the adventure in AM4 is part of this).

So, I think [the FTL Wave] better fits our needs

Note that this does not fit all our material perfectly. In particular, how to accelerate the Wave to allow Zhodane to do its thing, but then delaying the Wave to give 1248 time to do its thing. A Wave Bubble?

 

[mike wightman]

I wish I had been in on that discussion,

There is no need to change the wave to FTL if you read what is given in TNE - the Zhodani exodus only began when the nobles had lost hope, it is only the nobles and intendents that had to worry. Surely the Zhodani had studied the wave for decades before it even closes in on Zhodani space.

 

[robject]

We know the Joes knew about it by at least 750 Imperial. Marc suggests that they knew about it even earlier.

I'm sure Don knew TNE just fine. I don't, but I get that you can't prosecute a war when half your empire is chewed up by the Wave... and you also can't hide that fact from someone like the Imperium, either.

 

[mike wightman]

Exactly, it stops making sense, The ftl wave also breaks another of Marc's rules, no ftl communication.

 

[Dragoner]

We know the Joes knew about it by at least 750 Imperial. Marc suggests that they knew about it even earlier.

I'm sure Don knew TNE just fine. I don't, but I get that you can't prosecute a war when half your empire is chewed up by the Wave... and you also can't hide that fact from someone like the Imperium, either.

IIRC Don wrote or said, maybe only in a private conversation, that the FFW was only done by the Governor near the Spinward Marches, and it makes sense for what it looks like: Recon by Fire - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconnaissance_by_fire With the end zooming in, maybe they wanted to know what they were facing on the 3I side.

 

[robject]

Exactly, it stops making sense, The ftl wave also breaks another of Marc's rules, no ftl communication.

Yah, no ansible. And there's still no ansible, even with the FTL effect of the Wave.

 

[whulorigan]

Yah, no ansible. And there's still no ansible, even with the FTL effect of the Wave.

True, but it does necessarily imply the possibility of an ansible at sufficiently high TL.

(And in MgT: Secret of the Ancients it was explicitly available to the Ancients).

 

[robject]

True, but it does necessarily imply the possibility of an ansible at sufficiently high TL.

(And in MgT: Secret of the Ancients it was explicitly available to the Ancients).

And Mongoose material is more current than most Traveller material. So one might think that an Ancient, while re-inventing the wheel, created an Ansible.

I'm going to look that reference up and see what it says.

New topic!

 

[mike wightman]

Note that Mongoose has quietly introduced many new technologies to their take on the Third Imperium setting.

Energy scrrens (personal and ship), tachyon weapons, "ion" weapons...

If the "FTL empress" wave is technological in origin, then you have a means of communicating FTL.

 

[robject]

I know about those fancy schmancy weapons. It's incompatible with the OTU, but some people want to model Star Trek/Wars.

There's still a strangeness to the Wave being FTL, unrelated to a Traveller ansible. As far as I know, T5 doesn't have a way to produce an explicitly FTL effect like the Wave, even though T5 does have a way to produce an ansible. So this is still beyond the rules.

That's more like the Marc from 1979. Lately he's been tying up loose ends instead of creating new ones.

 

[robject]

By the way, I may whine and complain sometimes, but Marc's not bothered by any of this.

 

[mike wightman]

It is always best to have loose ends and unexplained stuff - gives the referee something to do

And all of us something to... discuss

 

[kilemall]

True, but it does necessarily imply the possibility of an ansible at sufficiently high TL.

(And in MgT: Secret of the Ancients it was explicitly available to the Ancients).

Space palantirs.

Damn winged elves.

 

[Condottiere]

Like canopy collectors, might get mainstreamed.

But as I understand the setting, it would be a red line.

You might have a psionic discipline that can view things at an interstellar distance, so someone could have a large signboard prepared.

 

[Timerover51]

I still do not have a clear idea of what this Wave is supposed to be or what it does. It seems to be something like the Virus, Destruction for the sake of destruction.

 

[Spinward Flow]

I still do not have a clear idea of what this Wave is supposed to be or what it does.

How about this for an explanation?
Picture(s) vs 1000s of Words (and all that) ...

 

[BackworldTraveller]

OK - But even in this video parts of the edifice remain, untouched.

There could surely be ways to move the incorporeal faster than light - or at least avoid the "C" speed limit

Psionics has little basis in reality - so if it can work at all, why not in a way that allows it to move such that it advances in space even as it moves sideways through time? It's got a means of not losing energy by the inverse square law - or even (it seems) linearly even though its effect gets spread even more thinly. Is it interacting with dark energy? Is it moving relative to an unexpanded matrix tied/mapped to expanding space time - the space-time effects are incidental?

As mentioned, there are plenty of other hand-wavy bits of technology (Ion Cannon, M-Drives, J-Drives, Powerplants of many MJ that don't melt your 100 dTon vessel, to name a few)

 

[Grav_Moped]

It's got a means of not losing energy by the inverse square law - or even (it seems) linearly even though its effect gets spread even more thinly. Is it interacting with dark energy? Is it moving relative to an unexpanded matrix tied/mapped to expanding space time - the space-time effects are incidental?

If the effect is bounded somehow (constrained to the Jump Plane, and directional from a broad transmission baseline) with little scatter, and is only an effect at/near the wavefront, the inverse square law may not quite apply. In that case, its energy doesn't get dispersed into the area behind the front, and it's running along a path with a fixed cross-section.

If so, it also suggests it's possible to go around the edges or up-and-over/down-and-under it -- though if jump drives only work in the zone where the Wave can propagate, that doesn't help much. And it still requires moving (or freezing and shielding) everyone.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Along these lines, I vaguely recall reading that the Jump Plane (the zone where Jump Drives work) was something created by the Ancient, Grandfather -- thereby REALLY pissing off another powerful ancient alien race when this messed up their own FTL drive system.

 

[Grav_Moped]

I still do not have a clear idea of what this Wave is supposed to be or what it does. It seems to be something like the Virus, Destruction for the sake of destruction.

What it does in-game is ruin the Zhodani Consulate then turn a lot of people psionic and make even more of them bonkers. Rocks Civilizations fall, everybody dies.

End result is everything gets stomped flat AGAIN (after the civil war and the Computer Virus each have a turn at it), and eventually there's more psionics but without needing the Impies to be conquered by the Joes to get to that point.