Sci Fi Writing Concept

Sci Fi Writing Concept

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bobthedinosaur
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Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by bobthedinosaur »

Well I'm trying to visualize this theory of fictional Faster than Light travel for a story and I would like to know, (since I don't have any education in college level physics and only a very basic understanding of quantum theories) what other think of this concept.
The back ground:

I'm writing some scifi crap, and sometimes it gets really intensive for me to think about details in the story, I know I could just ignore certain detail and continue the story but sometimes I like the extra work you put in to it.

I'm trying to picture some future technology unimportantly of how it works, but basically moves an object (vessel) through long distances of space by changing its characteristics to that of light/ or maybe tachyonic energy?, but does this in an instance of time. So the object appears to be in 2 places at once when it makes the jump, to an outside observer. Inside, the vessel time seems to slow down outside the vessel but carries on for X amount of time, being the time it takes for light to reach the distance (ie: 4 light years would be 4 years), however after resuming its place in normal time, the observe inside the ship resume normal time as well and does not actually age 4 years, but would have had the observed such passing of time in that instance.

Does this make any sense? Or maybe I'm really bored and way off? It just an idea for a fictional story.
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MidKnight
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by MidKnight »

Thought isn't instant. Your brain needs time to register the passing of the trip. The only way I can see this working would be to put the passenger in some sort of semiconciousness where they don't age.
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Argh
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by Argh »

Um, basically, no, what you're talking about is forbidden by the Theory of Relativity. That's ok, it's fiction. It doesn't have to really work. Invoke quantum mechanics, and keep it really vague how it's supposed to work, and nobody will give a hoot.
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bobthedinosaur
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by bobthedinosaur »

Well I thought any FTL is against theory of relativity.

Something else I considered is to the passenger of the vessel, outside time slows exponential so it seems to stop where upon, the passenger would experience the time it took for light to travel the same distance in a parabola of acceleration and deceleration of time. So if you go mad in a 4 light year jump in the 4 years of perceived time inside the vessel and decide to shoot yourself, you would be dead for awhile until time decelerated and accelerated in reverse into the point of the start. In which case would be pretty uncomfortable being dead and then undead.
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Pxtl
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by Pxtl »

Yeah, I have to say that, if you're doing "hard" sci-fi (that is, "realistic" sci-fi) your FTL system doesn't work. If the passengers experience 4 years, than 4 years pass for them. Now, there's nothing wrong with the concept of "they travel at light-speed but can slow the passage of time when travelling at light-speed, thus allowing their ship to travel faster than light to an external observer" but you'll need a companion technology to explain why they don't age for 4 years. Personally, I'd use a secondary technology - like some form of cryonic stasis where a machine mucks with their brains to simulate the flow of neurochemicals and electrical impulses so that the brain still functions while in stasis.

Of course, then you'd have immortal people, so long as they're willing to live in stasis and communicate only through their computer. Plus, they wouldn't be the same people, since the computer might have a hard time simulating hormones and other more complex neurochemicals beyond simple neurotransmitters.

Alternately, having a computer manually manipulate your brain to simulate thought would probably do some wear-and-tear (since the computer has to brute-force the creation of neural pathways rather than allowing them to form naturally), so a long time in thought-active stasis would be destructive.

edit: re-read it and your last post, now I understand - time flows backwards during the deceleration half after turnover. In that case, the people would have no knowledge of the first half of the trip, because that time would have been undone.

But you could have fun with the time-goes-backwards concept, since while the ship operates in a perfectly reversible form, outside interactions that occur during speedup or slowdown would have bizarre effects. An outside interaction during speedup would create an inverse operation in slowdown that would interact with the outside world - IE, ship is damaged by torpedo during speedup, reverse-torpedo-damage occurs during slowdown and torpedo is created existing in reverse-time but travelling forwards in time... and stranded in that state? Moves back with the ship? Gets spat out into realspace as a clone of the original torpedo?

Alternately, ship is damaged during slowdown, that means a forward-time explosion happens while time is being rewound. Entropy is utterly farked up, and the ship ends up arriving at its destination in a bizarre state of paradox, with the crew dealing with a twisted mess of anti-entropic pre-torpedo magically grafted to their time-reversal-repaired hull.
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bobthedinosaur
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by bobthedinosaur »

Pxtl, those are cool ideas. I had to read it twice to under stand but yeah, I would imagine any attack during acceleration would reverse in deceleration and cease to exist, however damage before acceleration would still exist after deceleration. But, since the trip to the ship and passengers would take a long time what if the damage would be enough during acceleration to destroy the ship, or cause it to disintegrate during the trip, would it then be un-destroyed in deceleration, or would it remain destroyed because maybe components of the ship are needed to decelerate phase time, and it just never appears in the other side of space?

Experiencing something even tho you won't remember it, I think would be pretty brutal on your psyche. Maybe not. Being kept in a ship for a long period of time, I would imagine as a sort of torture, but a cryo sleeping system might help, although you might have some jacked up dreams, if you ever remembered them?
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Spawn_Retard
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by Spawn_Retard »

How about using the whole tactic that you can enter some sort of slip stream that can only be accessed by literally tearing a hole in space with huge amounts of power. (a crude form of entry into slip space)This form of entry would give some sort of random output in a certain area.

You could then have a enemy alien race that can easily use this method and would be hard to be stopped?

This slip stream would be a reality outside of our own where mass and time would act very different.

Your biggest problem when asking how you should go about faster than light capabilities is that your putting it within current restrictions, different conditions could lead to faster than light travel without having to explain why current theory's are wrong.

If you outside our known space, no one can argue about the rules in which this other plain of reality works.

This works well in other fictional stories, one easy one to look at is the halo universe, seen as the technology in which they use has been discussed in great detail.
Kloot
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by Kloot »

bobthedinosaur wrote:Well I thought any FTL is against theory of relativity.
Actually, no. Just crossing over from < c to >= c (or from >= c to < c) is, for any particle.
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Teutooni
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by Teutooni »

Is there a particular reason you need FTL travel? If you want credibility as an added flavour, just use relativistic physics - ships travelling ~0.7c with time dilation and some kind of cryosleep/stasis. Just make up some kind of a powersource.

If you insist on breaking the currently known laws, there are a million different alternatives, like warp drive, hyper/slip space, wormhole, etc.

Time travel has such major implications that in a sci-fi universe where it is possible, any credible plot should be an extreme mindfuck. I'd say drop it. :P
Kloot wrote:
bobthedinosaur wrote:Well I thought any FTL is against theory of relativity.
Actually, no. Just crossing over from < c to >= c (or from >= c to < c) is, for any particle.
Actually... Speed of photons in a medium vary. In certain conditions they come near to a halt. Still, when they are clear of the obstacle, they "accelerate" back to speed of light in vacuum.
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BlackLiger
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by BlackLiger »

Spawn_Retard wrote:How about using the whole tactic that you can enter some sort of slip stream that can only be accessed by literally tearing a hole in space with huge amounts of power. (a crude form of entry into slip space)This form of entry would give some sort of random output in a certain area.

You could then have a enemy alien race that can easily use this method and would be hard to be stopped?

This slip stream would be a reality outside of our own where mass and time would act very different.

Your biggest problem when asking how you should go about faster than light capabilities is that your putting it within current restrictions, different conditions could lead to faster than light travel without having to explain why current theory's are wrong.

If you outside our known space, no one can argue about the rules in which this other plain of reality works.

This works well in other fictional stories, one easy one to look at is the halo universe, seen as the technology in which they use has been discussed in great detail.
I use this method, and it's the same as Babylon 5 uses with it's hyperspace/hypergates.
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Gota
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by Gota »

I think the hardest thing in sci fi is to actually describe how day to day life is...how society is organized...etc..
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Pxtl
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by Pxtl »

Kloot wrote:
bobthedinosaur wrote:Well I thought any FTL is against theory of relativity.
Actually, no. Just crossing over from < c to >= c (or from >= c to < c) is, for any particle.
? I'm not sure that's true. Your mass approaches infinity as you approach c, is /0 at c, and is an imaginary number when you exceed c.

Image

edit: whoops, hotlinkpwn. Formula is at http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=62478

notice that when v exceeds c, then the polynomial in the square root sign becomes a negative number, thus your mass becomes imaginary.

Imaginary numbers are generally a way that physics says "that's impossible".

Prettymuch the only way to do FTL according to modern theories would involve ripping a piece of spacetime up with you and carrying it with you as the spacetime envelope travels faster than light... and the math shows that said piece of spacetime would be horribly, horribly unstable. Lots of hawking radiation would be involved.
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bobthedinosaur
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by bobthedinosaur »

is the space time rip similar to bending/ folding of space?
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SinbadEV
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by SinbadEV »

Just use wormholes.
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bobthedinosaur
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by bobthedinosaur »

Doesn't fit the story. There is too many planned movements, and naval engagements, that wouldn't be possible by jumping in a naturally occurring phenomenon. Thanks tho.
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BlackLiger
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by BlackLiger »

Wormholes generated artificially. Warp holes, if you wish to call them that.
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PicassoCT
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by PicassoCT »

If you stay 4 year semiconciense - you can create a lot in virtual Reality- and will try to leave the created, changed Charakter you once was back, if you can, to not loose that memory.

So there would be some sort of blackbox, that stays behind, for you to collect the four years you lived of "DreamTime", precious memorys that can get lost, can be temepered with, discoverys that will some societys make travelljumping, to just think&construct without aging.

And how about SplitStreamPersonalitys? Everytime you jump- you double the Shizoid you get. So there is room for two in that head of your antagonist..

How about unreasonable strong shields, that make it a crime to jump within a System, because the 4 Year staying ship has evil effects on the Planets that drive by & crash into it.

Me just imagines Shieldsized Stripes of Planetpiece appearing befor the Traveller, making Suns go Nova.

Or you can make some creepy subspacedimension, your ship goes through, where you travell, unknownly destroys whole Civilisations of Aliens, or where thousands of stranded copys of your Travellers form a new civilisation.
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Panda
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by Panda »

I always liked the alternate dimension (in a bubble) theme in sci fi stories that had time travel in them. You could do something like that and use theories from quantum physics. I'm sure you could find some interesting stuff about that on wikipedia and in a physics textbook.
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Spawn_Retard
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Re: Sci Fi Writing Concept

Post by Spawn_Retard »

I still think sub light combat and slip stream travel are the easiest to explain.

Although slip stream combat is possible, but very risky that you dont close the stream that your in, and trap yourself in nothing.
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