Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

[Arioch]

If so... how does hyperspace look?

It's black.

You can't see anything in hyperspace, since you're moving faster than light.

[Werra]

If so... how does hyperspace look?

It's black.

You can't see anything in hyperspace, since you're moving faster than light.

Wouldn't your eyes still "run" into light then?

[Bamax]

If so... how does hyperspace look?

It's black.

You can't see anything in hyperspace, since you're moving faster than light.

Black? Well that saves you a lot of trouble drawing it does it not? So that is one benefit there, besides avoiding the spwctacular but cliche glow tunnels popular im the media.


I always thought of hyperspace as a fifth dimension with rules of it's own.

Regarding FTL though, if traveling in normal space physicists theorize you would see a white central glow ahead surrounded by darkness but blackness behind since light cannot catch you behind you.

[Bamax]

If so... how does hyperspace look?

It's black.

You can't see anything in hyperspace, since you're moving faster than light.

Wouldn't your eyes still "run" into light then?

Or in space, do ships that jump cause a flash effevt as they jump?
Or when they drop out of hyperspace?

[inxsi]

Or in space, do ships that jump cause a flash effevt as they jump?
Or when they drop out of hyperspace?

Detectable flashes on both entry and exit of hyperspace were part of the assumptions Arioch wanted for the jump drive:

Both entry into and return from hyperspace cause a bright flash of light that is very detectable at long ranges.

So is the ship being blind in hyperspace due to being FTL and outrunning the light, which I also wonder about but am fine with accepting without poking at it too much.

[Arioch]

Hyperspace often is shown as a cloudy, glowy, swirling tunnel in medis scifi.

That's how it's depicted in Star Wars. And that's about it. It looks cool, but has no basis in any kind of concept of what hyperspace is.

Space is black, because black is the absence of light. If spacetime were just empty space, what you'd see is just black. It's the same with hyperspace. There's nothing in hyperspace to create any light for your eye to run into, except whatever light you might have brought with you... and you're outrunning that.

From the jumping ship's frame of reference, the time spent in hyperspace is only a fraction of a second... so there's nothing to see or do while you're in hyperspace. There's no way known to TL11 to change your course while in hyperspace. It's as if you teleported, except you actually didn't.

There is a bright flash of light in real spacetime as you leave and re-enter; this is like the spacetime equivalent of a sonic boom.

[Krulle]

since light is bound to our more-or-less-newtonian universe, it does not translate into HyperSpace, and hence will not be visible in HyperSpace. (the speed of light is a real-space calculation, and in HS the calculations will likely be very different, even for light. Who knows what the speed of light is in HyperSpace?)
If another ship, or some weird reactions/explosions create light in HS directly, then the photons might be present in HS already and be visible for sensors, but it would be a very short light peak.

[Bamax]

Hyperspace often is shown as a cloudy, glowy, swirling tunnel in medis scifi.

That's how it's depicted in Star Wars. And that's about it. It looks cool, but has no basis in any kind of concept of what hyperspace is.

Space is black, because black is the absence of light. If spacetime were just empty space, what you'd see is just black. It's the same with hyperspace. There's nothing in hyperspace to create any light for your eye to run into, except whatever light you might have brought with you... and you're outrunning that.

From the jumping ship's frame of reference, the time spent in hyperspace is only a fraction of a second... so there's nothing to see or do while you're in hyperspace. There's no way known to TL11 to change your course while in hyperspace. It's as if you teleported, except you actually didn't.

There is a bright flash of light in real spacetime as you leave and re-enter; this is like the spacetime equivalent of a sonic boom.

Having empty hyperspace is.... safer if ships really are moving FTL inside.

An FTL collision with any stray debris (which will fall to norm space eventually) would be death by nanosecond.

If time passes slower in hyperspace than our verse then a sufficiently advance race could use it as a type of escape zone where they wait stuff out from our verse.

[kfcroc18]

Wouldn't jumping to a new star system one that nobody has been to before be highly dangerous? You could slam into an asteroid you didn't know was there.

[Cthulhu]

Wouldn't jumping to a new star system one that nobody has been to before be highly dangerous? You could slam into an asteroid you didn't know was there.

I think that at this tech level, telescopes would be good enough to spot planets, planetoids and asteroid belts. The chances of hitting lone, small asteroids are astronomically (pun intended) low. But that's the risk of exploration, to boldly go where no *weirdaliencreature* has gone before.

[Arioch]

It's a risky business, but it helps if you spend some time observing the target star from the departure system. A survey ship can move from one end of the departure system to the other to create large parallaxes to more closely determine the distance to the target, and watch the star for transits of planets. The only case in which there's a chance of collision with planets or asteroids is when the plane of the system is edge-on to the system you're departing from, which you'll know is the cased if you see planets transiting the star.

[Krulle]

Wouldn't jumping to a new star system one that nobody has been to before be highly dangerous? You could slam into an asteroid you didn't know was there.

Unlikely, for a multitude of reasons.
Space is big, even the space where you'll land is lightminutes long.

But yes, it may happen, especially because if you've surveyed the target star only for some weeks before the jump.
(The data you're observing is years old, something may have wandered into the "landing area" of hyperspace jumps while the light was travelling from the target star to the departure start.)

So, if' you've been observing the stars for years, or analysing stored data from previous automatic surveillance systems, you have a good chance of knowing what to expect, otherwise... Throw a D1000, if you throw a 1, .... Don't jump, you're an unlucky gamer. Ina ll other cases chances of something happening are even lower.

[Cthulhu]

A couple of small questions:

1. Do the Loroi have anything resembling our concepts of decade, century or millennia? A decade could be something like "eight-years" and a century a "lifetime" of 400 years, for example. Mozin spoke about a thousand (years?), so perhaps this is a translation of a Trade concept.

2. Do the Loroi know how the Historian reactionless "Illusion drive", as you've called it, works, at least in theory? Or is that not fleshed out yet/classified for plot reasons?

3. Are you all right?

[Arioch]

1. Do the Loroi have anything resembling our concepts of decade, century or millennia? A decade could be something like "eight-years" and a century a "lifetime" of 400 years, for example. Mozin spoke about a thousand (years?), so perhaps this is a translation of a Trade concept.

Decade, century and millennium are just derivations of the Latin for 10, 1000 and 1000; I think they have more to do with our base-10 numerical system rather than the human lifetime (which was certainly nowhere near 100 back during Roman times). Trade uses a base-8 numerical system, so you can expect common terms for 8, 64, 512/1024, 4096, etc.

However, a decade or century in terms of measures of time have limited application in an interstellar society in which each of a hundred worlds has a different year. Military Loroi tend to express time in smaller standard units, usually solon (second) or tibos (standard days). There are terms for intermediate values, but usage varies.

1 solon “beat”: one heartbeat, 1.092 seconds). The average rest heartbeat for a female Loroi is approx. 55 beats per minute.
1 bima “moment” = 1 dinosolon = 64 solon (70 seconds). Infrequently used unit between beat and cycle.
1 digel “cycle” 1 danzosolon = 1 dinobima = 64 bima = 8 nestasolon = 4096 solon = 4473 seconds (1.25 hours)
1 tibos “day” (standard day) = 21 digel = 26.09 Earth hours (1.08 Earth days)
1 nistil tozon = “standard year” = 22,195,037 seconds, 256.887 Earth days, .7033 Earth years (this is based on the Perrein year)

Mozin most likely actually said "one thousand twenty-four years," but I think that would be confusingly specific, as he didn't mean exactly 1024 years, any more than we usually mean exactly 1000 years when we say "a thousand years."

2. Do the Loroi know how the Historian reactionless "Illusion drive", as you've called it, works, at least in theory?

No.

[Krulle]

Mozin most likely actually said "one thousand twenty-four years," but I think that would be confusingly specific, as he didn't mean exactly 1024 years, any more than we usually mean exactly 1000 years when we say "a thousand years."

Well if our language would be translated into a language with a base-eight numerical system, our envoy saying
"in a thousand years" would be heard to say something weird like
"in a 1750 years". (Assuming the translation does convert numbers, and assuming the "year" will not be adapted...)
Sounds weird, and yeah, oddly specific.

[Cthulhu]

I guess that terms like century or millennia convey not only a specific amount of time, but also the concept of a long while/very long while. The Loroi, with their telepathy, can express those meanings more accurately, at least in sanzai. Their records would then list the exact date.
Therefore, Mozin most likely used a term out of their own, conversational version of Trade, something the Loroi have no real need for.

About the reactionless drive, will it be featured/explained/shown later on?

[Arioch]

NO FURTHER ENHANCEMENT
SPECIAL ORDER 937
SCIENCE OFFICER EYES ONLY

[Werra]

So...what would have happened on Tempest if Alex had been an employee of Waylant-Yutani which the Loroi rescued?
I mean, after the chestburster scene.

[Arioch]

DOES NOT COMPUTE

[Cthulhu]

Great, now I have to watch the film again, while Arioch reboots. I just hope that his nuclear reactor did not overheat...