The Death Of The Heavy Scifi Battleship

[Sarlith]

Often in SciFi you don't actually need to get into the specifics of hyperscience, you just need the results, and some good verbose technobabble will do. However sometimes the quirk of the plot depends on the hyperscience working a certain way.

My favorite involved the jump/warp bubble being taken literally. Envision the universe as a glob of snot, floating in a vat of olive oil, which contains other similar globs of snot. This is the Multiverse. Your universe is just one glob among many, but humans have not realized this aspect beyond the theoretical. The globs jostle, but don't merge. You creating a warp bubble is inflating a tiny bubble on the surface of the glob, then rolling across the surface, before merging into the glob once more. The glob is made of the same "stuff" as the home universe, so has similar rules of physics, but the process makes it have its own harmonic frequency or identifying energy.

Because of the separation of the boundaries, time and distance are irrelevant. In your jump bubble, you are in what amounts to a newborn universe, though one that will be a fleeting mayfly. Local time and space affect you, but you are divorced from your home universe. You travel without moving, because you've left the Universe proper, and are reinserting yourself back into it elsewhere. Inside the bubble, you experience some stretch of time, hours or days depending on RNG. The only reason any "outside" time passes when you jump is the leak of time around the merging bubble. This can also be hours or days, but is not related at all to the "inside" time.

The reason this mechanic mattered, is that the Multiverse aspect started intruding. Other universes are very "nearby" and are jostling against this one. On occasion there are portals opened between universes, either natural or by force of will of some sophont. The creation of jump bubbles across the surface of the Home Universe causes the membranes separating the universes to be pushed apart as the bubble passes, and slap back together after it's through. This causes some sort of effect in a neighboring universe, possibly ripping open portals, and possibly just the natives there notice.

There's a number of uses for this setup. Most of it involves disappearing spacecraft but may also prompt an invasion. It's also possible there is damage being caused to the universe itself, like the membrane is being scratched, and too much will literally pop the glob of snot. On the snatcher front, I have done alien species, and a massive single-universe entity. The aliens seemed like The Bad Guys but they were actually Exterminators, protecting the Multiverse from these horrible damaging Humans. The Entity was disturbed by Human Thought, it liked its alone time. The bubbles were bringing human minds into close enough proximity to disturb it. So it starts lashing out, reaching into warp bubbles to Mind Tentacle people to death, maybe destroying entire ships in transit, and eventually it contrives to eliminate the problem at the source.

Notice, within this framework, the jump drive itself can be tweaked to have different functional limitations. "Must Jump from a certain point" is very popular, as is "Arrives at a certain point". "Takes Ten Minutes To Charge" is another. "Capable of Short Jumps" for inter-system travel. "Accurate Jumping" for an ability or inability to predict where you'll appear.

[Keklas Rekobah]

Often in SciFi you don't actually need to get into the specifics of hyperscience, you just need the results, and some good verbose technobabble will do. However sometimes the quirk of the plot depends on the hyperscience working a certain way. . .

I have the impression that even the Loroi, with their vast scientific knowledge, do not really understand WHY their H-drive systems work, but only that certain subsystems arranged in a certain configuration and activated in a certain way will translate X amount of mass into H-space after expending Y amount of fuel.  From that point on, it is almost literally a "shot in the dark" to pop out of H-space at the desired destination.

Same for sanzai (TK/TP): they know that it works, but exactly what link exists between their thoughts and the results is still beyond their most advanced minds.

[Demarquis]

@DevilDalek: "DILC"

Take a look at this baby: https://medium.com/predict/constructing ... 3b37eb83b0
I don't want to just fly on it, I want to marry it.

@Sarlith: That sounds like a fascinating premise, but I would note that that isn't how the A-Drive is understood to work. You don't actually leave this universe and enter another dimension (in that sense, it is not equivalent to a wormhole). Instead if folds normal 3-D space such that the volume in front of the craft is compressed, and that behind the craft is stretched out. You are almost literally riding a 4-D space wave.