Hyperspace

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Arioch
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

Anything is possible, though this seems unlikely. But since the ship is completely blind during hyperspace transit, it would be hard to know whether this really happened or not.

A more likely result of this scenario:

Image

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by NOMAD »

Arioch you should write a Hyperspace Guide For Dummies

your images and explainations would fit prefectly in the above book ( and sincerely, I mean this as a compliment )

would the above be an example of entering negative-hyperspace as discussed ?
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

Yes, hence the screaming. ;)

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by NOMAD »

but in hyperspace no one can hear to scream . . . right :lol:
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Arioch
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

Well, you know what they say... what happens in negative hyperspace stays in negative hyperspace.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

This makes me wonder, folks in outsider have discovered how to make artificial gravity, but do they have anti-gravity? I would think that might be the only way to pull someone out of negative space... but even then the logistics would be pretty improbable.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Trantor »

Arioch wrote:Well, you know what they say... what happens in negative hyperspace stays in negative hyperspace.
So negative Hyperspace is somewhere between College and Vegas?



scnr. :mrgreen:
sapere aude.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by NOMAD »

Trantor wrote:
Arioch wrote:Well, you know what they say... what happens in negative hyperspace stays in negative hyperspace.
So negative Hyperspace is somewhere between College and Vegas?

scnr. :mrgreen:
I wouldn't go their, you won't be coming back ( literally) :lol:

and how would you know Arioch what happen is negative hyperspace?
I am a wander, going from place to place without a home I am a NOMAD

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Riess »

Negative Hyperspace has all the best party locations. You heard it here first.
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Karst45 »

We know that the well of soul actually prevent jump to a sector, but how do the gravity well of the said black hole (it must be quite big compared to a sun) interfere with the hyperspace jump?

If you were aiming at a black hole as a jump coordinate, what would happen?

Other question: Since some believe that the galactic core contain a super massive black hole, would "core ward miss-jump" actually spawn here by default?

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

I like to imagine that there is a civilization that exists near the galactic core that is comprised of all the species that have ever miss jumped before. Of course even if they did all end up there, I imagine they probably wouldn't survive for very long.

I think the reason why the black hole prevents FTL travel is because it distorts space time in such a way that jumps become inaccurate and dangerous.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Grayhome »

Or it gobbles up those who stray to near.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

Karst45 wrote:We know that the well of soul actually prevent jump to a sector, but how do the gravity well of the said black hole (it must be quite big compared to a sun) interfere with the hyperspace jump?

If you were aiming at a black hole as a jump coordinate, what would happen?
I don't think it's the well itself. Given how close jump points are to the stars...even the gravity well of a very large black hole shouldn't be difficult to miss. Say the jump zone gets pushed out from 5 AU (for a Sol-like star) to 6300 AU...that's a whopping one-tenth of a light year. Even with a 10x safety factor, you are only prevented from making jumps going right past the Well.

A gravity well is also a rather constant affair. The Well of Souls had a dramatically larger area of effect for a relatively brief period of time in recent history, which apparently died down after a while. It seems likely the interference is due to some other event associated with the Well that caused the outburst and continues to cause trouble in its vicinity, rather than it just being a really big gravity well.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

Very massive objects present a hazard to navigation because their mass can pull a ship off course in hyperspace. This can happen with any star, but a very massive star affects a larger area. In addition to making nearby stars more dangerous to hit, very massive star systems can be difficult to jump directly into, because the gravity well becomes so steep that it's hard to hit the target slope without being pulled all the way into the star. This is why the star-forming regions with star clusters and short-lived massive stars (such as the Gould belt surrounding the local bubble) form natural boundaries to safe jump travel.

Black holes are just like very massive stars, except worse: because of they way they form (through collapse) black holes usually have insane rates of spin, which cause gravitational waves. The waves have an unpredictable effect on objects transiting through nearby hyperspace, kind of like trying to putt a golf ball on an undulating surface.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by AndrewCrisp »

Well, we know from Gravity Probe B that rotating massive objects do drag space-time around them (this is called Lorentz frame-dragging IIRC), so icekatze's suggestion about a black hole distorting space-time to prevent jumps is probably right on the mark. If the black hole spins fast enough, then its frame-dragging will be intense compared to the frame-dragging of a slower-spinning object like a normal star or a planet.

We can now imagine a situation of a ship in hyperspace hitting this twisted-up space-time on re-entry; probably akin to someone attempting to jump onto a fast-spinning flywheel. I can see three possibilities:

Shred! The ship is forcibly inserted into the distorted space-time, and suddenly every particle in the ship must adapt to the frame-dragging. The result is a ship ripped apart at the quark level.
Boom! Similar to "Shred!" but the ship holds together. Instead, heat is generated - lots of heat.
Sideways Doink! The ship bounces off of the distorted space-time, and flies out into hyperspace on a random vector - essentially the black hole's spin adds a sideways component to the ship's vector.

I could also imagine pulsars posing similar risks to ships.

EDIT: Looks like Arioch beat me to it. Ah well. *shrug*

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by osmium »

yeah I think Arioch's explanation makes it easily digestible, especially if you reference the whiff, doink, freeeeedoooooommmmmm plot. Although I'd say rather than putting, it's more like chipping onto the green from a bunker and hoping to roll into the hole with no line of sight to the green (when said green is undulating). I think it provides a more appropriate degree of dread / difficulty i.e. you can't *really* see what the green is doing even if you know what it should be doing, and if that approach angle of the ball hits a random wave the results would be unpredictable to say the least.

-O

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Arioch
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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Arioch »

Except that since gravity affects the curvature of hyperspace (in addition to realspace), the waves do more than affect your "landing" area in realspace; they can directly affect the ballistic trajectory of the ship through hyperspace.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Karst45 »

Arioch wrote:Except that since gravity affects the curvature of hyperspace (in addition to realspace), the waves do more than affect your "landing" area in realspace; they can directly affect the ballistic trajectory of the ship through hyperspace.
so it the example above but with constant variation wind.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Mjolnir »

Karst45 wrote:
Arioch wrote:Except that since gravity affects the curvature of hyperspace (in addition to realspace), the waves do more than affect your "landing" area in realspace; they can directly affect the ballistic trajectory of the ship through hyperspace.
so it the example above but with constant variation wind.
Well, with periodically oscillating wind. Perhaps with multiple overlapping periods and amplitudes, varying over time as closely-orbiting massive bodies affect each others' orbits.

If you had good measurements of the gravitational waves you'd be traveling through (decades to centuries worth, and more recent the deeper in you want to go) and a lot of confidence in your measurements and calculations, you might compensate. You would only be able to make such measurements in the first place from the vicinity of the source, though...you're measuring waves that are propagating outward at the speed of light, and which incoming ships would have to jump through. Perhaps the Well of Souls was constructed (or found and modified) with a purpose, to make a home territory that was difficult or impossible to navigate for anyone without recent navigational corrections from the Well.

Courses tangent to the direction of the Well would be more stable, cutting across fewer waves. Travel inward might be possible without up to date navigational data, using a very indirect inwardly spiraling path and estimates of the short-term future gravitational waves (that is, those that will cross that location in the immediate future, and which are currently between that system and the next one in). Ships traveling outward would always be traveling through waves they have records of, and would only need to return to indirect paths on the last leg of return, when they travel through newer waves that have crossed their origin point since they left (assuming their navigational data didn't come from even deeper in via outgoing ships). The innermost leg leading to the monitoring stations themselves might be couriers that jump out, make a transmission to other ships waiting to relay the data, and immediately jump back in to minimize the number of waves they must jump across based on models rather than measurements.

It's a double-edged blade, though. A disruption to the measuring stations or the ships moving outward carrying the navigational data needed to move freely in that region of space would paralyze interstellar travel in that protected territory, and if the capability for building advanced interstellar starships was lost, re-establishing it would be very difficult. The Soia might be stuck in those unnavigable systems near the Well, trapped by their own defenses due to having lost the technology needed to compensate for the interference.

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Re: Hyperspace

Post by Trantor »

Looks like there´s a lot more busstations out there: http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.4678
:)
sapere aude.

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