Faster than light travel limitations

[Ianator]

I am working on my first sci-fi novel and i prefer to push plausible deniability as little as possible. To this end, I've speculated that FTL in the EU would have some realistic limitations though not as restrictive as relativity would require. My idea is that speed would be limited only by the increased frequency of neutrino interactions, charge accumulation by interaction with the aether (plasma environment), and the ability to accurately calculate location to avoid high speed collision. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
many thanks, Ianator

[Chickenmales]

That the problem with sci-fi these days... You need to be consistent with relativity in order to have some credability.

[Aardwolf]

The ridiculous thing is that if you ignore relativity, time dilation etc. travelling to nearby stars is achievable with current tecnology. No sci-fi needed.

Just design a craft that can constantly accelerate at say 1.2-1.3 g, which should be comfortable enough for any crew, and a round trip to Alpha Centauri is about 4-5 years.

Arguably if Einstein had never written his relativity papers we would already be travelling back and forth to the stars.

[chrimony]

The ridiculous thing is that if you ignore relativity, time dilation etc. travelling to nearby stars is achievable with current tecnology. No sci-fi needed.

Just design a craft that can constantly accelerate at say 1.2-1.3 g, which should be comfortable enough for any crew, and a round trip to Alpha Centauri is about 4-5 years.

Arguably if Einstein had never written his relativity papers we would already be travelling back and forth to the stars.

What's your budget for this craft? How much does the craft weigh without fuel? What's your fuel source? How much does the fuel weigh? What's your max speed? How much shielding do you need for this max speed?

In reality, even a trip to Mars is prohibitively expensive (in that the public doesn't want to pay for it) for a person and takes months, and we don't take any relativity constraints into account.

[Cargo]

If you going to go full sci-fi, you might as well include a superconducting electromagnetic drive which produces free energy thrust and requires no fuel. The craft also create a plasma sphere which harmonizes with the medium it's in to allow frictionless motion through the medium. Thus acceleration forces are not felt inside the sphere, and speed is only limited by the total efficiency of the drive unit and available span of the medium, which in space is infinite as long as you adjust for the different fields encountered from planets, stars, systems, interstellar, and galactic currents.

Ride the lighting my friend.

[Zyxzevn]

I assume that Einstein's special relativity is wrong. The relativity effect is in the electromagnetic
fields, not in the particles.
That could mean that you have interesting side effects when particles go faster than light.
Such particles might reduce the mass or change the gravity around it.
So you can create a hypothetical gravity vector, using a rotating Faster Than Light (FTL) particles.

Technically such a propulsion system would look circular.
It needs 2 rotating system components.
1. A system that rotates very fast. This would need a special kind of engine,
but too make it easy you could use a turbine driven by a particle beam.
This rotating system generates a very strong rotating magnetic field again, shielded and strengthened
by a super-conducting case.
2. The field pushes a plasma of particles around, these particles are contained within the
magnetic field. The particles, which have a magnetic momentum themselves, can not leave
the magnetic field, due to the strength of magnetism being greater when the particles move faster.
The super-conducting case makes the system even more stable, because it increases the strength of
the magnetic field.

Gravity itself might be caused by a flow of aether.
The gravity vector created by the engine creates its own flow.
That way your craft can accelerate in a short time, and go faster than light.

[Ianator]

If you going to go full sci-fi, you might as well include a superconducting electromagnetic drive which produces free energy thrust and requires no fuel. The craft also create a plasma sphere which harmonizes with the medium it's in to allow frictionless motion through the medium. Thus acceleration forces are not felt inside the sphere, and speed is only limited by the total efficiency of the drive unit and available span of the medium, which in space is infinite as long as you adjust for the different fields encountered from planets, stars, systems, interstellar, and galactic currents.

Ride the lighting my friend.

I really like that idea, but i am trying to find some solid theoretical science to base it on. Could you direct me to someone who could elaborate on the electrophysics behind how i could make that work? Many thank you

[allynh]

Ianator, sorry that I'm late coming in to the discussion.

I have some basic caveats you need to think of depending where you are starting from.

- There are a whole bunch of Space Cadets out there in SciFi Land who will attack anything that violates their bizarre religious beliefs, i.e., what they in their twisted minds think is the Theory of Relativity. Einstein is their god. HA!

- If you want to publish in the magazines, you too must become a Space Cadet. Yikes!

If you are going the sane, rational, way and Indy publishing, then you can literally write whatever you want, with no restrictions. The Space Cadets will never read your stuff, only people who want to be entertained will.

The best example to use is the movie Explorers. This is how I see an aether drive. Just scale up the drive and force field and write anything you want.

Explorers (film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_(film)

If you want to try other system look at the Classics like, Lensmen, etc...

In the long ago, and far away, when SciFi was written for fun, there was a guy called A. Bertram Chandler, and he developed a fun drive called the gaussjammer.

Look at:

A. Bertram Chandler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Bertram_Chandler

This is chapter three where he describes the gaussjammer
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/978143913 ... 73__29.htm

Force fields:

If you want a force field that stops everything, use the Asimov Shield that he wrote about in "Not Final!". This is my favorite, and I have stolen it as well. They develop a force field that stops everything, but it is impossible to maintain for long periods of time. They find that if they flicker the field on and off rapidly, the field created is stable. In fact the faster the rate of flicker, the less energy it takes to maintain.

Not Final!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Final!

The story is available in:

The Early Asimov (1974)
The Complete Stories, Volume 2 (1992)

Time Dilation:

Personally, I do not think that Time Dilation, i.e., the Twins Paradox has ever been shown to be true for physical objects. The proofs they have only refer to high energy Muons coming from cosmic rays. The example they use of high energy Muons is not convincing. It just means that high energy particles act differently than low energy. You can't jump to the bizarre concept that time is dilating. <---That must hurt. HA!

Time dilation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dila ... n_lifetime

All of the stories that depend on time dilation to get somewhere in Relative time are pure fantasy. There is the great novel by Poul Anderson called Tau Zero, where they go as close to the speed of light as possible to travel to another star in years of "ship time", while decades pass in real time. The drive gets stuck, and can't be turned off. The ship goes closer to the speed of light and they cross the universe, surviving the "Big Crunch".

I suspect, that anybody trying to do this will find that the ten year journey to Centauri actually takes ten years, and they starve to death because they have supplies only for a year.

If you want to read great stories that are literally written to keep Space Cadets happy, read Earth or Existence by David Brin. He literally took the incoherent babble of Space Cadets and turned them into coherent story. Each time I read them I say, "You can't do that!", yet he does. HA!

[willendure]

That the problem with sci-fi these days... You need to be consistent with relativity in order to have some credability.

Ever read "The forever war"? Brilliantly incorporates relativistic effects into the story. I recommend.

[Metryq]

The best example to use is the movie Explorers. This is how I see an aether drive. Just scale up the drive and force field and write anything you want.

From the Wikipedia description, Explorers sounds a lot like Murray Leinster's The Wailing Asteroid. An inventor builds a "negative inductance" magnet from a device he saw in a recurring dream. He later uses the device as a spaceship drive. In the course of the novel, FTL weapons (ships) are revealed.

[allynh]

Murray Leinster's The Wailing Asteroid

I have a bunch of Murray Leinster but I didn't have that one. Project Gutenberg has a lot of his stuff, they also have the Lensmen books by E.E. "Doc" Smith.

Thanks...

[Ianator]

Thank you allynh, i started reading the inheritors andw as intrigued enough to go read spartan planet as well! I definitely think now that some form of gaussjammer will be the most plausible and useful FTL device. I really appreciate all the input, i will be working my way through all the suggested reading as time becomes available.

[allynh]

I forgot to mention the Spindizzy drive that James Blish came up with for Cities in Flight. It combines an FTL drive and force field in the same system like in the movie Explorers.

Spindizzy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindizzy

The Dillon-Wagoner Graviton Polarity Generator, known colloquially as the spindizzy, is a fictitious anti-gravity device imagined by James Blish for his series Cities in Flight. This device grows more efficient with the amount of mass being lifted, which was used as the hook for the stories—it was more effective to lift an entire city than it was to lift something smaller, such as a classic spaceship. This is taken to extremes in the final stories, where an entire planet is used to cross the galaxy in a matter of hours using the spindizzy drive.

According to the stories, the spindizzy is based on principles contained in an equation coined by P.M.S. Blackett, a British physicist of the mid-20th century. Several other Blish stories involving novel space drives contain the same assertion. Blackett's original formula was an attempt to correlate the known magnetic fields of large rotating bodies, such as the Sun, Earth, and a star in Cygnus whose field had been measured indirectly.[1] It was unusual in that it brought Isaac Newton's gravitational constant and Coulomb's constant together, the one governing forces between masses, the other governing forces between electric charges. However, it was later disproved by more accurate measurements, and by new discoveries such as magnetic field reversals on Earth and the Sun, and the lack of a magnetic field on bodies such as Mars, despite its rotation being similar to Earth's.

Blish's extrapolation was that if rotation combined with mass produces magnetism via gravity, then rotation and magnetism could produce anti-gravity. The field created by a spindizzy is described as altering the magnetic moment of any atom within its influence.

The spindizzy was also used in at least two novels by Jesse Franklin Bone, The Lani People and Confederation Matador and appears as the nickname for fictional Heim theory devices in Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel.

Cities in Flight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight

The Wiki page mentions Jesse Franklin Bone who used the spindizzy. I did not know about him.

Bone, Jesse F. (Jesse Franklin), 1916-2006
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/b#a946

Classic SF had to build on great story, not depend on Space Cadet babble. The technology was a device to help drive the story forward, not cripple story.