Wormhole drives?

[expedient]

Are wormhole drives possible given:

• PPGs have a safety feature where if they detect a problem with the core they generate a micro-wormhole and jettison it into unoccupied space, presumably without any kind of destination anchor. Faey (Imperium) communications also use micro-wormholes to send messages in real-time over vast distances.
• Faey are masters at manipulating and distorting space. The Legion base at Cheyenne Mountain utilized a Faey device that allowed the dropship and skimmer to move through a tunnel too small for their size utilizing a bubble of distorted space.

To bypass the hyperspace-based interdictor defenses could a new drive create a small wormhole, without the help of a gate, wrap the ship in a bubble of distorted space and pass it through the wormhole to travel vast distances in a single near-instantaneous jump?

An external generator might have to used in order to maintain the wormhole long enough for a ship to travel through and perhaps also wrap the vessel in a bubble of space-time. Single use deployed generators, similar to probes or missiles, or heavily shielded hyperspace capable generator ships would probably have to used if internal generation is not possible.

Other potential advantages:

• Wormhole travel could well be harder for defenders of an area to track attackers due to a shorter advanced warning.
• Those utilizing wormhole drives would also be at lower risk of disorientation and other health problems associated with hyperspace travel.
• It may be possible to jump greater distances in less time and fewer rest stops compared to hyperspace travel.
• Wormholes are much less limited by gravity wells, evidenced by Faey communications and gates, potentially allowing closer jumping to targets or earlier escape from danger.

The greatest problem, if they work at all, would be targeting a precise area and maintaining that target without an anchoring device at the other end possibly reducing its effectiveness in battle situations.

PS - Jason owes me his hair if any of this works (ref: Unification, chapter 1).

[Spec8472]

AFAIK This was discussed/explained previously.

PPGs generate the micro wormhole from an emergency power reserve and send the *core* through, not themselves. You're still left with an exploding ppg.

The Gates use the same technology, but on a larger scale. They keep the wormhole open by remaining where they are.

Oh, also... un-anchored gates could be rather dangerous.. The relative motion of different stellar systems is typically non-trivial - You can hand-wave this away with fixed gates (they tether/anchor the gate) - but free floating ones might be a problem.

[khyranleander]

Yikes, would it! Try the equivalent of fallen power lines where the cable alone could smack into a planet like some large meteor. Toss in radiation of some exotic matter travelling near C, as well as a few (hopefully microscale) temporal anomalies. And make it all practically invisible.

Yeah, let something like that writhe about over a few parsecs of inhabited space. Might luck out and it'd disperse before the ends hit anything -- wouldn't NORMALLY take but a few seconds -- but then, that'd probably be a few seconds in travelled space lanes, if not inhabited systems. Not something your insurance company would like to hear you flicked out the side window like cigarette ash.

[expedient]

OK, so two possible alternatives for longer jumps:

1. Send an unmanned advance ship through hyperspace which then provides an anchor/tether for a stable wormhole using a manipulated space bubble to reduce the size of the gate required. Maybe even full size automated gate ships (with luck aided by Myleena’s hyperspace boost). They could travel to a remote location, connect and let a task force through to assemble a bigger gate system near that location protected by interdictors.

2. If an internal artificial upper-dimensional boundary could be maintained; mitigate the effect of hyperspace on the crew by enclosing enough of the ship in a bubble of normal space. Perhaps move the crew into a specially designed compartment inside the vessel.

[ANTIcarrot]

AFAIK This was discussed/explained previously. PPGs generate the micro wormhole from an emergency power reserve and send the *core* through, not themselves. You're still left with an exploding ppg.

I remember suggesting that if the exit location could be controlled/predicted, then this could be used as a weapon. In the same manner as the proposed x-ray bomb, which also exploded during usage.

A PPG/fusion-core that can produce a 1MT explosion is the size of a small barrel of beer. A starship could carrry tens of thousands of such munitions, fit them with crude pointing sensors and shove them overboard, then expend them endlessly until they hit the target. Even if there is a quantum-theory like uncertainty over the exit point (which just means a very low CEP) all you'd need to do is detonate enough to saturate the area.

Unless such things were horrendously expensive...

[Fel]

AFAIK This was discussed/explained previously.

PPGs generate the micro wormhole from an emergency power reserve and send the *core* through, not themselves. You're still left with an exploding ppg.

The Gates use the same technology, but on a larger scale. They keep the wormhole open by remaining where they are.

Oh, also... un-anchored gates could be rather dangerous.. The relative motion of different stellar systems is typically non-trivial - You can hand-wave this away with fixed gates (they tether/anchor the gate) - but free floating ones might be a problem.

Basically this.

The core ejection of a PPG is the PPG dumping its plasma core through a wormhole, but it's neither stable nor controlled. The PPG has no control over where the wormhole's terminus appears, and anything going through it will be ripped apart due to torsion, since the wormhole isn't controlled and thus the entire construction is more or less thrashing about space like a tornado between its origin and terminus, like two people holding ends of a rope and snapping it wildly back and forth. Given it's ejecting plasma energy, this isn't an issue, but it would be if something solid tried going through. Since the wormhole is uncontrolled, it wreaks havoc on the device creating it.

This is why PPGs melt down or explode on core ejection. It has nothing to do with the plasma core, it's because the ejection system can't handle trying to open a one-sided wormhole, it overloads, and it basically goes boom. If there's still a lot of residual plasma inside the PPG when it goes, it can explode. If it's burned most of its emergency backup power to eject the core, it just melts.

This is why stable wormholes need a controlling device on both ends, to prevent torsion forces inside the wormhole and keep it "calm" inside. Spec's assumption is more or less dead on; a wormhole that has a creating/controlling force on only one end, leaving the other side uncontrolled, makes it impossible to use safely, because of the torsion effect (torsion is the radical warping of space or time so severe it causes matter to be unable to follow the contour of fluxing space...this more or less defines a wormhole because the interior is vulnerable to the warping of the walls that form it). It takes a controlling force on both sides of the wormhole to keep it stable enough for matter to pass through safely.

[expedient]

"Further thoughts on long distance travel." Or, "How I spent my first work day of the New Year."


My obsession with overcoming the current limitations of hyperspace travel stem from these musing along these lines:

I can’t help thinking that even after the current struggles with the Consortium the Karinnes will only face a lull at best in the fighting. The other governments in the Milky Way may be too frightened to directly face them in battle after witnessing their true capabilities. The Consortium the though, can still muster ships from Andromeda, or if they cannot spare more ships from there then from one or more of the other galaxies that they occupy.

Future Generations will either have to disappear and leave those galaxies to a ruthless enemy or take the fight to the Consortium and try to whittle them down to manageable numbers. I doubt the Consortium will ever give up, making an eventual further conflict inescapable.

That means being able to travel and communicate effectively over intergalactic distances without as many of the inherent deficiencies of the Consortium’s current methods as possible. (i.e. delayed communications and vulnerability and slow travel times of intergalactic passage.)

With no idea how long the war will take and the real possibility of more Consortium reinforcements in another 5-50 years, those other galaxies need to be reconnoitered. We know that the Consortium is fighting another enemy in Andromeda and has probably been fighting them for more than 1400 years. That demonstrates that the resistance, in Andromeda at least, is somewhat effective and may provide useful knowledge by observation or even possible future allies.

The longer the delay in finding out more about the Consortium and its enemies the more the Karinnes will be fighting from the back foot. Overcoming the limitations of long distance hyperspace travel without the flaws which Jason is about to exploit would be an important early step.

Jason’s priorities will be the more immediate threat, leaving the conflict to secure the future to perhaps the 99th or 100th Generations. Only after both more information is available on the enemy and the Karinnes along with their allies have built up their militaries.

Of course this will also give the Consortium time to develop better strategies for neutralizing the Karinnes irregular tactics and superior technology. Perhaps even adapting some of it to their own uses.

One inevitable consequence of prolonged conflict is that the Karinnes will become more and more orientated towards warcraft probably leaving Jason’s idealistic dreams of the Karinnes as peaceful arbiters of trade in tatters.


Still there is a lot more story to tell before some of this matters.

This is all wonderful news for us as readers of course. Fel could conceivably be writing in the Subjugation universe for many years to come. As the scale increases hopefully many stories large and small will present themselves. It’s a wonderfully rich and complex world.

(Not to mention prequels. George Lucas)


PS - I’ve also been thinking about how the story of Karis and its people is similar in many ways to the legend of Atlantis.

[expedient]

AFAIK This was discussed/explained previously.

I've found the thread this was originally discussed in: http://forums.sennadar.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1067

In it Fel talks about having changed the safety feature to using hyperspace ejection, with further explanations why...