In Jack Vance''s space ships, they had some sort of spacetime-turbine which sucked up the space and used it to thrust the ship, leaving the ship "outside" the space-time in the process.

Maybe Bishop-Pass can help here with better english than mine.

quote: Original post by RTF
There is also "hyperspace skipping." The ship doesn''t enter hyperspace once and stay there for the remainder of the journey, but instead makes something more akin to a dotted line, flicking in and out of it many times, because the difficulty/feasability of plotting an accurate course through hyperspace in one try warrants stopping to readjust or recharge.

That reminds me of the Foundation books. Basicly, ships had the required technology to jump from A to B. The only problem is, there are so many factors in calculating a route, that the longer the jump, the bigger the chance is that you end up wrong. And you had to calculate manually. So to go from A to B, you pass by dozens of points, jumping, stopping, finding out where you are again, recalculating, jumping again, stopping, finding out if you are close to where you want to be, etc. etc. Highly annoying, yet quite close to the old days of seafaring. When the longer you sail, the less accurate your knowledge of your position becomes

quote: Original post by RTF
There is also "hyperspace skipping." The ship doesn''t enter hyperspace once and stay there for the remainder of the journey, but instead makes something more akin to a dotted line, flicking in and out of it many times, because the difficulty/feasability of plotting an accurate course through hyperspace in one try warrants stopping to readjust or recharge. Depending on design taste the time between each entry may be momentary or take hours, if the calculations are ultra-sophisticated or a charging of "hyperspace capacitors" is needed.

That reminds me of The Foundation Series, and Nemisis, all good books by Asimov.

What about the infinite improbability drive from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

quote:
the ships in vinge''s book were designed by some ancient star faring race. they used a 2 dimensional sheet of warped space bounded on its edges by extremely long cosmic strings as their engines. the sheets were in the shape of wings and the faster the craft traveled the bigger the "wings" would get. they did something like folding/warping space i believe though the rest of the details have escaped me a bit. they did achieve the ultra fast speed by flitting from point to point. also i believe that the wings provided a completly inertialess environment in the craft so that extremely high slower than light speeds were possible as well as ridiculous accelerations without squishing the pilot. read the book anyway, it is incrediably detailed and engrossing.

No, no, no, that was stephen baxter''s novels. They were the Xeelee, and they made the whole universe into a causal loop. Basically they traveled back in time, to almost the begining of the univese, to fight against the photono races (dark matter) who were destroying the stars. Anyway, thtey escape through this interface to another universe by creating this massive artifact that was so massive it actually counteracted the universe''s expansion (locally). But the loop ended with them going back into time, you see, so it was closed..

In vinge, it was like ultradrive, like hyperspace but only in certain Zones, anything in the Slow Zone couldn''t travel using ultradrive so they couldn''t travel faster then light. Basically the higher in zone you got the faster you could travel, so at the upper limits, massive interconnecting machines could be built that operated at FTL speeds, making computers more and more powerful until at some point they reached consicenceness...but on the down side everyhting''s really fast "up there" so ''gods'' only last for like 10 years before losing interest in anything.

There''s always the very interesting theory of complex space, where space cannot be mapped onto a real number system, but must instead be represented as a set of complex points. This allows any single point of "real" 3D space to contain an infinite number of "complex" space points. To travel, you shift all "real 3D" points of matter into another complex plane, and travel there. When you shift back, no time has elapsed in the original plane, the actual matter is unaffected by elapsing time in the secondary complex plane, and for all practical purposes the travel is instantaneous. Kind of hard to explain succinctly, but a fascinating possibility nonetheless.

quote:
What about the infinite improbability drive from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Doh! *smacks head* how could I have forgotten that one. Saves all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.


[edited by - JuNC on July 25, 2003 5:07:14 AM]

But the improbabilty drive isn''t the fast method of travel, I belive the fastest method of travel was called the barista drive ... it was powered by waiters if I remember right.

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quote: Original post by TechnoGoth
But the improbabilty drive isn''t the fast method of travel, I belive the fastest method of travel was called the barista drive ... it was powered by waiters if I remember right.

Close... bistromatics is a special branch of math that depends on waiters calculating the dinner check.

That ship also had an SEP field. This caused the ship to become invisible, because anyone who looked at it would think it was "somebody else''s problem", hence SEP. These books were written under the influence of gin

Did anyone mention wormholes (Deep Space 9)?

The Alien series just put people in hibernation.

Starcraft''s protoss aliens use some kind of psionic/psychic magic to move structures onto new colonies.

In the original H.G.Wells War of the Worlds book, the martian''s vehicles were shot into space out of very large cannons.

The Lost in Space movie used gravity assist, but also featured some sort of warping that allowed a window into another time and space.

I think Battlestar Galactica used hyperspace.

You could also consider teleportation based on quantum mechanics. I think quantum states get coupled somehow and it would allow instantaneous exchange of information between the 2 nodes.

-solo (my site)

What about Tesseracting? you know, folding space, so that a straight line isnt the shortest route, but a tesseract is... or has that already been mentioned... i have to get off soon, so i dont have time to read the whole thing...

Quantum

There are four "generally accepted" ways of space travel in SF (quoted from Orson Scott Card), and they transpose fine. A bit of advice - don't use "warp speed". Sounds tacky and is not possible. Period.

Generation ships - sublight vessels going as slow as they have to. Scientifically unlikely due to the difficulty of creating a self-contained biosphere.

Ramdrive - Short for "Bussard Ramscoop Drive", this idea revolves around the idea of a huge net used to scoop up free-floating hydrogen. It's semi-plausible, but not the way it's usually implemented. The net would have to be HUGE (think about one Luna diameter in width and that again in height) and there would need to be some heavy shielding protecting anyone inside because even at fractions of lightspeed that stuff turns deadly. It isn't very compatible with "stylish" spaceships.

Hyperspace - This one is semiplausible as well, assuming you believe there's more than three dimensional axes. Forget all that crap about time being the fourth dimension (it can probably be represented as a dimension, but not the fourth for this argument). If you take a 2D piece of paper and fold it, you can make any two points touch at a lesser distance than going across the 2D plane. Migrate this idea to the third dimension, take a right at the decimal point, and try to imagine a hypercube. If you can't, don't worry, just say it takes loads of energy and folds space.

Time Dilation - the only one that's truly scientifically plausible. At insanely high speeds close to c, time itself compresses. At 99.9999% of c, give or take a 9, I believe the ratio is 1:~8, but I'm likely wrong. If my number was right, then a hair short of one light year would appear to those aboardship to be one year, but outside it would be close to eight. (If you DO do this and have your game involved with space, make SURE that anything they see in this speed mode is heavily red-shifted, because of the Doppler effect. Anything behind them is blueshifted.)

[edited by - Edward Ropple on July 25, 2003 7:48:50 PM]