Jarrah's Uplink
Today, a link to Storm
Corps, a truely awesome scifi webcomic. I'm green
with envy, frankly.
A
few weeks ago I
promised to explain further about inter-stellar travel in
my universe. Now is when I explain it. Don’t worry,
you don’t need to read it to understand the comic.
Its just something I’ve given a lot of thought to.
Having said that, pay attention, there may be a test afterwards…
The underlying principles of FTL (Faster Than Light*) travel
and communication are way too complex for 1-and-20 century
humans to grasp (if they weren’t, we’d have
the technology already), but the external mechanics and
limitations of the technology are pretty simple.
A ship’s FTL drive has two parts, the Boot and the
Strap. The Boot is an integral part of the ship, while the
Strap unit is movable. To move the ship, the Boot unit hurls
the Starp unit to the ship’s destination, and then
the Strap pulls the rest of the ship into position. After
being used, the Strap unit takes some hours to recover sufficiently
to be used again, so most ships carry multiple Strap units
if then need to make a lot of jumps, or else stop at Waystations
to swap their used units for fresh ones (rather like with
carriages and horses ). As an alternative set-up, some ships
lack bootstrap drives altogether, and instead get moved
about by the huge Boot units, often called Bootgates, built
near waystations. You can see one in action here.
While this does make the ship cheaper to build, it restricts
its movements to the main trade routes, where it can access
stationary Bootgates.
Of course, there are limits about jumping besides the number
of Straps you have. Jumps are impossible past a range of
roughly 500 parsecs, and trying to jump into or out of a
body’s gravity well is likewise impossible.
And in case you were wondering, yes, its entirely possible
that the people who named this technology had a thing for
bondage…
*Or Facon, Tomato, and Lettuce, if you’re on one of
those backwater waystations where they can’t even afford
vat-grown bacon, and have to use a synthetic substitute on
their sandwiches.
|
John's Uplink
Note from Jarrah: John couldn't get
an Uplink together this week, as he's in Canberra, International
Capital of Boredom. |
