Mastodawn

✅ 🦊 CheckFox Sep 5, 2018

Thinking about FTL travel in my universe:

Warp: basically only good for travel within star systems

Hyperspace: preferred mode of travel, but has limited bands of empty universes where it's viable, and gets crowded in busy areas.

Wormholes: only for the bold (pirates/smugglers!). Leftover from an ancient civilization, mostly unstable or unpredictable.

Jump drives: the nuclear weapons of the far future. Highly regulated, and only big ships can produce enough power to handle it. #AmWriting

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Ontploffing Boer Sep 5, 2018

@checkfox What's the difference between warp and jump? Is it just distance traversed and power requirements?

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✅ 🦊 CheckFox Sep 5, 2018

@ontploffing Jump is instant and takes a lot more power. Warp is slow, but safe and efficient.

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Ontploffing Boer Sep 5, 2018

@checkfox Oh, interesting. I'd've thought they were both instant, but warp was limited by power curves to only be feasible within gravity wells, where traversing the boundary between adjacent wells would require power proportionate to delta-V, while jump somehow avoided that power requirement in order to go between low points of wells. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/681:_Gravity_Wells

681: Gravity Wells - explain xkcd

explain xkcd is a wiki dedicated to explaining the webcomic xkcd. Go figure.

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Ontploffing Boer

@checkfox Jump would require a higher initial energy output than warp to "pierce" the well, but lower total energy use than warp. By analogy to modern energy storage, jump would be discharging a capacitor to light a flashbulb while warp would be discharging a battery to light a lightbulb. The reason jump-ships would be dangerous is because of how they store/generate that huge burst of energy.