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Time to Spare While the time expansion effect of FTL travel is usually a problem, it can sometimes be useful. One good example is automated refineries; raw ore is loaded onto a ship with a small refinery, and in just a few months (relative to Earth) the ship will arrive having completed years of work. This sort of work is limited by the fact that the task must be fully automated, but the versatility of modern robots means this isn't a crippling limitation. Long trips are boring and expensive, so hypersleep is a standard tool for getting from place to place. But some people deliberately travel FTL to get extra time. Some pleasure liners offer two week holidays that only take a few days, or training ships offering six month courses in a week. FTL Projectiles |
Starships use hyperdrive to travel faster than light. Invented by Romberg and his team
in 2068, hyperdrive works by creating an intense virtual mass field (related to artificial
grav technologies) that expands towards supercritical levels, and causes a quantum
transition of everything within the field to a tachyonic state. While in this state matter
can only travel faster than light, and thus has great difficulty safely interacting with
the sublight universe. This state is often called hyperspace, although it isn't actually
distinct from normal space. Speed is controlled by altering the strength of the virtual
mass field - shedding mass will speed the ship, while increasing mass will slow it.
One major problem with hyperdrive is that way it affects conventional physics. An objects mass alters, creating effects similar to variable gravity. More seriously, FTL travelers are affected by time expansion. As the ship goes faster, time goes slower for everything within it. The time expansion ratio for FTL travel is given by the following formula;
Inside the ship the journey will seem to take t times longer as a result of time expension. As trips get shorter relative to the outside world they get longer from the point of view of the occupants of the ship. This placed considerable supply limitations on early ships, who had to carry sufficient food, water, and air for trips that could offen seem to last several years. This spured the development of both AI systems and hypersleep capsules. Using GURPS Vehicles, treat hyperdrive as a TL10 warp drive, but at ten times normal cost. A ships speed is given by WTF / mass in tons. A speed of 50c is considered slow, speeds of 150-250c are typical, and anything above 300c is very fast. The ship can extend its hyperspace field to include objects up to roughly ten times its own volume, depending on the dimensions of the objects. This allows that things such as hyperspace tugs towing external cargos, or battleships with fighters already deployed when it returned to sublight. Mass CountersThe only form of sensor that works while in hyperspace is a mass counter. A mass counter detects light approaching the ship in the direction of travel, and uses software to correct for the Rohremann effect, the FTL equivalent of Doppler shift. The result is a simple picture of the space ahead of the ship. The speeds are too great for this to be used to avoid collision with an object; rather, this sensor is used to map constellations and keep the ship on course.Hyperstate recievers also still work in hyperspace. Since no natural sources of hyperstate signals have been found, this is only useful for navigation within the Network. Within the Network the signals always include a place and time of origin, which allows a ship to easily calculate its position. This system is called UPS - the Universal Positioning System. Within the core systems it can track a ships position down to a few thousand kilometers. |