Use wormholes instead of that...Thing you thought up. It makes no sense.
Mention that attempting to accelerate a wormhole to high speeds causes it to collapse, meaning it can't be used for practical time travel, and realize that you need to have negative energy density to make a wormhole.
This is a signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.To me it seems reminiscent of "Warp Points" in the boardgame Starfire
. The Querci drive is thus, From a Certain Point of View perhaps simply a "key field" generator which allows ships to access the pre-existing wormhole system? One wonders if the holes were laid by precursors or somehow a natural phenomena...
Pulsor Rifle - very similar concept to the ppg weapon from Babylon Five. You will need a lot of energy per blast, so power consumption will be important. But plausable. Ion engines and plasma weaopons already exist in research labs.
Envirosuit - many components of this technology already exist or might soon, so very plausible.
I'd say on Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness, you're at about a 1.87.
So basically it sounds like you want:
- material should have a high sublimation expansion ratio
- solid form should have high density.
Also:
- ratio of weapon effectiveness / energy required per shot, and effectiveness / cost should be maximized.
- Water has a density of 1g/cm3 and a gas expansion ratio of 1,700. Melting and boiling points are 0 and 100 C. The energy of sublimation is very high however.
- Neon
has a density of 1.2g/cm3 and a gas expansion ratio of 1:1400 but it's melting and boiling points are 24.56 K and 27.07 K, respectively, so you'll need pressurized or cryogenic storage. On the plus side, it's easier to sublimate.
- Osmium-192
is the densest stable odinary (made of atoms on the periodic chart) material known, at 22.59 g/cm3. Melting and boiling points are 3306 and 5285 K, so it'll take a lot of energy, but the resulting gas will have a lot of energy. It's also quite toxic, so you may not want to use it for reduced - lethality use.
An intersting phenomena is that in space, liquids are unstable because of the low pressure.
edited 20th Mar '11 10:50:09 PM by FrodoGoofballCoTV
Pulsor Rifles aren't going to work, firstly because you need a force-field to actually contain the blast, and secondly because a blast of gas simply isn't going to do any damage at even pistol range (400 joules over an area of 0.64 square centimetres, at 20m distance). Hells given that you've already got the forcefield you might as well make the bullets out of that.
Well seeing as you have FTL, that already puts you at a 3 at best on the scale.
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play@ Frodo: You're spot on with the drive as a key of sorts. It doesn't create the holes, it just opens them. I avoided having any connect to outside our galaxy for the story's sake, but would it make sense to say that's because they are somehow affected by gravity?
@ Matt: ...How on Earth did I miss that?
Looks like I'll need to find an alternative; the important part is having the PSI easily adjustable.
@ Storyyeller: I was hoping that I could bypass the speed issue by saying that things going through the holes aren't going faster than light, but instead going in a direction where the distance between the two points is zero. The idea is that there are actually more than three spatial dimensions, and it's like tunneling through a wall instead of climbing over it.
edited 21st Mar '11 11:35:10 AM by RTaco
Minkowski
will not like you if you do that, and you still hit the FTL = time-travel limitation. (Since a new "dimension" in normal physics just means there's a different direction you can travel, which wouldn't help you get to your destination any faster, unless you could change c, or something.)
edited 21st Mar '11 11:52:00 AM by Yej
It's complicated, but the short version is that since time and space are actually the same thing, if you go fast enough you go backwards in time.
You know how relativity says that when you get going really fast, time slows down? Well if you go faster than the speed of light, then time goes backwards.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.I'd say probably, though my understanding of General Relativity is too weak to actually answer definitively.
The real problem is that there's no known laws of physics that would make a traversable wormhole possible.
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play![]()
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Not quite. Relativity says that if you somehow managed to exceed local c, time becomes imaginary, in the sense of imaginary numbers
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A side effect of Relativity treating time and space as interchangeable is that the conventional idea of "distance" gets dropped, and something odd pops up in its place. For instance, you can think of Alpha Centuari as not 4 lightyears away, but 4 years ago.
Actually, if we keep going with that, it becomes clear what the problem is. Imagine right now is t=0, and we get a distress signal from Alpha Centuari. For the purposes of clarity, we wait 3.5 years before we activate our magic FTL machine, which gets us to AC instantly. However, to do that, we need to get to 4 years ago. (Remember, time and space are interchangable, so a normal engine will let you "travel in time".) This is perfectly sensible within Relativity, until you realize that we traveled 4 years ago, relative to our start at t=3.5 years. ...Final destination, t=-6 months, 6 months before we received the distress signal. If we prevent the distress signal being transmitted for whatever reason, we've just caused the Grandfather Paradox.
This effect does not rely on what happens to you, locally, only that you traverse a normal-space distance d in less than d/c time.
edited 21st Mar '11 2:34:29 PM by Yej
Technically, the distance itself would be lower, so there's no paradox, probably.
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's PlayI may have come up with a way for the Pulsor Rifle to work: By making it into a bubble wand.
The air blast could pass through a liquid film as it goes through the barrel, trapping it inside a bubble. After each shot, the film could be reloaded.
And the pressure could be adjusted by having two triggers: One that gradually evaporates the material (building pressure), and another to release it. For a more powerful shot you'd just need to hold down the first trigger longer before pulling the second one.
@ Yej: Would it make any sense for the device to always transport you to your destination at the "equivalent" point in time?
edited 21st Mar '11 6:10:39 PM by RTaco
^ Not really.
Basically, in Special Relativity, FTL = Time Travel, guaranteed. In General Relativity, it probably is, but I'm not smart enough to be able to prove it.
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play![]()
Kinda. The closet meaningful equivalent in GR to "equivalent time" is a light-like path, i.e. traveling at exactly c. You could do that and the physicists couldn't shout at you, but it defeats the point of FTL comms, and runs into Space Is Big.
[[quote Pulsor Rifle - A form of projectile weapon developed by the piranchi. An electric current is sent through a block of ultra-dense watenium, which evaporates into highly pressurised gas. This wave is released through a valve that forces it out in one direction, creating a "bullet" of air. The valve can be adjusted to create wider or more focused blasts, enabling it to be used on a wide variety of targets. A fist-sized block of watenium can provide enough gas to fire continuously for nearly 18 hours.]] I've come up with far too many ways of killing people to not be anything other than a supervillain or an engineer. I can tell you that not only is this impractical, inefficient, and mind-bogglingly useless as a weapon, it's more or less ridiculously impossible and most likely enough to have your Hardness rating plummet into the negatives.
I may sound mean, but I'm mean with the most benevolent of intentions. I will outline the various problems with this weapon, which you can use as parameters when trying to come up with another weapon.
First issue: Using a gas to kill someone through the delivery of kinetic energy rather than as a poison/toxin. You have a highly pressurized volume of air sealed within the weapon while located within a most likely low-pressure environment. It's not going to be like shooting a can of condensed air. All it's really going to do is generate a vacuum effect until the pressures of the chamber and the environment equalize. It is the natural behavior of gas atoms/molecules to get as far away from each other as possible. If try to Hand Wave it by saying that this substance has weird-ass properties that makes it stay together, any chemist or physicist with knowledge of Boyle's and/or Graham's Laws (or in this case, basic atomic physics) are going to hunt you down and make sure you don't make it out alive.
For example, all dispersing the gas is going to do is generate a brief period of wind like if you blow a hole in the side of a passenger plane at 30,000 feet. It's going to be bad news for anyone within the depressurizing cabin, but unless something is going to fly out and hit you, anyone who happens to be outside of it isn't really going to be affected.
Second issue: Using a conductive material to generate gas through electric shock. Due to the unnaturally high density of "watenium" or whatever, I'm going to assume that it's a metal. It is very difficult to regulate electricity being conducted through a material, meaning that the watenium block is going to be segregated into predetermined "shots" insulated by rubber. As such, that means that you cannot disperse the pressurized gas variably without having impractically-large gas chambers in the weapon or risking a potential chain reaction of sorts.
Maybe the "vacuum" effect could be used to suck something out of the barrel and wack someone? Or perhaps watenium could be used for a kind of "inflating projectile"? A problem I see about this is that it's gimmicky, and when compared to traditional projectile weaponry (I.E., chemically-propelled munitions), it kind of violates Occam's Razor.
I hope this helps you.
"Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn't get it."Thanks for all the responses so far, guys.
I actually wasn't picturing the pulsor rifles being used in space, but on the surface of planets. In that case, would the bubble wand version work?
And I had a feeling that the simple "evaporate via electric shock" method might not pan out. How's this set-up instead?:
Every time the first trigger is pulled, a piece of the material will be loaded into an "evaporating chamber" (which is insulated). A second trigger will evaporate all the material in the chamber, and the third will fire. This also allows the user to "abort" a really big shot by ejecting the material before it's evaporated.
The reason I imagine it'd be used over conventional guns is that the lethality is adjustable: It could kill an elephant or stun a mouse.
edited 22nd Mar '11 12:04:25 PM by RTaco

Howdy all. I'm trying to make my sci-fi setting as hard as it can be while still retaining all its key elements, and I can't think of many better ways to do it than by brining it before you guys.
Go ahead and lemme know just how much I'm flubbing science here, and what are some more plausible ways to do these things.
Pulsor Rifle - A form of projectile weapon developed by the piranchi. An electric current is sent through a block of ultra-dense watenium, which evaporates into highly pressurised gas. This wave is released through a valve that forces it out in one direction, creating a "bullet" of air. The valve can be adjusted to create wider or more focused blasts, enabling it to be used on a wide variety of targets. A fist-sized block of watenium can provide enough gas to fire continuously for nearly 18 hours.
Querci Drive - Named for its inventor (piranchi scientist Querci Chieras), the Querci drive is a propulsion device capable instantaneous movement over vast distances. The drive opens "holes" in spacetime, through which a vessel may travel. The hole's destination is not determined by the user, but appears to be pre-set and fixed (holes connected to space outside the Milky Way have yet to be found). After several decades of experimentation, a large number of holes were mapped, and the device revolutionized space travel. Trading between planets was far easier and became highly popular, and the number of sapient races being discovered grew exponentially. When a hole was opened to the previously unknown Almar Empire, a long war followed. Though the piranchi were victorious, their loses were enormous and it became clear that holes should no longer be opened without careful regulation.
Envirosuit - A set of apparel designed for manned exploration of intolerable environments, or environments that are simply unknown. The suit protects from ionizing, miscrowave, and thermal radiation. The pressure and temperature are designed to mimic those of the wearer's homeworld (the suits are available in piranchi, lakua, human, varpask, and korfan shapes/sizes). The suits are equipped with ogygen generators which manufacture breathable air from carbon dioxide, provided the device has power remaining. The exterior of the suit is made from a material that hardens in response to swift impacts (such as bullets) but otherwise remains highly flexible.
Intergalactic Communicaton Network - Information is sent from one area of space to another via satellite signals. Specific relays have been arranged to travel back and forth frequently between holes, allowing information to quickly travel to areas that would otherwise not recieve it for years or even centuries.
edited 21st Mar '11 11:35:54 AM by RTaco