Interstellar Travel, but no Interstellar Communication?

A good place to breed eldritch abominations.

I was thinking of having them exit their hyperspace jump a bit too early and end up stranded, but they could in theory reactivate hyperspace - since all the equipment required to do so is right there on board the ship - and continue on the same course they were on before. But then of course there is always a risk of the equipment itself getting massively damaged, which would provide much narrative tension. Not to mention that they'd need time to get it fired up again.

The obvious safety risks present here would of course be another worldbuilding point; besides being enough to scare much of the populace into not wanting to leave their system (which helps the government control traffic even better), personnel who serve aboard hyperspace-capable vessels are advised to 'not have a faint heart' and must always be prepared for the possibility of being stranded in deep space with little-to-no possibility of help; when one of their ships is lost in hyperspace, the government tends to shrug their shoulders and pretend the ship never existed, since they think it's far more cost-effective to just replace it than it is to send in yet more ships on a rescue mission to some unspecified point in the galaxy.

I'm imagining it being similar to the situation with real-life aircraft, in that accidents are very rare, but when they do happen they tend to be disastrous, except taken Up To Eleven. Ergo, to serve aboard a hyperspace vessel you have to be at least a little jaded, brave, stupid or just desperate for a paycheck (it at least pays much better than interplanetary vessels to mitigate the safety risks somewhat), which would play into their characterisation.

edited 9th Jan '18 4:08:33 PM by PresidentStalkeyes

If hyperspace works as discrete lanes that all ships have to pass through, what are the chances of encountering another ship on the way? Since all the traffic is passing through a single area I'd have to imagine there would be pirates and picket ships and various kinds of commercial traffic along the way, if the setting allows for that. If they're stranded along the hyperspace lane would it be possible for them to signal a passing ship or something?

Well, as mentioned previously, hyperspace-capable ships are actually quite rare since they're so expensive to run. Commercial traffic along hyperspace routes is therefore kept to a minimum, mostly restricted to wealthy Mega Corps, and a band of pirates getting their hands on one would be the equivalent of a band of present-day gangland drug dealers acquiring a nuclear submarine. Even if they did, the sorts of people that can afford to send ships through hyperspace tend to have military forces backing them up - the government is very closely allied with big business. This isn't to say piracy doesn't exist, it's just most pirates tend to focus on much safer targets, such as local interplanetary shipping - which often turns out more profitable for them in the long term.

Having said that, it is possible that anyone stranded on a hyperspace route could signal a passing ship, it'd just take a long time; first, they'd have to continuously broadcast until someone passed by, and then the passing ship that got the signal couldn't just stop; they'd have to get to their destination, and then figure out where exactly along their route they got their distress signal, and then send a rescue party back to that point (if they decide to do so), all of which would probably take a few days at least, since hyperspace travel still isn't instantaneous.

And all of this is thrown out the window if they wind up straying too far from the route for some reason; for example, if their propulsion systems fail and they naturally drift off-course.

edited 9th Jan '18 6:20:10 PM by PresidentStalkeyes

Piracy was just one example, I'm just thinking that if an interstellar civilization's worth of traffic is squeezed down into a few routes they'd get pretty crowded. Well, crowded in a relative sense at least, given how big space is. If there was only one path cargo ships could take across the Pacific the chances of running into another ship would be pretty high.

Even with the government limiting interstellar traffic, I'd imagine there would still be a significant volume of "approved" commercial traffic moving through these lanes.

That's probably true, but there'd still be the aforementioned time issue when it comes to catching the attention of passing ships and waiting for them to come and pick you up - or if it's worth coming to pick you up, which will typically depend on what you're carrying rather than anything silly like valuing human life. :V

Of course, there'd be exceptions, but the margin for error is slim; the worst possible thing to happen besides drifting off-course would be to jump in the wrong direction once you reached the hyperspace lane; which is very unlikely since you'd have the coordinates drilled into you several hundred times by the time you got to helm a hyperspace-capable ship and the on-board computers would throw all manner of 'are you absolutely sure?' messages at you, but accidents do happen. Or 'accidents', if necessary. Or just plain ol' negligence. :V

I'm thinking the risk of getting stranded in deep space if something goes horribly wrong isn't the only reason why serving on a hyperspace vessel is considered dangerous; going through hyperspace I would imagine has some adverse physical effects on those not prepared for it, akin to seasickness. Or worse.

edited 9th Jan '18 7:45:34 PM by PresidentStalkeyes

This reminds me a bit of the old Jerry Pournelle story He Fell Into a Dark Hole, about a series of ships that disappear due to the previously unknown presence of a black hole too near to the hyperspace route.

The situation is basically a replay of the Age Of Fighting Sail, when warships would cruise around the world annexing new lands and projecting military might, but it took years for word of their exploits to get back to their government.

I touch upon this topic in an ongoing story of mine.

There, FTL exists as artificial wormholes tunneling through hyperspace, but is limited. At the beginning of the story, taking place in the mid-21st century, travel speed is slightly less than a parsec per day, which makes trips take weeks. This form of travel is also restricted to spacegates. It is possible to go faster and without gates and the local Precursors did so, but the faster the ship tries to go, the exponentially more complex the nav calculations become until even a high-level AI can only guess where the ship is going to come back into realspace. Could be within several thousand kilometers, could be within several dozen lightyears.

What makes this belong in the thread is that in this story, ships in the middle of an FTL jump experience full-spectrum EM whiteout. Laser comms work only within visual range, everything else relying on EM is completely blind, gravimetric sensors that detect relativistic spatial warping caused by the presence of mass suffer Explosive Instrumentation. Thus there is absolutely no way to use hyperspace for FTL comms because any EM-based signal transmitted into them is immediately drowned out by white noise. The only way to get any kind of information across interstellar distances is courier ships - which, due to travel times being measured in weeks, are an absolutely dreaded assignment by soldiers and civilians alike.

They do eventually switch to automated messenger drones by the early 22nd century, but that's it. It's implied at one point that 40th century humanity has some kind of Sufficiently Advanced FTL comm method, but it's not stated nor described and it's Lost Technology by the early 11th millennium (at least, a derelict ship contemporary with the Sufficiently Advanced era doesn't have any).

I'd imagine that the occasional ship pops out of hyperspace directly in the gravity well of a black hole or something equally catastrophic, since all jumps are essentially blind. That's a pretty good reason to be cautious.

Fundamentally, you're still using the same trope set: FTL travel without FTL comms, because naked EM radiation can't travel coherently through hyperspace. This inevitably raises certain physics questions, since matter is literally held together by electromagnetism, but for story purposes it serves well enough.

edited 15th Jan '18 7:22:06 AM by Fighteer

Actually, the spacegates I mentioned have problems operating in gravity wells. Namely, a gate can catch an incoming wormhole passing through its general vicinity, but if the gate is too deep in a planet's gravity well, the space-curving nature of gravity as stated by relativity tugs on the wormhole, causing it to either miss the gate entirely and end up sligshotted out into the interstellar void with no hope of rescue, or worse: drop back into realspace inside the planet.

First-generation gates can make use of an L1 Lagrange point between a planet and a single fairly large moon like the Earth-Moon setup, but any additional satellites make gravimetric forces too chaotic to safely use, hence why most of these gates were restricted to highly eccentric circumsolar orbits avoiding the ecliptic as much as possible, adding weeks and months of additional travel time and hours of transmission lag between a courier ship arriving and delivering the data it brought. It was only in the late 21st century that gates with improved gravimetric tolerances were developed, allowing them to operate at planet-star Lagrange points and do so with a high enough precision to target gates in the same star system for near-trivial interplanetary travel.

Additionally, the verse has access to some fairly compact teleportation technology working on similar principles as the gates, but has a severe range limitation. Point A to point B on the same planet is safe enough to use as public transport, but longer distances douse the cargo in exotic hard radiation. Lunar orbit is about the maximum safe distance for humans; attempting interstellar (which is how the gates are deployed) not only requires a colossal amount of energy (the gate fabrication facility orbits the Sun well within Mercury's orbit and requires nearly a full year's worth of solar power to deploy ONE gate), but kills living tissue pretty much instantly (thus gates are sent out under AI control, position themselves at the system's zenith automatically once arrived and send a message pod back to Sol to signal that it's operational and ready to receive crews).

So basically the machine that lets you travel fast is something you carry, rather then a stargate.

In that case you would want to load information in bulk and upload it to the receiving system. A company might buy rights to the current state of an entire website, that's primarily hosted in another system, and update it once a month, based on what's popular or what they want people to see. Custom orders could also be big with companies shipping out a copy of your search ai to find everything it thinks you'll want, and then bring all of that back, followed by you giving your ai feed back. Economy of scale might even keep the cost relatively low.

Government certainly would have their own prioritized information shipping. Maybe once a week vs once a month. With information being sent with diplomats (ai or otherwise) that can help explain it, and cover for misunderstandings that can't wait +2 weeks.