On 10/15/09 4:42 PM, Jon Lang wrote:
Bret Indrelee wrote:
My first thought is this means the drives will interfere with each other.
Similar to the jet wake from a modern air plane, the drive would create a
gravity wave which interferes with other nearby drive systems. You would
need clear flight lanes in order to operate the drives, and want to define
what happens in the presence of 'bad gravity'. Defining the failure mode
will do a lot to define the setting.
Right. Failure could potentially range from "the bubble dissipates,
and you lose the pseudo-velocity that it was providing" all the way up
to "the bubble collapses catastrophically, atomizing your ship in the
equivalent of a nuclear explosion". I like having the latter option
in play when large amounts of pseudo-velocity have been built up;
doing so means that you can't just accelerate all the way to your
destination and then turn off the drive, and it also means that
attempts to use this drive to throw rocks at a planet would more
likely result in high-orbit explosions of said rocks: still nasty, but
less likely to be planet-killers.
That said, warp bubbles probably don't produce tidal effects the way
that mass does; so the way in which warp bubbles interact with each
other doesn't necessarily correspond to the way in which they interact
with gravity wells.
The second thought is missiles are now just gravity drives set to
over-thrust such that they create these disturbances. Fire off a salvo of
Grav Missiles to interrupt the opposing ship's drives. The other ship
presumably must out maneuver the disturbance or become disabled and ready to
be boarded. You might be able to fudge it such that boarding actions between
ships becomes practical.
The "explosive at high pseudo-velocities" business would tend to
interfere with the boarding actions bit, which is a shame. Maybe warp
bubbles that share the same pseudo-velocity tend to merge and split
readily. That is, it's the relative pseudo-velocity that matters in
determining how destructive a collision between two bubbles is, and if
the relative pseudovelocity is close enough to zero, the respective
drives may be able to maintain their bubbles' integrities when they
collide.
I think you need a way to detect Grav at FTL speeds in order to be able to
operate at those speeds. This works well with the idea of Grav Missiles, now
your detection system is Nav and Tracking.
Perhaps. What would be the effects of "flying blind" when
superluminal (and badly blue-shifted when borderline subluminal)?
I don't think you would be flying blind inside the bubble. Photons would
reach the surface of the bubble, enter the bubble space and become part
of it. They would then be detectable as normal. There would be no blue
or red shifting or time distortion because the ship isn't moving: the
space around the ship is moving.
--
Zan Lynx
[email protected]
"Knowledge is Power. Power Corrupts. Study Hard. Be Evil."
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