My complaining about Starfield's various issues was morphing into an idea for a totally different Space advanture game, so I figured it would make sense to move such musing to a separate thread, since it increasingly has very little to do with Starfield itself. Preliminary Game map:
First off, the idea for how the transversal system works, so I can hopefully get some feedback and theorizing of how it would realistically work/best way to implement. You've got two major systems, uncreatively names Mass Effect and Mass Inverter.
Mass Effect
Very simply, you adjust the Mass of the object, with momentum conserved. Since Momentum is Mass*Velocity, if you reduce Mass by 10x, speed has to increase 10x.
As an example, something in Earth orbit is moving at 30 km/s compared to the sun. If you reduced the Mass from 1,000 tons to 100 tons, its velocity increases to 300 km/s. This is a very good speed for interplanetary travel, allowing an AU to be crossed in about a week.
A good Fusion Engine should be able to manage an exhaust velocity of 3,000 km/s, about 1% speed of light. If you can then reduce mass by 90%, you boost velocity to 30,000 km/s, or 10%. And if you can decrease mass by 99%, your at the speed of light, though relativity would push that lower. This then can allow for relatively easy interstellar travel at good fractions of lightspeed.
The tech is severely limited by it getting exponentially harder to change mass at the limits, like how lightspeed works.
Basically, within +- 50% of natural mass variation is pretty easy and relatively low energy, but gets exponentially more expensive as you try to change the mass more. And, it cannot decrease the Mass of an object to zero. How much mass can be increased is a little less nailed down.
Technically, lowering Mass costs energy, while increasing mass absorbs energy. But, that might not be a major practical difference: A heater is adding heat, while a refrigerator is removing heat, but from a user/player perspective, both use electricity to cause a change of state.
There are probably many other uses of such tech.
Mass Inverter
This is the FTL system. While the Mass Effect system changes how much things mass, the mass inverter inverts how matter interacts with the universe.
First, the matter is inverted from having a physical presence, to not having one. I'm currently leaning towards "ghost matter" as the name of this state.
Second, rather than being attracted by gravity, its repelled by gravity, which is one of the few forces the ghost matter still responds to. Practically, this means the ghost ship is accelerated away from a Star, and slowed if it approaches one. Escape velocity is a good proxy for the strength of this repellant force. Each 1 km/s of escape velocity corresponds to a roughly 1x light speed travel speed.
Third, it can't exist slower than light: ghost matter which decelerates bellow lightspeed reverts back to regular matter. This means the ship much be converted to ghost matter and accelerated to at least lightspeed. I'm currently thinking of a minimal gravity field of 1 m/s^2
Examples.
Earth has a surface gravity or 9.81 m/s^2. Anything Earth and larger is unambiguously large enough to support matter inversion. Escape velocity is about 10 km/s, so a craft that inverted aground earth would be repelled at approximately 36.5 days per light year. It would need to be braked by a body with at least equivalent escape velocity.
Pluto has a surface gravity of 0.6 m/s^2. It does not have strong enough gravity to support matter inversion. Its escape velocity is 1.2 km/s. Thus, it could only break a vessel traveling just over the speed of light, and such a vessel would have to leave Pluto via STL.
A red Dwarf, the most common type of star, are dim and relatively compact. A 100k radius red dwarf would have an escape velocity of roughly 400 km/s, enough to travel FTL at less than a day per lightyear.
Suns like our own can have higher escape velocities, our sun would have a 600 km/s escape velocity on the surface. But, since stars like our are larger and hotter, getting an equivalent acceleration to a red dwarf may be more challenging.
Finally, White dwarfs are dead suns with masses roughly in line with our sun, but roughly the size of the earth. This can easily allow a 4,000x lightspeed, or about 1 LY per 2 hours.
So, what do people think of these FTL systems?
First off, the idea for how the transversal system works, so I can hopefully get some feedback and theorizing of how it would realistically work/best way to implement. You've got two major systems, uncreatively names Mass Effect and Mass Inverter.
Mass Effect
Very simply, you adjust the Mass of the object, with momentum conserved. Since Momentum is Mass*Velocity, if you reduce Mass by 10x, speed has to increase 10x.
As an example, something in Earth orbit is moving at 30 km/s compared to the sun. If you reduced the Mass from 1,000 tons to 100 tons, its velocity increases to 300 km/s. This is a very good speed for interplanetary travel, allowing an AU to be crossed in about a week.
A good Fusion Engine should be able to manage an exhaust velocity of 3,000 km/s, about 1% speed of light. If you can then reduce mass by 90%, you boost velocity to 30,000 km/s, or 10%. And if you can decrease mass by 99%, your at the speed of light, though relativity would push that lower. This then can allow for relatively easy interstellar travel at good fractions of lightspeed.
The tech is severely limited by it getting exponentially harder to change mass at the limits, like how lightspeed works.
Basically, within +- 50% of natural mass variation is pretty easy and relatively low energy, but gets exponentially more expensive as you try to change the mass more. And, it cannot decrease the Mass of an object to zero. How much mass can be increased is a little less nailed down.
Technically, lowering Mass costs energy, while increasing mass absorbs energy. But, that might not be a major practical difference: A heater is adding heat, while a refrigerator is removing heat, but from a user/player perspective, both use electricity to cause a change of state.
There are probably many other uses of such tech.
Mass Inverter
This is the FTL system. While the Mass Effect system changes how much things mass, the mass inverter inverts how matter interacts with the universe.
First, the matter is inverted from having a physical presence, to not having one. I'm currently leaning towards "ghost matter" as the name of this state.
Second, rather than being attracted by gravity, its repelled by gravity, which is one of the few forces the ghost matter still responds to. Practically, this means the ghost ship is accelerated away from a Star, and slowed if it approaches one. Escape velocity is a good proxy for the strength of this repellant force. Each 1 km/s of escape velocity corresponds to a roughly 1x light speed travel speed.
Third, it can't exist slower than light: ghost matter which decelerates bellow lightspeed reverts back to regular matter. This means the ship much be converted to ghost matter and accelerated to at least lightspeed. I'm currently thinking of a minimal gravity field of 1 m/s^2
Examples.
Earth has a surface gravity or 9.81 m/s^2. Anything Earth and larger is unambiguously large enough to support matter inversion. Escape velocity is about 10 km/s, so a craft that inverted aground earth would be repelled at approximately 36.5 days per light year. It would need to be braked by a body with at least equivalent escape velocity.
Pluto has a surface gravity of 0.6 m/s^2. It does not have strong enough gravity to support matter inversion. Its escape velocity is 1.2 km/s. Thus, it could only break a vessel traveling just over the speed of light, and such a vessel would have to leave Pluto via STL.
A red Dwarf, the most common type of star, are dim and relatively compact. A 100k radius red dwarf would have an escape velocity of roughly 400 km/s, enough to travel FTL at less than a day per lightyear.
Suns like our own can have higher escape velocities, our sun would have a 600 km/s escape velocity on the surface. But, since stars like our are larger and hotter, getting an equivalent acceleration to a red dwarf may be more challenging.
Finally, White dwarfs are dead suns with masses roughly in line with our sun, but roughly the size of the earth. This can easily allow a 4,000x lightspeed, or about 1 LY per 2 hours.
So, what do people think of these FTL systems?