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Post by Alex on Sept 1, 2011 12:54:35 GMT -5
Thank you aramis. That's a very good concise explanation.
Personally I never liked the SF that spends days or weeks in transit aboard ship to go anywhere. So when I write/run games I use such a high speed that travel between nearby stars (100LY) takes around an hour, travel between typical stars (1000LY) takes around half a day, travel between distant stars (10,000LY) takes about 5 days, and crossing the galaxy (100,000LY) takes about a month and a half. Then I apply a multiplier like Star Wars so freighters and big battle wagons take longer. Then to further complicate long distance travel the ship must follow established routes (which may wind around from system to system) or risk hazards of space travel at a million times the speed of light. Finally, ships don't carry the fuel to make such a long voyage and have to "stop for gas" multiple times on the way. This way travel within an empire (or federation) doesn't detract from the time the characters may interact with others, but visiting the distant borders is an ordeal most spacefarers don't bother with...like modern transportation: I can take a puddle jumper flight from Austin to Dallas in about an hour, or reach anywhere in the 48 contiguous states in under 6 hours, but going halfway around the world to India is about a 24 hour trip with at least two intermediary stops. Nearly everyone makes the inter-city trip, lots of people make the inter-state trip, but few have the tolerance (patience or money) for the inter-continental trip. That's the hundred, thousand, and ten thousand light year equivalents. For crossing the galaxy, now you're going to the moon and it's going to take you a week and really only big governments are going to succeed.
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Post by aramis on Sept 1, 2011 21:41:33 GMT -5
You realize, Alex, your definition of "nearby stars" is about 2--4x that used in astronomy...
1 star per cubic parsec is fairly low density, so within 100 LY one can expect 120,000 systems...
Hence why I much prefer much slower than you.
I've used wf^3 for so long, it's second nature, now. But I've also used variations of it... wf^(1.5+(wf/2)) [wf 1= 1c, 2=5.6c, 3=27c, 4=128c, 5=625c, 6=3174.5c, 7=16807c] wf^max(3,2+wf/3) [1=1c, 2=8c, 3=27c, 4=97c, 5=365c, 6=1296c, 7=4592c, 8=16384c]
found them both not worth the mathematical effort.
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Post by Alex on Sept 2, 2011 15:20:05 GMT -5
What "astronomy" calls near by stars does not necessarily have any relationship to what is a nearby planet in an empire spanning 30,000+ lightyears. First there is the whole matter of scale. When the empire spans 30,000+ lightyears considering only ~10 LY "nearby" makes that category too small next to the humongous "far away" category. Second, not every star must have a planet, nor a planet with civilization on it, nor a planet large and interesting enough to travel to. Even if there are 120,000 stars within 100LY, there might only be 1-2 worthy destinations, and perhaps a dozen inhabited systems which interest nobody. I used the idea of "the nearest star is 3LY or 1PC" based on our own situation. That is approximately the distance to the Centauri trinary system, our closest stellar neighbor.
If you do like a smaller, denser federation then WF^3 is okay. Still it will be days to *any* other star, even if you pick to have a small, dense local neighborhood; and it will be weeks if you want to skip visiting all the intervening systems and go straight to the Romulan border or some other busy but frontier location.
There are other easy methods besides WF^3 you can use without getting into hard math. WF^3 will always be the winner with Trek fans because of its history, but other easy formulas exist. Here are a few covering the WF1-WF8 Constitution range: WF^3 = { 1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512 } 3^(WF-1) = { 1, 3, 9, 27, 81, 243, 729, 2187 } max(1, 100*(WF-1)) = { 1, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600 } 1=1, 10*WF^2 = { 1, 40, 90, 160, 250, 360, 490, 640 } WF! = { 1, 2, 6, 24, 120, 720, 5040, 40320 } (boy that blows up fast!)
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rflowers
Lieutenant
Beware Romulans bearing gifts!
Posts: 68
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Post by rflowers on Mar 10, 2012 15:10:03 GMT -5
Warp travel has been in the news recently. Some brainiac crunched the numbers, and saw that dropping out of warp (as understood by the proposed "realistic" method of traveling by warping space) would release many, many highly charged particles, basically destroying whatever you "stopped" in front of. www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46595994/ns/technology_and_science/#.T1uz1vWUTq0Of course, that's why you drop out of warp in the outer orbits somewhere, not right in front of the space station.
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Post by Falconer on Mar 11, 2012 1:35:39 GMT -5
Hm, very interesting. It’s not so simple, though, because then you have to consider how it can be used in combat. So, it brings up the bigger question of whether you want to incorporate modern science and modern scientific speculation into a Star Trek game, or just keep it within the bounds of what the creators imagined. This bit from the wiki is really interesting, too: It does solve the Romulan problem, but also I just really like making simple analogies that make sense of Sci-Fi in terms like “impulse and warp drive analogous to … electric and combustion engines in a modern hybrid car” for the sake of storytelling.
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Post by blackbat242 on Mar 11, 2012 3:40:18 GMT -5
Well, there is cannon mention of very early warp drives being powered by fusion (or even fission) reactors.
And that is what the impulse drive is powered by... so I can see an emergency low-warp drive being powered by the impulse reactors, while the normal high-power warp drive is dilithium-focused m/am powered (for higher speeds and greater ranges).
It would also explain the TOS "emergency separation of the saucer from the engineering hull" concept... I always wondered what they did if they had to separate outside a reasonable impulse drive range from a planet or other system... at sub-light speeds you could end up with a crew turning cannibal... or a few security types spacing most of the crew in order to stretch life support long enough for a favored few to survive until planetfall.
After all you can't guarantee that your distress call will be heard in time... what if whatever fried your warp drives also fried the sub-space radio?
Well now the saucer can make it to the nearest habitable system in a reasonable time... and with all the crew!
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Post by aramis on Mar 11, 2012 4:06:00 GMT -5
I'm not certain that Balance of Terror really implies combat at warp speeds... it pretty explicitly makes it clear the plasma torpedoes are warp capable, tho'!
The Romulan Neutral Zone map, however, pretty much means either 20 year deployments or some form of FTL...
Doomsday machine is really off-point for impulse at superluminal speeds; they don't have warp engines on either ship functioning through the bulk of the episode. If anything, it's a good argument that SVC got it wrong, not that he got it right.
Likewise, Where No Man Has Gone Before notes that bases that were days away are "now years away." It doesn't support a superluminal impulse speed.
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Post by Falconer on Mar 11, 2012 20:37:12 GMT -5
Star systems are light years away from each other, and how many systems have a base? One in a dozen? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? And WNMHGB presents the Enterprise as being way out there on the edge of the galaxy. Even at 1*c, it would take years.
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Post by blackbat242 on Mar 12, 2012 1:12:01 GMT -5
Right... at the speed of light Alpha C. is 4.37 years away.
Near the "edge" of the galaxy stars are supposed to be much further apart, so some degree of FTL would be necessary to prevent the actual situation being "bases that were days away are now unreachable within the limits of our life-spans".
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Post by aramis on Mar 12, 2012 1:33:02 GMT -5
Gentlemen, it's also worth noting that, in all cases, the warp drives got repaired without returning to dock.
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