{"id":8293,"date":"2013-04-06T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2013-04-06T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=8293"},"modified":"2013-04-06T14:27:59","modified_gmt":"2013-04-06T20:27:59","slug":"f-is-for-faster-than-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/f-is-for-faster-than-light\/","title":{"rendered":"F is for Faster Than Light"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/falcon_startrails.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-8294\" alt=\"falcon_startrails\" src=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/falcon_startrails.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/falcon_startrails.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/falcon_startrails-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a>Remember that moment in Star Wars when the <em>Millennium Falcon<\/em> went into hyperspace?&nbsp; When Harrison Ford shouted &#8220;go strap yourselves in, I&#8217;m going to make the jump to light speed,&#8221; and the sky lit up as the stars streaked by?&nbsp; That was my first introduction to <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/FasterThanLightTravel\" target=\"_blank\">faster-than-light (FTL) travel<\/a>, and I haven&#8217;t looked back since.<\/p>\n<p>FTL is a major recurring trope in space opera, and not just <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/RuleOfCool\" target=\"_blank\">because of how cool it is<\/a>.&nbsp; If you&#8217;re going to have a galactic empire, you need some way to get around that empire&#8211;or at least some way to transmit information without too much difficulty.&nbsp; The distance between star systems is measured not in miles or kilometers, but <em>light years<\/em>&#8211;that is, the distance that a particle of light can travel <em>in one year<\/em>.&nbsp; Considering how the nearest star to Earth, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Proxima_Centauri\" target=\"_blank\">Proxima Centauri<\/a>, is ~4.24 ly away, you can see the need for some sort of magical technology to bridge the distance.<\/p>\n<p>FTL travel comes in four basic flavors:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Warp Drives &#8212; <\/strong>The ship breaks the speed of light as easily as our modern fighter jets break the speed of sound.&nbsp; Impossible to justify, <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/HandWave\" target=\"_blank\">except through hand-waving<\/a>.&nbsp; The most prominent example of this is Star Trek.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Jump Drives &#8212; <\/strong>The ship disappears from its current position and <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/TeleportersAndTransporters\" target=\"_blank\">reappears somewhere else<\/a>.&nbsp; Also requires hand-waving, but is at least a little easier to justify.&nbsp; Battlestar Galactica is a good example of this, as is Schlock Mercenary.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Hyperspace Drives &#8212; <\/strong>The ship <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/SubspaceOrHyperspace\" target=\"_blank\">enters an alternate dimension<\/a> which allows it to travel faster through our own.&nbsp; The alternate dimension is called ____space, usually &#8220;hyper&#8221; but also &#8220;quasi,&#8221; &#8220;x,&#8221; etc.&nbsp; Star Wars is the classic example, though Star Control II took things a step further by having a hyperspace dimension <em>within<\/em> hyperspace.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Wormgate Network &#8212; <\/strong>The ship (or maybe just the passengers) <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/PortalNetwork\" target=\"_blank\">enters a portal<\/a> which transports it to a portal somewhere else.&nbsp; A network of these portals allows travel throughout the galaxy.&nbsp; Stargate and Babylon 5 use this method.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>An alternate way to do it is to make FTL travel impossible, but hold the galactic empire together through FTL communication.&nbsp; This technology, known as <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/SubspaceAnsible\" target=\"_blank\">the ansible<\/a>, features prominently in Ursula K. Le Guin&#8217;s books and the <em>Ender&#8217;s Game<\/em> universe.&nbsp; It has some <em>really<\/em> interesting implications: for example, even though planets can communicate instantaneously with each other, it takes almost 40 or 50 years to go from one to another, but at near-light speeds, it feels as if only a few months have gone by.&nbsp; Thus, if you&#8217;re going to travel to another world, you have to leave everything behind, including your family and loved ones.&nbsp; By traveling from world to world, you can skip entire generations, spreading your natural lifespan across thousands of years of normal time.<\/p>\n<p>In writing FTL, one thing you have to be really careful about is to keep in mind ways in which the system can be abused.&nbsp; For example, if jump drive technology makes it possible to instantaneously transport anything anywhere in the universe, then you can bet that someone is going to send a bomb into the White House (or whatever the equivalent is in your fictional universe).&nbsp; Thus, the invention of unrestricted jump drive technology will lead to a very short and brutal war.<\/p>\n<p>This actually happened in Schlock Mercenary, and the solution was Terraport Area Denial (TAD) zones, or broad areas of space where a force field prevents anyone from either jumping in or out.&nbsp; Thus, anyone who wants to visit a planet in a TAD zone has to jump to the edge of the field and travel the rest of the way at sublight speeds.<\/p>\n<p>FTL isn&#8217;t always appropriate for a science fiction story.&nbsp; If the story is supposed to lean more toward hard sf, then it&#8217;s probably better to stick with our current understanding of the rules of physics, which state that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.&nbsp; Still, with things like <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Quantum_entanglement\" target=\"_blank\">quantum entanglement<\/a> and other recent discoveries, if you know the science well enough, even the speed of light might not be an upper limit.&nbsp; But for the rest of us mortals, FTL is basically just magic&#8211;a <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/SufficientlyAnalyzedMagic\" target=\"_blank\">sufficiently explained magic<\/a>, perhaps, but magic nonetheless.<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I&#8217;m a fan of the jump drive form of FTL.&nbsp; That&#8217;s the one I use the most in my own books.&nbsp; The cost is that the further distance you try to jump, the harder it is to pinpoint exactly where you&#8217;ll end up.&nbsp; To overcome this, you can use jump beacons to draw out anyone trying to jump into your particular sector and have them exit jumpspace next to the beacon.&nbsp; This comes in handy in combat, when the enemy tries to jump a nuke onto your ship.<\/p>\n<p>In the later Gaia Nova books, FTL is facilitated by jump stations spread out in a line across space, with reactors powerful enough to jump ships rapidly to the next point along the line.&nbsp; In the earlier <strong>Star Wanderers<\/strong> books, that technology hasn&#8217;t been invented yet, so there&#8217;s still an Outworld frontier.<\/p>\n<p>It gets kind of complicated, but it&#8217;s lots and lots of fun to world build.&nbsp; For example, how does a particular change in the FTL tech alter the galactic balance of power?&nbsp; When settlers try to colonize a new system, what do they establish first&#8211;starlanes, jump beacons, Lagrange outposts, or what? As with any magic, changing one thing affects everything else, which also affects everything else, which &#8230; yeah, you get the picture.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><center><a href=\"http:\/\/www.a-to-zchallenge.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/i1139.photobucket.com\/albums\/n547\/Jeremy-iZombie\/A%20TO%20Z%202013\/A2Z-2013-BANNER-900_zps1a85732a.jpg\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/center><!-- start LinkyTools script --><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"http:\/\/www.linkytools.com\/basic_linky_include.aspx?id=181381\"><\/script><!-- end LinkyTools script --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember that moment in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon went into hyperspace?&nbsp; When Harrison Ford shouted &#8220;go strap yourselves in, I&#8217;m going to make the jump to light speed,&#8221; and the sky lit up as the stars streaked by?&nbsp; That was my first introduction to faster-than-light (FTL) travel, and I haven&#8217;t looked back since.&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/f-is-for-faster-than-light\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">F is for Faster Than Light<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"F is for Faster Than Light #atozchallenge http:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-29L","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[857],"tags":[806,76,1007,165,331,184,565,626,72],"class_list":["post-8293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sw","tag-blogging-a-to-z-challenge-2013","tag-ftl-technology","tag-gaia-nova","tag-magic","tag-magic-systems","tag-space-opera","tag-tropes-and-cliches","tag-tvtropes","tag-worldbuilding","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-29L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8293"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8348,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8293\/revisions\/8348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}