Destructionator Domain

In this setting, there are three things that are clearly magic: the shields, the FTL, and the literal magic system (which isn't mentioned much, if at all in the blog).

Even in my magic technology, it is always my goal to keep to the laws of physics as much as possible. The actual mechanisms are not defined, since they are in fact impossible (that is the 'magic' part), but the results should be.

Let's have some examples. Which is worse to introduce into the universe to me: being able to magically freeze something and get a warm gadget, or being able to magically set something on fire?

If you said the first option is worse, you are thinking like I am. Here's why.

The first one seems reasonable at first glance: it is just moving energy around. The gadget warming up shows that the energy is still being conserved. But when you think about that a little more, a problem shows up: it is moving heat from something with a colder temperature to something with a warmer one. If this is done without paying additional energy from another concentrated source, this is contrary to the second law of thermodynamics: it is undoing entropy in the universe. The mechanism is a mystery and the result is impossible.

The second one is simply paying some activation energy to start a chemical reaction. This energy could come from just about anywhere; it doesn't require much. The result is no more fantastic than something anyone can do with a flint; just the mechanism is mysterious.

In both cases, comprehensively working out the side effects of this new ability will take work. But in the second one, the side effects would be little more than what happened when flint was discovered. In the first one, in addition to the magic refrigerator effect, it is erasing one of the foundations of our understanding of the universe! The ripples of that would be much harder to predict.

Let's take another example: the energy shields from my universe. What these are doing is accepting energy, then spreading it out over their surface and reradiating it into space.

The same thing happens when you connect a piece of metal to a heat source. The heat comes in at one point, is conducted through the material, and then eventually dissipates.

It is taking concentrated energy and spreading it out, just like what the second law of thermodynamics says would happen. The mechanism is a complete mystery, but the result breaks no law. This leaves me with only trying to work out the consequences of what this new mechanism can allow, but I don't need to investigate the ripples of a changed fundamental universe.

My FTL is pure magic. The mechanism is an impossible mystery and the result can create an impossible paradox. But there are times in fiction that you need to wave your hands for the sake of the plot. Doing this too often though just looks silly.

Now, in general, even if you adhere to physics except for a magic mechanism, I think it is a good idea to keep the amount of magic to a minimum. The reason is pretty simple: each piece of magic you add makes it harder and harder to keep the consequences worked out.

I just wanted to ramble a bit there.

Quick link only today: Sikon over on SDN has posted several very interesting essays in the last few days, and this one is one I like since I have debated it a couple months ago.

He explains how FTL concepts coming from real scientists are still just as outrageous and impossible as pure magic FTL, and why they are looked at anyway.

He also goes on to discuss hard sci fi ideas with no FTL at all, complete with some awesome looking artwork. Take a look:

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?p=2438568#2438568

The important thing I think to note is FTL is not possible at all, so if you want it in your stories, do what I always advise: just make something up that fits the plot you want to tell and handwave the rest of it.

Hello and welcome back. First off, I would like to apologize for going so long without saying anything. I have been busy with a lot of other things in the last weeks, and since each of these significant posts takes me some time to research and write, I simply haven't had the time to commit to them. Tonight, I have some time to spare, but it has been a while, and I pretty much forgot what I wanted to talk about when I closed my last long post back in February, so this is probably going to be a little disjointed. I can also make no promises about when I will return to post again after this; I'll try to get back into it at least once a week, but if I have stuff to do, I'm afraid the blog is just not a high priority.

Moving on, Winchell Chung has added a new section to Atomic Rockets discussing Future measurement, and that has prompted me to write a little about the measurement system in my own universe. I am going to talk about time in this post, and hopefully, work out other thing at a later time. Time is important since there is a good practical reason to work out something, whereas changing the other units of measure would pretty much be just for appearances. (Though an interchange unit with aliens would be good, but Winch discusses this on Atomic Rockets, so I won't rehash it here.)

In a sci-fi civilization, measuring the time of day and the time of year may be a difficult task. On Earth, we have time zones to account for time of day, but for the actual length of the day, and the length and time of year, it is the same for everyone. However, in a sci-fi civilization, people may be living in space or on other planets, where this is not the case. Relativistic time dilations might also make a difference, but this difference is probably going to be negligible on the scale of a human lifetime, unless your starships have magic to go to that kind of speed, or if your FTL also equals time travel. Since it is probably negligible though, I am not going to talk further about it here.

I would think that at any point in the civilization, there will be at least two time measures: local time and some form of centralized time. Like with our time zones, local time is dependant on where you are, and central time is the local time at a specific location. This specific location may be anywhere; perhaps a place which is convenient for spacers (a well traveled spaceport), perhaps the time at the nation's capital. It should be something everyone agrees on, however, so it is useful for coordination.

An interesting case would be those of space stations or ships. In space, there is no local time like there is on Earth, to the stations and ships can set their clocks to any time they want. I would imagine this would be one of four things: local time as the departure point, local time at the destination, local time at the ship's home port (or space station's parent country or control center), or standardized to central time. The latter seems best to me for space stations or orbital habitats; this makes coordination very easy. When traveling, there is no need to worry about crossing a time zone.

A space economy might also benefit from everyone going to bed at the same time. A company in station X serving all the space stations in the local orbital area wouldn't need to stay open 24 hours a day to serve customers who are just waking up as you are going to bed from the other side of the world.

There is also the problem of being on different planets. If there are two worlds with different periods of rotation, simple time zones will not be enough. For example, if planet X has a day that is 23 hours long, it will complete an additional day compared to Earth every few weeks! So central time can't just be an adjustment for hours, it must also be a separate calendar, with day and year lengths adjusted to the capital (or whatever) as well. Again, this isn't much of a problem for space stations; they can control the lengths of their day, and the time of the year is relevant only to astrogators (since seasons are also dialed up at will). Space navigators will probably be using orbital positions for their plotting instead of regular time anyway, since it is more precise and works for more places in the solar system.

It would get confusing when talking about local days vs central days vs local days on planet Y and so on. I propose a different set of words when referring to central days, and when talking about local time, if it is to other people close to you, nothing special is needed, but if talking to someone in another place in the solar system, your planet and time zone must also be included, however, I think sticking to central time when talking to another planet is easier. Let your computers do the automatic conversions back and forth from central time and local time for display.

The choice of words for central time is up to you. You might still call them days, years and hours. You might call them central days like I have been here. I personally like taking the words from the classic Battlestar Galactica and putting meaning to them: a yahron, no matter where you are in the empire, always means one year at the capital. A secton is one day at the capital, and from there, you can make up the rest.

You could also ditch the idea of central time being local time entirely. Maybe central time is metric time based on the number of seconds since event X (or something else you like), and local time is always years based on your current planet. Metric time isn't pretty for a calendar though, but you still might be able to make it work. You could have stardate XXXX.X, where the X is the number of kiloseconds since the epoch. This stardate would be several digits soon - if the epoch is Jan 1, 1970, and one year is about 32,000 kiloseconds, then Jan 1, 2000 would be stardate 960,000.0! (As a computer programmer, I can't look at 32,000 without thinking of 32768, which is 2^16 / 2, which is seen in hexadecimal as 8000, and much more easier to work with once you get used to it, but even hex would get unwieldy quickly. Nevertheless, using hexadecimal as the number system in sci-fi would be somewhat cool, although you would have to explain why people with 10 fingers aren't using the intuitive base 10...).

A potential solution to the long stardate problem is being able to leave off several digits from the front when speaking. As a comparison, when saying the date, do you always specify the year out loud? Of course, when storing time, it would all have to be saved, but that could be done automatically by the computer. Another solution is use megaseconds instead of kiloseconds, but that lacks precision when talking day to day. A kilosecond is about 20 minutes, but a megasecond is closer to 2 weeks!

Nevertheless, I don't think metric time is very nice to work with, so I would prefer to stick to a central time based on regular time and date at the capital. Again, the awesome thing is space stations can be adjusted to be equal to central time, which is still quite easy to work with, and that is the solution I like the best.

Well, that is all I have for tonight. As I said, I will try to post again by this time next week, but I can make no guarantees. Until next time, thanks for reading.

A quickie today; I haven't been posting much since I have been busy with other things, but this is something fun to read on your own.

On SDN, Sikon posted a link to the website of John G. Cramer, a professor in the Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle.

I have just now started reading it, but it is very interesting and applicable to some science fiction talk. Here it is:

http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/av_index.html

This is just a quick post I am cross posting from a forum where I was discussing the specifics of my universe's FTL drive. It follows from the energy problem I discussed in my previous blog post about gravitation potential energy. Since my audience over there is different, I wrote in a different tone, and more specific to my universe, but I think the points should be applicable to anyone writing hard sci-fi, so I am posting it here too. Here it is:

The travel times imposed by the energy issue is significant, and I don't want to be tied to that the whole time.

I could say the FTL system can get energy from somewhere else, but still, the energy must be available, and huge amounts of energy, from anywhere, is still a problem as to unintended consequences. It is not possible to get around this directly while still using an arbitrary start / end point drive, even with any amount of handwavium, without sacrificing self-consitancy.

So the other thing I might have in mind is something like the Alderson points, created by Jerry Pournelle and Dan Alderson, and used by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in the MOTE series (just like the Langston field, which bears resemblance to my shield and now shares a name)

I've said before that the FTL drive works because of the strange properties of a magical "warp field" that can be manipulated by warp coils. Other than that, the warp field doesn't do anything in the real universe. (anything perceptible, at least, though I might later tie it into my shields so both the handwaviums go back to the same source; I'll have to think hard before doing that though, since there will surely be unintended consequences and maybe broken tech abound if I actually work out a unified theory instead of leaving it at magic effects only. I don't think that would work)

Consider though, if there was some kind of warp field change with stars. Something like if you get in closer to one, there can be warp wormholes that will jump you to a point with equal gravitational potential around another star (which is a variation on one of the mechanisms I proposed a few months ago for the FTL system, but decided against, since it was too powerful - but putting in arbitrary points can solve that power problem).

Of course, your momentum is conserved, and so is your energy still, so you will still need a space drive to establish orbit around the new star.

The problem with points is:
1) Where will they be?
2) Why are they there and not somewhere else?
3) Are there more than one? Do they lead to the same star or different stars?
4) Why does it point to this one star instead of another one anyway?
5) How would they find them in-universe? Hell, how would they even know to look for them?
6) Do they orbit the star? If so, why? If not, why not? What kind of orbit does it have? Why?
7) Do they move through space with the star? Why or why not?
8) Does the star's relative motion with the destination change how it works?
9) How big are they? Why are they this big and not some other size?
10) How do you use them?
11) How often can you use them? Why does this limitation exist, if it does?

Then, of course, the secondary effects of their presence on military plans, transportation, etc. If they go through to many stars to the destination (like the Alderson Points), how does this change things - location of interstellar bases and colonies, etc? And I need to work their discovery and use into the master timeline while still making sense with everything, and they should probably be discovered early, since they are pretty needed for regular back and forth transit - the delta-v is bad enough without the obscene gravity cost. And I need to work out how having them or not having them changes interstellar ship design.

And that is that. I will return to post what I worked out for my universe once it has been worked out.