Nope, they increased it. Think of it this way:
Currently, the speed of light is 3x10[sup]8[/sup] m/s, so we can never go that fast. If it was lowered, our speed limit would be even lower. But let’s say we increase the speed of light to 3x10[sup]100[/sup] m/s, now we can have ships go 3x10[sup]90[/sup] m/s in real space, for example, and not be breaknig that pesky speed limit.
What are the odds for making a safe jump VS going insane?
I didn’t realise the Gap series was sci-fi, someone else recommended it to me but I thought it was a fantasy series and didn’t bother, might check it out now.
bouv explained the Brin idea right (sorry, can’t recall the name of the story).
I not sure I understand Wearia’s explanation. The way I recall the story, his survival didn’t have anything to do with a suit, in fact the ship got so hot he stripped down and was sweaty the whole journey through hyperspace.
Most jump points are located near or beyond the outer planets of a star system. It typically takes several months to travel between the jump point and the inner part of the system, as most of the time the ships have to use sublight fusion drives.
It’s not there’s a chance of going insane after a jump; it’s that a certain amount of humans have an undetectable flaw in their brain that is triggered by FTL travel.
And yes, it’s Science Fiction; in fact, it probably could be defined as “hard” science fiction, at least in the sense that the writer seems to understand how acceleration works, and that his technology is reasonably based on known science (plus, no artificial gravity!). It also has some of the best space combat I’ve ever read. There are some mythological allusions - it’s vaguely based on the Niebelungenlied - but you can ignore them if you want.
Traveller 2300AD has the cool idea of Stutterwarp.
But where’s the fun in going one ten-thousand-millionth of the speed of light? :dubious:
Whats the % of humans that are vulnerable to this flaw though? Is it ever stated?
And I think I will check the series out now.
I can’t recall where this is from, but I once read a book with a FTL system called the Skip Drive. Basically, when you travelled, you didn’t have to pass through all the intermediate points. You appeared in some, and skipped others. However, since you were skipping points, there was the side effect that you would pass outside of the universe you’re in and move into others that were close to your own–almost the same but not quite. At the end of the book, our heroes were trapped in orbit around an earth that wouldn’t let them land to refuel–they built up their skip factor without travelling to find one that would let them land.
Another side effect was a lot of static, so most skip pilots cut their hair short.
Another one was in the book Nemisis (I forget the author). At the beginning of the book FTL travel was possible, but a ship couldn’t travel through space at FTL speeds indefinately–they had to pop back into normal space at certain periods. The faster one went through hyperspace, the shorter the period one could stay there and the longer you had to stay at STL speeds before the next jump. The effect was that while FTL travel was indeed possible, in reality one could only travel at about the speed of light, and no faster, when talking in terms of a complete journey. A trip of 4 light years took about 4 years.
Later a true FTL drive is invented, where travel at FTL speeds can be sustained. However they find that gravity starts affecting them in reverse at those speeds. Any stars they pass nearby will push them off course with their gravitational force, and the faster they travel the stronger the push. So they need to plan their trips around those forces to actually move in a straight line.
Didn’t Clifford Simak write a story about a hotel in which the various rooms were actually on different planets (with a commensurate interesting variety of views)?
Similarly, the previously-mentioned Hyperion by Dan Simmons has a wealthy character with a house where every room is on a different planet. One bathroom was a raft on an ocean, IIRC.
In the aforementioned Hyperion/Endymion saga, extremely wealthy people coule afford to have a house like that. Instead of doors between rooms, they had Farcaster portals.
Asimov used this version of jump drive (in which the main limiting factor is the amount of calculation needed to pop out of hyperspace in the right place) in a number of his stories. In one short-short piece
[SPOILER]a criminal has his ship set up with an unusually powerful computer navigational database, so he can make a quick “random jump” to escape the authorities and then have the computer figure out where he is and plot a course to his intended destination. After the random jump, he waits for the computer to do its thing… and realizes that he’s been waiting longer than it should have taken. It turns out that he’s emerged into normal space near a recent nova – not close enough to be in physical danger, but close enough that this star, which doesn’t match the database, will be the computer’s primary reference point.
Too bad he killed the partner who did the computer work, and too bad he didn’t keep the knife…[/SPOILER]
I think Smith’s best FTL travel is via the planoform drive - the ship goes two-dimensional and can’t exist in a 3D universe, so it skips across light-years at a time. Of course, the go-captain has to be insane to work the ship… Read The Game of Rat and Dragon for an account of a typical trip.
Bob Shaw has another wormhole variant in his novel Nightwalk. You can jump from anywhere, and will come out the same place consistently if you start at the same place, but you can’t predict where a new spot will take you. (The best image in the book has nothing to do with FTL, or even space. The hero has been blinded, and has glasses that give him whatever the nearest living thing is seeing. And there he is walking along a seaside cliff, watching himself through the eyes of the seagulls as they swoop and dive all around him.)
need to be at the same