Seeing that I haven't had a very go response from my more artwork based blog posts, I thought that I'd return to the world(s) of 'The Return of a Nagus' for this weeks blog post (sorry about them becoming a little irregular but an infant distraction really is distracting).
Whether you like it or whether you don't, if you are going to have science fiction whether other worlds are visited and other races encountered then you are going to have to have some form of space travel.
Now you could have it that its only just faster than light so most of the story takes place on the ship during the vogue, such as in 'Midshipman's Hope', which does have its merits as, if something goes wrong, you are a very long way from help but it does narrow down how many new worlds and new races you can meet with one lot of characters.
If you are going to have really faster than light travel then you need to put some thought behind it.
Some use an alternative reality that is theorised to lay behind our own. This is very popular as you can introduce the risks of attracting the attentions of some THING that calls the 'Warp' home. Usually these are of the demonic variety so it would be interesting to see a setting where the beings of the 'else where' are either not interested in humankind or are even angelic.
Some use Worm Holes, where time and space are folded like a piece of card and a hole punched through the desired point.
Having read 'Einstein and His Inflatable Universe' I came up with something slightly different from the usual system of Worm Holes.
Instead, I pictured the universe in the style of Einstein as a flat sheet with the gravity wells of the solar systems making depressions in said sheet. Only instead of rubber, I imagined it to be made out of the material elastine, which is what those skin tight T-shirts are made out of.
Then if you want to travel from one solar system to another, you first fly out of the gravity well using the engines that are just short of faster than light then you select one of the threads, snap it and stretch it out before reacting it to the point where you want to go. Because you have stretched the space you have also stretched the time, therefore a journey that normally only takes half an hour still only takes half an hour, its just that the end of the journey is in fact several million light years away from where it would normally be.
I have been told that it is one of the attractions of my books as it is pretty different from any thing else in science fiction. If you'd like to read it for yourself and decide, please visit the shop page. (The Hardback version maybe temporarily out of stock as I am updating the internal file as out the 24.09.2015 as someone pointed out a major blooper in the title listings.)
Of course, once you have worked out your faster than light travel you have to decide if there are any limitation on it. It could be that only the biggest ships have faster than light travel so other than the rich and powerful, everyone else is reliant on being able to pay a big company for transport.
In my book I when for the idea that 'instant' jumps are impossible, you have to have a lapse of at least half an hour. To add to the sense of historical development, I haven't specified why this is, just that the test ship "experienced severe technical difficulties". This could mean that it had a total systems collapse or that the captains head imploded, I haven't really decided and I figured that it add to the sense that the technology has a long history of development if I left it unspecified.
Once that is all nailed down, you can start dreaming, where your faster than light travel will take you. I'd say dream big, the universe is a big place, anything could be out there.
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