5628 AD: What if the Jump Drive was TL 15?

[heron61]

Lets assume each passenger paid Cr400,000 for their passage. This gives you a budget of Cr15,000,000,000 to build this starship. The passengers put up the money first, elect a representative and he goes to various shipyards to contract construction of the starship. Using the rules, and tech level 12 in the year 2300 AD, what kind of starship could be built for this amount?

The 100,000 ton hull is 5 billion, since it's relativistic, armour might be good, so 2 pts of crystaliron + radiation shielding raise this to 7.625 billion Cr, the fusion plants and maneuver drives add an extra 18 billion Cr, and 40,000 low berths add in an extra 2 billion MCr, so we're looking at a total cost (since Sensors, the Bridge and suchlike are vastly less expensive) like a total of more like 28 billion Cr, which comes to 700,000 Cr per ticket + whatever cargo the ship carries, which seems unlikely to be more than 100,000 Cr/passenger. So, roughly twice your estimate gets you a fully equipped relativistic starship. If you go with 60,000 low berths, then the cost (including cargo) becomes a bit less than 600,000 Cr/passenger.

Of course, if we assume that starships have a standard design (which if we assume large-scale colonization efforts makes sense), then you cut around 70,000 Cr off the cost of each ticket.

If you drop the ship down to 4Gs, then the hull and low berth costs are unchanged, but you need 4000 tons of maneuver drives and 5000 tons of fusions plants, so 23 billion MCr for 40,000 low berths and 24 billion MCr for 60,000 low berths. So (including the 10% discount) around 518,000 Cr or around 620,000 Cr with cargo. For a 60,000 low berth ship, the cost is 360,000 Cr for the ship and around 460,000 Cr with cargo, so pretty close to your cost.

4Gs, gets you a cruising speed of 0.925 C, and 2.6 years passing on Earth for every ship year, so a 500 light year journey would take around 200 years of ship time.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

4Gs, gets you a cruising speed of 0.925 C, and 2.6 years passing on Earth for every ship year, so a 500 light year journey would take around 200 years of ship time.

But since everyone is going to be in low berths for most of the journey anyway, this doesn't really matter, what really matters is the ship is traveling just under the speed of light, for the outside world's perspective, the trip doesn't take an extra 100 years just because from their point of view the ship is traveling a little slower. From their point of view the trip takes 541 years. The faster ship takes a little less to make the journey, but not 100 years less. The ship will be operating in low power mode for 200 years instead of 100 years after it cuts off its engines for interstellar cruise. A much larger starship with fewer passengers could be a generation ship rather than a sleeper ship as this is, but the tickets for a generation ship, the interstellar equivalent to high passage would be much more expensive. You probably want to max out the fuel and go with Maneuver-6 to get as much acceleration as you possibly can in order to max out the gamma factor to reduce your ship time. In this case you are using relativity as a substitute for low berths. A rich noble that enjoys living by himself might go with this, using staged throwaway starship, he would push as hard against the speed of light as he possibly can to arrive at the target in 500 years+ within his lifetime!

 

[Reynard]

" When refueling is complete, the ship then accelerates out of he star system heading towards the next system, and this is repeated a number of times until a suitable planet for colonization is found."

I picture that scenario as colonists finally waking after centuries only to find the home world achieved TL 15 and have been colonizing worlds by way of jump drives.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

The home world would be surrounded by already colonized systems. The Colonists have 3228 years to find a homeworld before the jump drive is invented. 500 light years is a huge distance to travel, it takes 540 years to cover that distance, in that amount of time, they could travel a distance up to 3081 light years, which is almost 1000 parsecs. Traveling 1000 parsecs is kind of a big deal for the newly invented jump drive, even the ones capable of jump 6. The Jump drive is most likely to be invented near the center of inhabited space, so those colonists living on the fringe probably have a bit of time before the first Jump Drive starships start arriving in their systems News travels only as fast as the fastest starship, so they will be completely unaware of that development until the first jump drive starship arrives.

 

[Reynard]

Hmm, that could also mean a galaxy filled with colony worlds isolated from each other for centuries. Would they welcome the homeworld who would be almost alien by just cultural drift?

 

[heron61]

4Gs, gets you a cruising speed of 0.925 C, and 2.6 years passing on Earth for every ship year, so a 500 light year journey would take around 200 years of ship time.

But since everyone is going to be in low berths for most of the journey anyway, this doesn't really matter,

There's one way in which it matters - the longer ship time is, the more chances there are for maintenance problems and equipment failures.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

4Gs, gets you a cruising speed of 0.925 C, and 2.6 years passing on Earth for every ship year, so a 500 light year journey would take around 200 years of ship time.

But since everyone is going to be in low berths for most of the journey anyway, this doesn't really matter,

There's one way in which it matters - the longer ship time is, the more chances there are for maintenance problems and equipment failures.

But the starship is not doing much when it is in cruise mode. The time when something is most likely to go wrong is when the starship is accelerating or decelerating, because then the engines are working, the gravity is on and those things can break down because they are in use. The crew is not in their low berths while the ship is undergoing acceleration, although the passengers probably are. The Ship's life support after all is not designed to support all the passengers out of their low berths, there are not enough staterooms for them all! The ship is designed to support the crew and the crew stays up and about for the entire acceleration phase, which is 40 weeks, and it is that time for which they are getting paid their salaries. There job mostly is to make sure the ship remains on course and that the engines continue to operate and nothing goes wrong during the acceleration phase. When the acceleration phase is complete, then the crew climbs into the low berths, the ships systems except life support and gravity are shut down one by one, and the remaining two are put on a timer for automatic shutdown after the crew has cycled into the low berths, and then the life support and gravity are shut down as well. The ship's computer continues to operate, there are reaction control jets to make sure the ship continues on course during the journey, should the ship drift off course, then the computer can restart everything and revive the crew members in mid journey, otherwise they remain in their low berths. After 200 years, the crew is revived, all the systems are restarted, and the ship begins its deceleration for 40 weeks, the passengers remain in their low berths. When the ship arrives at the planet, the crew sets up the shelters on the surface, some food is unpacked, and they start growing food, and passengers are revived sequentially based on their importance to the colony and whether the food supply can support them. As each passenger is revived, he or she adds their labor to the food production so that more passengers can be revived, in about a year's time all the passengers are revived from their low berths. The starship while big is capable of landing, so it is on the ground and is part of the colony. What do you think of this plan?

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Hmm, that could also mean a galaxy filled with colony worlds isolated from each other for centuries. Would they welcome the homeworld who would be almost alien by just cultural drift?

That is pretty much what the OTU is anyway, except they had the help of the Ancients to get isolated. Under this scenario it occurs naturally. Probably one main difference is there are a lot more languages which evolved over 3000 years, each system is a separate society, news travels at the speed of light. Each system is poorly prepared for interstellar war, there has been very little thought about conquering other systems, because each government can only control at most one system, they could send a military force at STL, but when it gets there, it would either conquer the new system ad become its own government separate from the government which sent it, and orders from home would likely be regarded as irrelevant and out of date, the generals and admirals send over there would do what they want, the soldiers under them might or might nor rebel with no consequences, and the whole enterprise would be a waste of resources for the government which sent they, all they would be doing if successful is changing the government of a neighboring system, the new government would be just as independent as the old government was. Interstellar war just doesn't happen without FTL. With the invention of the Jump Drive, everything changes, but old habits are engrained. I think the government of the Solar Union wouldn't be prepared to conquer its neighbors immediately, it wouldn't have the capital ships necessary to accomplish the task, the military force it has is primary geared towards piracy suppression, and that means a lot of small ships. The Solar Union has plenty of fighters, it has patrol cruisers, and even mercenary cruisers for troop deployments, but it has no carriers, no dregnaughts, no battleships, and no destroyers, it has conquered its own system long ago, the main threats to it come from domestic criminal organizations and that's it!

 

[steve98052]

. . . One other difference, there were no Ancients, and thus there were no Extra Solar humans, encountered when mankind first traveled to the stars, the other races are present, the Aslan, the Vargr, the hivers etc. Chirpers exist, but they never were the Ancients. . . .

According to traditional Traveller, Vargr were uplifted and transplanted by the Ancients, so they would not exist, or would require a significantly different back-story.

One possibility: a human colony was settled by a giant space ark, complete with an assortment of Earth flora and fauna. The human colony developed uplift technology, and tried it on an assortment of Earth fauna, including wolves. The uplifted wolves rebelled against their human creators, and took over their system, which became the Vargr homeworld.

Another possibility: humans on Earth developed uplift technology, and tried it on an assortment of Earth fauna. The most successful were wolves, but they because a political nuisance, so Earth humans decided to grant them independence, subject to permanent departure via a colony ship sent a long way from Earth.

A hybrid possibility is that a human colony settled by a giant space ark developed uplift technology, and the uplifted wolves became a nuisance, and were granted independence subject to departure via colony ship from the space ark settlement.

- - -

Also according to traditional Traveller, the Ancients were a single mutant Droyne, "Grandfather", his 20 children, and 400 grandchildren. Grandfather developed the caste system for Droyne using "Coyns", and Droyne became dependent on the caste system. After the Ancients' Final War (where Grandfather destroyed or drove into hiding all of his descendants, then disappeared), those Droyne who lost access to Coyns were unable to caste, and developed as Chirpers instead. Droyne that retained access to Coyns continued (and Grandfather occasionally reappeared from hiding to revise the Coyns). There's nothing published about Droyne before the caste system, except reference that they had existed before Grandfather.

So, without Ancients, Droyne would lack caste, but they wouldn't be Chirpers either, because Chirpers are caste-dependent Droyne who weren't able to caste -- analogous to domesticated animals that revert to wild (feral) rather than never-domesticated wild animals. Alternatively, Droyne invented the ability to caste without Grandfather, and became dependent on it, resulting in Chirpers on worlds where the caste process was lost.

- - -

Third point: according to traditional Traveller, several sentient beings developed Jump independently. That is equally plausible in a no-Ancients setting. Maybe Droyne had it for millennia before any other species, but because of their culture they didn't do much with it other than settle a few dozen worlds that were extremely easy to colonize. Maybe after a few thousand years of near-isolation, a couple of fast-sublight human colony worlds would develop it. For example, a distant human society, keeping in touch with its progeny colonies, meets the Droyne and learns just enough to reinvent a Jump drive, in addition to picking up a cultural favoritism toward psionics.

- - -

Your 'colony' ships would be bloated fuel ticks with extremely tiny usable space and it still takes hundreds or even thousands of years to crawl between worlds. . . .

There are quite a few different rule sets about maneuver drives. Any sort of reaction drive (other than a Bussard ramjet), even with magical reaction efficiency, is impractical because of the fuel requirement, so interstellar colony ships are pretty much dependent on rules that assume reactionless maneuver drives. Some of those are very fuel-efficient -- GURPS Traveller power plants include fuel for 200 years (which requires them to be at least two-thirds fuel, based on my calculations about the maximum energy value of fusion) -- some are much less fuel-efficient, such as classic High Guard rules. I don't know current Mongoose ship construction rules.

- - -

Hmm, that could also mean a galaxy filled with colony worlds isolated from each other for centuries. Would they welcome the homeworld who would be almost alien by just cultural drift?

Sometimes a thousand years of cultural drift leaves a society surprisingly similar; present-day Icelandic people can read Old Norse without any special study, and present-day Muslims can read the seventh-century Arabic because of the doctrine that the Quran is canon only in the original language. But sometimes cultural drift is rapid; Maori, Hawaiian, and Taiwanese mountain people are all descendants of ancient Taiwanese, but Maori and Hawaiian are not mutually comprehensible (and mountain Taiwanese have mostly assimilated into Chinese culture). Differences in conditions are one thing that drive cultural drift (such as the food needs of the ancient Vilani in Traveller canon), so it's likely that most fast sublight colonies would diverge rapidly -- though interstellar light-speed communications might maintain some cultural continuity among cultures that want to maintain it.

- - -

. . . Each system is poorly prepared for interstellar war, there has been very little thought about conquering other systems, because each government can only control at most one system, they could send a military force at STL, but when it gets there, it would either conquer the new system ad become its own government separate from the government which sent it, and orders from home would likely be regarded as irrelevant and out of date, the generals and admirals send over there would do what they want, the soldiers under them might or might nor rebel with no consequences, and the whole enterprise would be a waste of resources for the government which sent they, all they would be doing if successful is changing the government of a neighboring system, the new government would be just as independent as the old government was. Interstellar war just doesn't happen without FTL.

It can certainly happen, but only in situations where the aggressor's motives are to change the target world, rather than to control it. For example, a militaristic theocracy may be indifferent to the political ways of other worlds, but it might launch a conquest to impose its religion on target worlds.

With the invention of the Jump Drive, everything changes, but old habits are engrained.

This may be true, but as soon as Jump reaches a system that is in the mood for conquest, it will be put to that purpose. Maybe the reason it's invented is that because a society decides that it wants to be able to control other systems.

I think the government of the Solar Union wouldn't be prepared to conquer its neighbors immediately, it wouldn't have the capital ships necessary to accomplish the task, the military force it has is primary geared towards piracy suppression, and that means a lot of small ships. The Solar Union has plenty of fighters, it has patrol cruisers, and even mercenary cruisers for troop deployments, but it has no carriers, no dregnaughts, no battleships, and no destroyers, it has conquered its own system long ago, the main threats to it come from domestic criminal organizations and that's it!

This is a pretty reasonable assumption about a culture that doesn't have Jump, but not a situation that would likely persist for long if it developed Jump.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

As for the other races developing the Jump Drive independently, that only would occur if they were at the same technological level as the humans or higher, a more realistic scenario is that humans visit their homeworld when they are still primitive, and the humans decide it would be a good idea to trade with them, and as part of that, they increase their technological level, and soon after that they are building their own starships, they were told that the speed of light was the ultimate limit and they took that as gospel thinking that the much wiser humans would know about that stuff, they don't bother to investigate the possibility of a loophole around that limit.

The Solar Union has its origins back in Earth's remote past, when it was originally called the Soviet Union. When the Titanic failed to meet up with an iceberg, the passangers got off in New York, one of those passengers got drafted in the British Army during World War I, and shot Hitler, there was consequently no Hitler to rise to power in Germany in 1933, instead another Nazi named Ernst Rolm took his place, he was the Fuhrer of Germany, and build up its armed forces, but he neglected to start World War II, so instead Stalin started it in 1953, In 1955 the first atomic bomb was detonated above Berlin Rolm's government was destroyed along with the city, Germany Surrendered, then France, and later Great Britain. The Soviets quickly conquered the World, and they used captured German scientists to build rockets, and explored space. The Soviet Government abandoned Communism in 1997, and after colonizing the Moon, they decided to rename their World Government the Solar Union "Солнечный союз", its longer name was the Union of Soviet Solar Republics "Союз Советских республик солнечной". with the initials CCPC which is often on their military spacecraft. After the fall of Communism, the one World government remained, and those that held power did not want to give it up. The Governmen of the CCPC at first colonized the solar system using a version of the Orion Spaceship.

There was little controversy about using atomic bombs for propulsion as the government controlled these ships, there were no other nuclear powers to object, and the dangers of radioactive fallout were not much discussed by the government controlled media. The planets were settled in the early 21st century, and later on the maneuver drive was invented, and travel to the planets became even cheaper plans were made to build the first starships. Starships were launched in the 2080s, and arrived at Alpha Centauri in the 22nd century. One main problem as far as the Controlling Solar Union government was concerned was that there was no way to control their interstellar colonies, s they quickly became independent stellar nations, and the migration to the stars continued apace.

After the invention of the Jump Drive, one misjumped to the Universe next door and ended up in the Terran System, and Imperial Patrol picked it up, the inspectors could not understand the language the crew was speaking, but after some linquistic analysis, they found that it was derived from ancient Russian.

 

[heron61]

According to traditional Traveller, Vargr were uplifted and transplanted by the Ancients, so they would not exist, or would require a significantly different back-story.

One possibility: a human colony was settled by a giant space ark, complete with an assortment of Earth flora and fauna. The human colony developed uplift technology, and tried it on an assortment of Earth fauna, including wolves. The uplifted wolves rebelled against their human creators, and took over their system, which became the Vargr homeworld.

Another possibility: humans on Earth developed uplift technology, and tried it on an assortment of Earth fauna. The most successful were wolves, but they because a political nuisance, so Earth humans decided to grant them independence, subject to permanent departure via a colony ship sent a long way from Earth.

That option seems like an excellent choice for this setting.

Also according to traditional Traveller, the Ancients were a single mutant Droyne, "Grandfather", his 20 children, and 400 grandchildren. Grandfather developed the caste system for Droyne using "Coyns", and Droyne became dependent on the caste system. After the Ancients' Final War (where Grandfather destroyed or drove into hiding all of his descendants, then disappeared), those Droyne who lost access to Coyns were unable to caste, and developed as Chirpers instead. Droyne that retained access to Coyns continued (and Grandfather occasionally reappeared from hiding to revise the Coyns). There's nothing published about Droyne before the caste system, except reference that they had existed before Grandfather.

So, without Ancients, Droyne would lack caste, but they wouldn't be Chirpers either, because Chirpers are caste-dependent Droyne who weren't able to caste -- analogous to domesticated animals that revert to wild (feral) rather than never-domesticated wild animals. Alternatively, Droyne invented the ability to caste without Grandfather, and became dependent on it, resulting in Chirpers on worlds where the caste process was lost.

- - -

Third point: according to traditional Traveller, several sentient beings developed Jump independently. That is equally plausible in a no-Ancients setting. Maybe Droyne had it for millennia before any other species, but because of their culture they didn't do much with it other than settle a few dozen worlds that were extremely easy to colonize. Maybe after a few thousand years of near-isolation, a couple of fast-sublight human colony worlds would develop it. For example, a distant human society, keeping in touch with its progeny colonies, meets the Droyne and learns just enough to reinvent a Jump drive, in addition to picking up a cultural favoritism toward psionics.

At least according to the CT Doyne book, the Droyne evolved with castes, what Grandfather introduced was Coyns. I can see either saying that the Droyne reached TL 9 or 10 and settled a few worlds with STL starships, or maybe they hit TL15 long ago, colonized a few dozen worlds, then their civilization didn't collapse so much as slide back to Tl 9-10, and someone in a human colony that had Droyne or Chirpers on it found the ruins of a Droyne jump ship and reverse engineered it. Either options seems to work pretty well, but I do like the idea of jump drive being invented on Earth, so maybe just go with TL 9-10 Droyne who had a few STL colonies.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

As for the other races developing the Jump Drive independently, that only would occur if they were at the same technological level as the humans or higher, a more realistic scenario is that humans visit their homeworld when they are still primitive, and the humans decide it would be a good idea to trade with them, and as part of that, they increase their technological level, and soon after that they are building their own starships, they were told that the speed of light was the ultimate limit and they took that as gospel thinking that the much wiser humans would know about that stuff, they don't bother to investigate the possibility of a loophole around that limit.

The Solar Union has its origins back in Earth's remote past, when it was originally called the Soviet Union. When the Titanic failed to meet up with an iceberg, the passangers got off in New York, one of those passengers got drafted in the British Army during World War I, and shot Hitler, there was consequently no Hitler to rise to power in Germany in 1933, instead another Nazi named Ernst Rolm took his place, he was the Fuhrer of Germany, and build up its armed forces, but he neglected to start World War II, so instead Stalin started it in 1953, In 1955 the first atomic bomb was detonated above Berlin Rolm's government was destroyed along with the city, Germany Surrendered, then France, and later Great Britain. The Soviets quickly conquered the World, and they used captured German scientists to build rockets, and explored space. The Soviet Government abandoned Communism in 1997, and after colonizing the Moon, they decided to rename their World Government the Solar Union "Солнечный союз", its longer name was the Union of Soviet Solar Republics "Союз Советских республик солнечной". with the initials CCPC which is often on their military spacecraft. After the fall of Communism, the one World government remained, and those that held power did not want to give it up. The Governmen of the CCPC at first colonized the solar system using a version of the Orion Spaceship.

There was little controversy about using atomic bombs for propulsion as the government controlled these ships, there were no other nuclear powers to object, and the dangers of radioactive fallout were not much discussed by the government controlled media. The planets were settled in the early 21st century, and later on the maneuver drive was invented, and travel to the planets became even cheaper plans were made to build the first starships. Starships were launched in the 2080s, and arrived at Alpha Centauri in the 22nd century. One main problem as far as the Controlling Solar Union government was concerned was that there was no way to control their interstellar colonies, s they quickly became independent stellar nations, and the migration to the stars continued apace.

After the invention of the Jump Drive, one misjumped to the Universe next door and ended up in the Terran System, and Imperial Patrol picked it up, the inspectors could not understand the language the crew was speaking, but after some linquistic analysis, they found that it was derived from ancient Russian.

The other background is it is just something like the European Union only with a stronger central government, whatever floats your boat.

In a parallel Earth's campaign, this one could be one of those parallel earths. In this case The Solar Union develops the Jump Drive, only in this case they do it the "hard way" which is why it is a tech level 15 device, you see what holds them back is the ability to store a create antimatter, which they think is necessary in order to make their jump drive work, they haven't got the capacitors the Imperium has, they don't know how to make them, so instead, to create the concentration of energy they need, they need to store a little antimatter. Missjumping sometimes sends one of their ships over to a random parallel universe by accident, they don't know how to do this deliberately!