Substituting fixed wormholes for the Jump Drive

Wormhole actually select not to connect to 'boring' systems? Part of exploring is discovering what's there. The Rift supplement added all those new stellar locations and phenomena to check out. Fun thing about a wormhole system is you HAVE to cross over to know what's there. Black holes are a bi....

Are wormholes in your system an artificial construct similar to the Stargates from the movie/TV show? I can understand that. I prefer a natural wormhole system based on some weird quantum timely whimely universal physics that causes systems to interconnect randomly. Alternative Traveller Universe, similar but just different enough to say What If.
 
Been playing around with the Traveller Wormhole Universe. The X-boat system definitely is different. It's still based on connecting Important worlds by way of wormholes. Each wormhole has a transfer depot on each side. Radiation is disrupted and can't pass so you still need to physically cross. This is done with 95 ton drone ships, Express drones. 1G mobility, Virtual Crew/0, Basic sensors, Mail Distribution Array and 70 ton external cargo mount. Digital information is flash - download and uploaded to the DMA while cargo pods are dismounted and new pods mounted then return through their assign portal. The transfer depot sorts the digital and physical mail for distribution to their next portal on the route or head to the system's homeworld. Digital mail Is transmitted to the appropriate depot at light speed while physical mail is loaded onto cargo pods and mounted onto Express boats. Express boats move at 9Gs carrying external cargo either planetside or to another depot for unloading. As wormholes can be scattered all around a star system, this can take some time which is why the X-boat has a crew of two with a double occupancy stateroom. The TWU has much faster digital information delivery while physical delivery is at the speed of maneuver of the X-boat technology. A priority X-boat might have a reaction drive supplement to shave a little time for special deliveries of physical goods.

Just like OTU, the majority of wormhole routes will be of varying importance and served by company entities and small entrepreneurs as usual. Two big differences to the OTU, travel will be faster as, without jump, the money will be spent on better maneuver BUT you will need that, including fuel, to fly great distances within systems. Also remember that you will no longer plot a jump exit to a fuel source. In TWU, you need to travel to where the nearest source sits. A gas giant could be at the far side of the system though asteroid belts would be more convenient IF you want to go belt mining for ice. Normally either there will be very large fuel stations at the wormholes or you need to travel to the homeworld's starport facility as per OTU at expense of fuel. This could mean fuel scoops and processors will be far less common. It would be far too expensive to have starports at every wormhole and less important/poorer systems may not have any facilities at their wormholes.

Which brings us to how easy it would be to move between and through systems undetected. We tend to forget most law enforcement in the OTU is around the 100D of a homeworld and along established routes between important planets. Some systems can have Customs station at wormholes to 'check your papers' when you enter or leave with cutters and SDBs to give chase if you bolt for and through the wormhole. A lot will have little to no stations. This means even the smaller ships will more likely be armed like a stage coach in the wild west while companies might regularly have armed escorts. There could be bonded services stationed in systems to offer escort duties as needed.
 
Reynard said:
Wormhole actually select not to connect to 'boring' systems? Part of exploring is discovering what's there. The Rift supplement added all those new stellar locations and phenomena to check out. Fun thing about a wormhole system is you HAVE to cross over to know what's there. Black holes are a bi....

Are wormholes in your system an artificial construct similar to the Stargates from the movie/TV show? I can understand that. I prefer a natural wormhole system based on some weird quantum timely whimely universal physics that causes systems to interconnect randomly. Alternative Traveller Universe, similar but just different enough to say What If.
Some intelligence guided the construction of wormholes to prefer sunlike stars and systems with Earthlike planets in it. Apparently the aliens which existed one billion years ago were interested in similar types of worlds that humans are interested in. Of course one billion years is a long time, what planets were once habitable may no longer be, other planets that the aliens were considering terraforming, but never got to, may be habitable now, and with 1 billion years of drift, the time periods the vaious ends of the wormholes are in tend to vary, there is one Earth that exists in the year 1647, and that has been colonized and traded with which altered its timeline, though many of the historical rulers still rule the various kingdoms on that planet while adapting to the futuristic technology they suddenly have access to, another wormhole leads to a system 3.8 light years away from a ringworld around a Solar System in the future, in about the year 11,800 AD, of course that ringworld didn't exist with the wormhole builders built their wormhole network, and apparently the ringworld builders weren't aware of the wormholes, otherwise they wouldn't have altered the Solar System to the extent they did. I'm assuming the ringworld tech is 18 or greater because definitly artificial intelligences were involved in its construction.
 
Reynard said:
Been playing around with the Traveller Wormhole Universe. The X-boat system definitely is different. It's still based on connecting Important worlds by way of wormholes. Each wormhole has a transfer depot on each side. Radiation is disrupted and can't pass so you still need to physically cross. This is done with 95 ton drone ships, Express drones. 1G mobility, Virtual Crew/0, Basic sensors, Mail Distribution Array and 70 ton external cargo mount. Digital information is flash - download and uploaded to the DMA while cargo pods are dismounted and new pods mounted then return through their assign portal. The transfer depot sorts the digital and physical mail for distribution to their next portal on the route or head to the system's homeworld. Digital mail Is transmitted to the appropriate depot at light speed while physical mail is loaded onto cargo pods and mounted onto Express boats. Express boats move at 9Gs carrying external cargo either planetside or to another depot for unloading. As wormholes can be scattered all around a star system, this can take some time which is why the X-boat has a crew of two with a double occupancy stateroom. The TWU has much faster digital information delivery while physical delivery is at the speed of maneuver of the X-boat technology. A priority X-boat might have a reaction drive supplement to shave a little time for special deliveries of physical goods.

Just like OTU, the majority of wormhole routes will be of varying importance and served by company entities and small entrepreneurs as usual. Two big differences to the OTU, travel will be faster as, without jump, the money will be spent on better maneuver BUT you will need that, including fuel, to fly great distances within systems. Also remember that you will no longer plot a jump exit to a fuel source. In TWU, you need to travel to where the nearest source sits. A gas giant could be at the far side of the system though asteroid belts would be more convenient IF you want to go belt mining for ice. Normally either there will be very large fuel stations at the wormholes or you need to travel to the homeworld's starport facility as per OTU at expense of fuel. This could mean fuel scoops and processors will be far less common. It would be far too expensive to have starports at every wormhole and less important/poorer systems may not have any facilities at their wormholes.

Which brings us to how easy it would be to move between and through systems undetected. We tend to forget most law enforcement in the OTU is around the 100D of a homeworld and along established routes between important planets. Some systems can have Customs station at wormholes to 'check your papers' when you enter or leave with cutters and SDBs to give chase if you bolt for and through the wormhole. A lot will have little to no stations. This means even the smaller ships will more likely be armed like a stage coach in the wild west while companies might regularly have armed escorts. There could be bonded services stationed in systems to offer escort duties as needed.

In my traveller universe, the wormholes were all built by aliens 1 billion years ago. these wormholes are self-maintaining by automated robots that don't care who uses their wormholes, they just keep them open, and smart people don't interfere with them! The starports are a different story, not every wormhole has a starport, thus a Starport X, there may have once been a starport but their isn't a starport there any longer, the wormhole tenders don't bother with building starports, they just build wormholes with a certain programmed criterion to what systems to build wormholes to. The wormhole networks is still expanding automatically, the edges of which are one billion light years away, the point of origin is the Andromeda Galaxy, wormholes easily cross intergalactic distances and do, the whole local galactic cluster was colonized this way. There are numerous wormholes leading to the Andromeda Galaxy, they will bring you millions of years into the past because the wormhole network past light cone exists in that galaxy. The original builders are nowhere to be found, only their automated constructs.
 
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