User:Narc/Unnamed Story about Tully Winston/Tully Winston Data Gathering

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Contents 1 People 2 Ships 3 Places 4 Technology 5 Footnotes

People

• Tully Winston -- title character, so far not much known about him.
• Commander Ronald Van Der Meer -- Captain of the ESF Bern. No data available yet here, either.
• Lt. Cdr. Philip Chu -- Navigator of the Bern.

Ships

• ESSF Bern -- A frigate of the Earth Space Services Fleet, captained by Ronald Van Der Meer.
  • The Bern is lightly armed and heavily sensored, in keeping with its designed role as a police ship.
  • Compared to other frigates of the period, it is also severely undermanned, being crewed by only five people (normally 25), which is offset by heavy automation.
  • It also has leather seats. :)
• EMSS^[1] Mule -- Unmanned, automated freighter belonging to the Earth Space Merchant fleet under private registry until its destruction in the beginning of the story.

Places

• Maison Gris -- a space habitat built inside a hollowed-out asteroid approximately 30 years ago. It is the anchoring point for the space-borne industry exploiting the mineral-rich asteroids that form the rings of Aerys V.
• Aerys -- the star system in which our story begins. The star is a G7 (i.e. somewhat more orange than Sol) positioned "not far" (more precise distance to be determined) from Sol itself. It has no habitable planets.
  • Aerys V is (as expected) the fifth planet in the star system. It is a large Jovian, strongly reminiscent of Saturn, and featuring similar rings made up of very mineral-rich asteroids. Maison Gris orbits it a few hundred km beyond the outer edge of the ring system, in the same plane, making it a perfect mining base.

Technology

• Reaction drives are used throughout all of known space. Officially, there is some suspicion that reactionless drives are possible, but the technology has failed to work usefully so far. Unofficially, at least two ships have had a functioning reactionless drive successfully mounted and used in trials; however, these are being kept secret for the time being.
• FTL travel is achieved using a hyperspace translation drive, commonly abbreviated hyperdrive (duh). In brief, hyperdrive translates a spherical volume of space including the ship into hyperspace, which is many-layered. By controlling the shape of the volume after translation, ships can move in any direction desired, thanks to some properties of hyperspace geometry. This requires power to maintain. Standing still, however, with the volume in default spherical shape, requires little more power than just keeping the hyperdrive at idle, which is normally the case unless it is undergoing maintenance.
  • Hyperspace motion is applied as a force acting on (parts of) the hyperdrive itself, thus the hyperdrive is usually mounted very securely as close to the ship's center of mass as possible.
  • Losing power to the hyperdrive while in hyperspace will result in the realspace volume being immediately returned to its default spherical shape, after which, over a period of several hours, it is slowly returned to realspace from the outside in. Hyperdrives usually carry enough realspace that the time until core hull begins translating back^[2] is around ten hours, and the maximum amount of realspace that can be translated depends on the size of the drive and energy supplied to it^[3]. However, the more realspace being translated, the more energy-consuming it is to reshape it for directional travel, and the slower the travel speed.
  • Hyperspace has bands, or levels, nominally lettered A-Z, and the amount of energy required to translate into a higher band grows exponentially the "higher" you already are. Realspace is often accepted as hyperband zero, in spite of having an apparently completely different geometry from hyperspace. The reason to go into a "higher" hyperband is because realspace distances become (linearly) more compressed the further "up" you go. However, strange things have happened with experimental hyperships purpose-built to reach as "high" as possible -- no ships have returned after passing hyperband H^[4].
  • Hyperwalls (i.e. the walls of the "bubble" of realspace that is translated into hyper) interact by pushing each other away. It is thus impossible for two ships traveling together to both translate into hyper on their own power and stay together. Similarly, electromagnetic waves do not travel through hyperwalls (or perhaps they are absorbed by the natural medium of hyperspace), so ships in separate bubbles cannot communicate. Thus, the tendency in this universe is to have bigger cargo ships rather than more, and for each to travel separately. It is possible but obviously dangerous to tow ships through hyperspace, as long as the trailer does not activate its hyperdrive. If it does activate its hyperdrive, the newly formed bubble will immediately deform the original one^[5], and the two will mutually repel each other until they do not touch.
  • Hyperdrives are expensive, bulky, and, as shown above, can be extremely energy-demanding. The exponential increase in power when translating "up" through the hyperbands generally restricts merchant vessels to hyper-C or below, while the quadratic increase in power when translating more volume tends to restrict ship sizes^[6].

Footnotes

1. ↑ EMSS stands for Earth Merchant Space Ship
2. ↑ This is the first point of reduced survivability, for two reasons: a) the water commonly used as reaction mass and for oxygen is usually stored in large tanks just inside the core hull (where it can double as radiation shielding in case of emergency); and b) an unplanned translation to realspace on a mostly broken hyperdrive is most likely to leave you somewhere in deep space, with no real possibility of reaching any nearby inhabited space. On the other hand, hyperdrives almost never fail on their own -- sabotage, while extremely rare, is by far the most common cause of hyperdrive failure.
3. ↑ Energy required increases quadratically with volume of realspace being translated. Hyperdrives tend to translate the least possible volume of realspace when translating back into realspace -- the rest of the bubble will return on its own sooner or later.
4. ↑ The reason for this is that above hyper-H, there are "currents" in hyperspace, which will move even the stable sphere shape in random directions... and do so with much higher than expected force. After a ship successfully reaches hyper-I, parts of its hyperdrive are subjected to enormous mechanical stress and just fly away, punching a hole through, in order, the hyperdrive casing, any humans and bulkheads in the way, and finally the outer hull. The same parts are also the ones holding the realspace bubble in place, and as the ship falls behind, it passes through the hyperwall and gets translated down to realspace in pieces, ending up scattered across a large volume of realspace. Gruesome death.
5. ↑ For two equally powered drives, the deformation will put the original bubble's wall dead center between the two ships, probably severing the tow bar by forcefully translating part of it into realspace. Unequally powered, the lower powered one will have the wall proportionally closer, which can be extremely dangerous (half of the ship in one bubble, half in the other, major oops).
6. ↑ A frigate with a cruiser's hyperdrive and power plant would go into hyper-H comfortably, but a cruiser's hyperdrive and power plant are the size of a frigate