Re: A Short Digression on Hyperdrives and Almost-Vorlons
(no login) Posted Feb 10, 2004 10:46 PM
> More like a different engineering paradigm. Standard Spiral hyperdrives are big and complex. The Vorlon, despite their thing for megastructures like orbitals and GSVs, emphasize miniturization and the efficient use of space. This suggests instead that the Vorlon, having discovered hyperdrive, immediately begin work on reducing as many of the components to micro or nanoscale as possible. <
I'm afraid that this doesn't wash. The Havenite tech base is quite capable of building circuitry and computer components (and, presumably, most anything else they need) at the molecular level - even with this advantage, their hyperdrives -still- represent a very sizable percentage of a given ship's mass and cost.
The Vorlon are vastly more advanced than the common ruck of the Spiral. Heck, they're even ahead of the Jurai in every field but one. But just because, say, the Manties don't have the same kind of toys doesn't mean that they don't know what they're doing.
There's a simple physical limit to how small you can make the vital components of a jumpdrive relative to the jump point you want it to generate; sort of like the relationship between a rocket engine and the payload it can put in orbit - and Spiral standard has reached the point where there's nothing left but evolution.
Or completely changing the question.
> Conversely, they may have found not so much a different FTL mode but instead a different way of crossing the realspace/hyperspace barrier, still using hyperspace as the transit medium but entering and exiting in different manners, like the difference between a normal jumpgate, a wormhole and a Nexus transit. <
So, instead of creating a jump point, they're instead cheating shamelessly?
-That-, I'll buy.
> Historical ref: Dr. B. Banzai and the mystery ride of the USS Venture. Had B. Banzai returned with the ship, a good number of things may have been different. <
The case of the Venture gives an inkling of why nobody has come up with this sidestep trick since the Vorlon took it with them - there's a 'catch' of sorts that's easy enough to avoid if you know what you're doing, but only, say, a one in one billion chance of surviving unprepared and -no- way to predict until you start reaching Xuncaesque levels.
> The Spacing Guild could have done it, except that they got tangled up in the mysteries of Quantum-II hyperspace and melange, locking them into symbiosis with whoever could protect their sources. <
The Guild is an essentially successful structure; it has no -reason- to evolve.
> The Abh have come closest of the modern powers as most of their territory is literally -off- the Rim, forcing them into a space-based existence as a rule, but as long as the Emperor of Jurai a) has treeships in quantity and b) a desire to keep all the terminals of the Jurai Wormhole Junction in the Empire, the Abh aren't going anywhere. <
And the Ahb share the Juraiian concept of efficiency, which is rather different from the Vorlon one.
A Vorlon thinks, "Why spend all this mass for living space on a planet when an Orbital takes so much less?"
Getting the most out of the least, say. They like to see themselves ahead and everything else balancing out perfectly.
In contrast, the Juraiian view is more likely to be, "Why do all the work of building a habitat when all you need to do to use what's at hand is drop a few seeds and wait?" It doesn't matter how much work is being done, only how much -they're- doing.
Quite flatly, it would take about the same amount of time to grow a treeship with a sideslip hyperdrive as it would to grow a jump point model. Since the tree doesn't spend its -own- energy running the drive, that's a wash, too. Pumping power to the trees doesn't cost Tsunami anything more than being Pillar cost Corwin, so -she- doesn't have to do any work...
And even after the Ahb secede, they won't have any reason to change that opinion. It's a machine; it doesn't feel. Its maintenence is automated; no more or less work for us either way. The energy source is still basically free and functionally unlimited. The only difference is that the robots melt down a few less asteroids. Who cares? They're just rocks.