There are three known levels of hyperspace, called Quantum Bands. They may be thought of as alternate universes, overlaid on the conventional one in which what is usually called 'life' exists. They may also be thought of as energy states. Or levels of reality. Or interior layers of the Onion-That-Is-Reality. None of those are really accurate, but they all come as close as can be stated in any way except pure mathematics.

The first level, or Quantum I, may be accessed by generating a particle-probability state called a jump point. Jump points, while technically, well, points, act like zones - the more energetic the point, the larger the zone and the larger the volume that can be pushed through it into hyperspace.

As a quick rule of thumb, a starship will cost ten (basic cargo ship) to fifty (high grade combat vessel) times as much as a surface ship of equivalent tonnage. These figures do -not- include hyperdrives, for which add a flat ten thousand guilders, plus five to twenty percent of the ship's total base cost (depending on rate of recharge, quality of components, age of jumpcore, etc).

QI hyperspace is riddled with gravity wells, bumps, planes, corkscrews and things far stranger. Given the utter lack of natural reference points (and completely random location and severity of these disturbances), these are very dangerous even to ships with their own hyperdrives. Since these gravatic disturbances shift (in random ways) on a timescale that is considerably less than geologic, mapping is pretty much a moot point.

Fortunately, there -is- a way to navigate - a fixed jumpgate (basically a hyperdrive without a ship) also includes a beacon that transmits carrier beams to other known jumpgates, linking them together in an immobile network that starships can follow across the galaxy.

Of course, if you lose track of the beam, you're screwed. If you're lucky, screwed quickly. It is for this reason that extreme manuvers (such as are pretty much manditory in combat) are Not Recommended.

Someone with a better grasp of economics and/or history should probably take a look at the kind of costs that would be -just- low enough to pay for interstellar shippage of bulk foods.

Quantum II hyperspace is to Quantum I as a corrosive vapor is to quicksand - hostile, active, and far, far less stable. It is, in fact, so unstable that it may be practically entered only through natural particle states called swards. Swards, in addition to acting as jump points when sufficiently energetic, are fixed to a given low energy location in QII (as far as such a term as location may be applied to so unstable a realm). Attempting to enter QII without such an anchor and safe zone is not at all reccomended.

Manuvering safely in QII requires either the ability to manipulate local spacetime (see warp drive, later) and thereby ignore the majority of its ill effects, or the ability to predict and follow those points/zones where the various energy effects crest in unison and thereby cancel each other out. Since these events follow no recognizable pattern, this requires -extremely- reliable short-term precognition.

QIII's existence is predicted mathematically (along with bands IV through VII), and widely considered to be confirmed by the fact that all attempts to access it have exploded energetically, instead of simply not working.

An impulse drive has three main components, let's say - _Power Source_ which must be fairly sizable, because it must run the _Field Coils_, and they're power hogs. What they do is very similar to the hybrid reaction/grav drives used by the Centauri and Taiidani - reduce the ship's apparent mass, which lets reaction drives do all the work and saves them all the -extremely- finicky technical work neccessary to creat a true grav drive - but they do it differently, more by sort of fiddling local spacetime than any manipulation of gravity per se.

Let us say that they seperate the ship's IS from the IS of the space around it. Because the ship's IS is connected to the local IS, they can affect each other, but because the _Reaction Thrusters_ are shoving relative to the ship's IS - which has no mass, except for the various bits of the ship that have to stick out into local IS, and thus still have their own mass - impulse drives don't have to do much work.

A warp drive fiddles local reality too, only with a lot more power behind it and a sort of distortion to the way the ISs interact - if you say that impulse drive works, in crudest terms, in a superficially similar way to Centauri or Taiidani drives, then warp drive works like a Juraiian or Mimbari one - movement is produced by the field itself.

Because impulse drive leaves stuff sticking out into local IS, they can't go faster than light, because that would Break The Rules. But warp drives encase the entire ship, and there's nothing in The Rules that says that a ship's seperate IS can't go faster than light relative to local IS - just that nothing inside ship's IS or local IS can exceed... whatever the number that I've forgotton is.

Oh, and as for spacetime shots, a warpdrive can offer you -some- control over the local laws of reality. Trying to -change- them gets you into a massively complex and utterly chaotic chain reaction scenario that usually ends in the ship in question being reduced to its component quarks, if not smaller. If you're lucky, you get an unstable wormhole.

If you're -lucky-.

On the other hand, keeping the internal rules set to realspace standard is not only possible, but rather easy. It's tricky in execution, and extremely wasteful of power for a conventional warpdrive, but in theoretical terms it's simple.

Oh, and the number of warp coils aligned along a given axis has a direct bearing on how fast and how efficiently you can move on that axis. Unfortunately, it also has an -inverse- bearing on how quickly you can move along other axes (and how fast you can yaw/pitch). It's a tradeoff. It also lets you guess a warpship's general performance envelope at a glance.

Stable wormholes are natural loci which are different points in realspace, but congruent in some high level hyperspace. No, I don't know how they work, either - you just go in one side and come out the other.

Blessed be.
-n

>On the other hand, keeping the internal rules set to realspace standard is not only possible, but rather easy. It's tricky in execution, and extremely wasteful of power for a conventional warpdrive, but in theoretical terms it's simple.

I'd still prefer it if warp was impossible to use with hyper unless the warpship is being carried by another ship or some other restriction like that (like having to remove certain particles from warp coils.), or if there was some draw back to going hyper, such as a much greater wear and tear on the hyperdrive making brakedowns in hyper very likely (a probably messy). Also how would the warpship ever get out of hyper?

I knew I'd forgotten something.

Okay, the most powerful and most efficient way to operate warp coil is to carry on your power reaction -in the coil itself-. Hydrogen fusion does not provide sufficient energy density, so most everybody uses matter/antimatter feeds. Dilithium tuned feeds are by far the safest and most efficient type of mechanism.

Dilithium is a naturally occurring crystalline mineral with some really -wierd- magnetic properties. It can be synthesized, but the expense is ruinous.

Occupying a similiar useful-but-not-quite-indespensible role in hyperdrives and jumpgates is an isotope called Quantium-40. This stuff has numerous interesting and exotic properties beyond its role in creating jumppoints, but only one of them has any relevance to anything outside the realms of esoteric physics - warpfields, either active or residual, trigger what the math says is a QIII gate.

In layman's terms, Quantium-40 + warpfield = It blowed up real good!

Residual warpfields have a half-life measured in decades, and occupy a multi-kilometer zone surrounding the ship carrying them - a zone whose radius invariably exceeds the maximum distance between jump point and generator.

Blessed be.
-n

Okay. Q2 stuff looks good. Warp stuff looks good. Q1 stuff looks bad.

Q1 needs to have the following attributes in order to not seriously rewrite a lot of the Spiral:

- You can travel between static, established hypergates in anything that's capable of sidereal travel, as long as you have adequate supplies.

- Given a hyperdrive, you can travel to any location that you know the approximate location of.

- hyperdrive travel gets more and more difficult/dangerous/finicky as you get closer and closer to inhabited planets.

- The shape of hyper can be affected significantly by human will (neccessary for gods)

You're also contradicting a fair amount of previously written stuff, some of which I was quite fond of.

I'd say, instead of a transit beacon, static hypergates are actually capable of stabilizing the corridors between themselves into a decent approximation of realspace. Such corridors are easy enough to find, and passing into and out of them, while unpleasant, is not undoable. Thus, if you need to escape someone, you can, as a desperation move, crash out through the gate wall, fight your way through hyper far enough to escape their detection radius, and crash back in. Planetary systems leave telltale signatures on the fabric of Q1 that are easy enough to track down. With a decent suite of hyperspace sensors, and a navcomp that knows what it's doing, you can find, distinguish between, and navigate to any inhabited system that you've either been to or had described to you well. Certain forms of dowsing/crossreferencing can distinguish between them by their location in the sidereal, and beacons invariably tell you where they are.

It's an interesting thought: temporarily shut down the hyperspace beacon for some small, unimpressive system through cometbombing. Set up a hyperspace beacon somewhere else, that claims to be the beacon you just shut down. Ambush unsuspecting merchants in job lots.

For those planets with life but no real intelligent populations all of the above is still doable, but it gets to be harder, requiring better sensors, better avcomps, ect. If you're going for planets that have no life, well, unless there's something else on the planet that warps hyper around itself, it gets to be really hard to tell the difference between any you haven't been to before in person.

Also, it's not that hyperspace maps don't exist at all - it's just that the concepts they entail aren't really describable in any known sentient language, and they only describe destinations, not paths. You get to where you're going by finding the "shadow" of the destination and following it. Of course, if the shadow is weak and indistinct, you may have to get pretty close to catch a whiff of it - meaning that you better know someplace close to it that's easier to find.

Additionally, if you're just looking for *a* planet, it's relatively easy to distinguish between the classes. Looking for a planet with life but not sentient populations, for example, will often get you a decent place to hang out and hide while you replenish your stores.

The thing about Q1 combat is that while it's not particularly hard to keep track of where you are, tracking your opponent can be almost arbitrarily difficult. Especially in the more chaotic parts of Hyper, rogue flows, variable distances, and sensor difficultiesmake it really, really easy to run away. Then, too, ships just don't cast all that large a shadow, so you can't chase them from all that far away through any means short of a specialized, or very powerful hypergift.

I think that was coherent. Nate?

Fibula

I like fibula's ideas for Q1, what does everyone else think?

I'll have to go with Fib on this one.

This is one of those times where the Codex would really come in handy, if only to see what ideas we'd already established would get a thumbs-up.

-Griever
lurking ... lurking ... waiting for inspiration

I like the write up of how you can navigate Q1 w/o benefit of beacons. However, I would suggest making the level of sensors needed higher - and thus usually used only by military vessels, dedicated survey ships or pirates. Jump-points make more sense as artifical structures than natural ones to my mind, unless I'm misunderstanding you.

Beacons are seperate for jumpgates and most major and minor routes have beacons with a high overlap. However, these are usually short routes that take less than 72 hours in hyper from one gate to another. Ships therefore move from one gate to another (although they might not actually USE every gate en route, they are just nexi along the routes. Most governments regulate what ships use longer routes for safety reasons.

Ships - usually starships - can navigate without beacons based off memory or fixed charts with the chance of the route having shifted. Obviously this is much safer with better sensors but anyone knowing a quicker route between two jumpgates than the beaconed route can make a fortune off it, so a lot of small traders take chances.

This is partiuclarly important in areas with few jumpgates (Uncharted Region from Act IV) or where warfare has led to destruction of gates and beacons (e.g. Cameron Sector). In some areas with beacons but few gates spaceships are relatively impractical and trade is slow but this is fairly unusual.

Commerce is only viable for valuable (either high bulk or high price) cargos with starships but a spaceship using jumpgates is much more viable (thus most tramp frieghters are spaceships but a smuggler might have a starship).

Combat being a risky proposition in Q1 might be less a matter of navigation than the chance of blundering into something hostile (the 'mass shadow' of an uninhabited planet or something equally nasty).

drakensis

"I believe that forgiving the enemy is God's function. Ours is simply to arrange the meeting." - General H Norman Schwarzkopf

>Combat being a risky proposition in Q1 might be less a matter of navigation than the chance of blundering into something hostile (the 'mass shadow' of an uninhabited planet or something equally nasty).<

There's also the problem of hitting your target. All thouse cross currents, transient distortions, and mass shadows cause projectile weapons, missles and, to a leeser extent energy blasts to deflect in random directions. The further you are from a target the less chance you'll be able to actually hit it.

I believe it's been stated that Q1 tends to cut down effective sensor range, which prevents long range missles from locking on, and of course interferes with tactical sensors (adding to the difficulty of long range fire)

Which all means that effective combat and Q1 requires you to be within metaphorical arm's reach of your target. Meaning if they are at all combat ready, both sides are gonna take a beating.

Most advanced navies dislike such close range combat, as the high end ECM they use has little effect. The less developed races (who may pack more armor since they're used to getting hit more often) prefer not to get that close to opponents with bigger/meaner guns.

End result, Most people to avoid hyperspace battles if they can. To quote B5 "There hasn't been a battle in hyperspace yet that didn't turn into a disaster for eveyone involved."

There are three known levels of hyperspace, called Quantum Bands. They may be thought of as alternate universes, overlaid on the conventional one in which what is usually called 'life' exists. They may also be thought of as energy states. Or levels of reality. Or interior layers of the Onion-That-Is-Reality. None of those are really accurate, but they all come as close as can be stated in any way except pure mathematics.

The first level, or Quantum I, may be accessed by generating a particle-probability state called a jump point. Jump points, while technically, well, points, act like zones - the more energetic the point, the larger the zone and the larger the volume that can be pushed through it into hyperspace.

As a quick rule of thumb, a starship will cost ten (basic cargo ship) to fifty (high grade combat vessel) times as much as a surface ship of equivalent tonnage. These figures do -not- include hyperdrives, for which add a flat ten thousand guilders, plus five to twenty percent of the ship's total base cost (depending on rate of recharge, quality of components, age of jumpcore, etc).

QI hyperspace is riddled with gravity wells, bumps, planes, corkscrews and things far stranger. Given the utter lack of natural reference points, and incredible distances (even in hyper) over which errors can multiply, these are very dangerous even to ships with their own hyperdrives. Since these gravatic disturbances shift (in random ways) on a timescale that is considerably less than geologic, mapping them is pretty much a moot point.

Mass in realspace on a planetary or larger scale (Mercury yes, Ceres no, Jupiter very yes) tends to increase the severity of disturbances on an exponential basis - and over an area governed by the mass of the object. The base intensity of a gravatic anomaly over what corresponds to interstallar space is 0.1 meter per second per second - an infentesimal level for a ship under power.

Intensity around an earth-mass world is well over 100 m/s^2 - far in excess of the physical limits of most spacecraft.

The terror weapon known as a hyperspace inhibitor generates an artificial energy field with negligible realspace effects... and a hyperspace shadow equivalent to an G sequence star. All vessels with their own hyperdrives are forced to jump to and remain in realspace. Vessels without are destroyed.

Fortunately, there -is- a way to navigate in hyperspace - a fixed jumpgate (basically a hyperdrive without a ship) also includes a beacon that transmits carrier beams to other known jumpgates, linking them together in an immobile network that starships can follow across the galaxy.

Of course, if you lose track of the beam, you're screwed, since non-directional transmission is only visible for a few hundred kilometers apparent distance - if that.

Given the small emissions signature of any kind of properly designed warship, and the boost the high particle and energy levels of hyperspace provide to ECM systems, this means that any combat engagement in hyperspace would have to take place at ranges of only a few kilometers. That's not even point blank range - that's suicide range, submachineguns at five paces.

Life, especially sentient life, has an interesting effect on hyper - it agitates it, decreases the time required for a given amount of change in the local gravity gradients. The hyperspaces around Golgotha-called-Coruscant shift at rates visible to the naked eye in real time, going through a month's worth of realignment in only a minute or so.

Naturally, this makes approaching an inhabited world in hyper even -more- dangerous.

Quantum II hyperspace is to Quantum I as a corrosive vapor is to quicksand - hostile, active, and far, far less stable. It is, in fact, so unstable that it may be practically entered only through natural particle states called swards. Swards, in addition to acting as jump points when sufficiently energetic, are fixed to a given low energy location in QII (as far as such a term as location may be applied to so unstable a realm). Attempting to enter QII without such an anchor and safe zone is not at all reccomended.

Manuvering safely in QII requires either the ability to manipulate local spacetime (see warp drive, later) and thereby ignore the majority of its ill effects, or the ability to predict and follow those points/zones where the various energy effects crest in unison and thereby cancel each other out. Since these events follow no recognizable pattern, this requires -extremely- reliable short-term precognition.

It is theoretically possible to create a sward. No one has managed it yet.

QIII's existence is predicted mathematically (along with bands IV through VII), and widely considered to be confirmed by the fact that all attempts to access it have exploded energetically, instead of simply not working.

An impulse drive has three main components, let's say - _Power Source_ which must be fairly sizable, because it must run the _Field Coils_, and they're power hogs. What they do is very similar to the hybrid reaction/grav drives used by the Centauri and Taiidani - reduce the ship's apparent mass, which lets reaction drives do all the work and saves them all the -extremely- finicky technical work neccessary to creat a true grav drive - but they do it differently, more by sort of fiddling local spacetime than any manipulation of gravity per se.

Let us say that they seperate the ship's IS from the IS of the space around it. Because the ship's IS is connected to the local IS, they can affect each other, but because the _Reaction Thrusters_ are shoving relative to the ship's IS - which has no mass, except for the various bits of the ship that have to stick out into local IS, and thus still have their own mass - impulse drives don't have to do much work.

A warp drive fiddles local reality too, only with a lot more power behind it and a sort of distortion to the way the ISs interact - if you say that impulse drive works, in crudest terms, in a superficially similar way to Centauri or Taiidani drives, then warp drive works like a Juraiian or Mimbari one - movement is produced by the field itself.

Because impulse drive leaves stuff sticking out into local IS, they can't go faster than light, because that would Break The Rules. But warp drives encase the entire ship, and there's nothing in The Rules that says that a ship's seperate IS can't go faster than light relative to local IS - just that nothing inside ship's IS or local IS can exceed... whatever the number that I've forgotton is.

Warpfields of similar characteristics in close proximity to each other will synchronize and merge.

Oh, and as for spacetime shots, a warpdrive can offer you -some- control over the local laws of reality. Trying to -change- them gets you into a massively complex and utterly chaotic chain reaction scenario that usually ends in the ship in question being reduced to its component quarks, if not smaller. If you're lucky, you get an unstable wormhole.

If you're -lucky-.

On the other hand, keeping the internal rules set to realspace standard is not only possible, but rather easy (mathematically, at least). It's tricky in execution, and extremely wasteful of power for a conventional warpdrive, but in theoretical terms it's simple.

Oh, and the number of warp coils aligned along a given axis has a direct bearing on how fast and how efficiently you can move on that axis. Unfortunately, it also has an -inverse- bearing on how quickly you can move along other axes (and how fast you can yaw/pitch). It's a tradeoff. It also lets you guess a warpship's general performance envelope at a glance.

Warpfields, whether in that form or acting as spacetime shots, are easily detectible at ranges up to dozens of lightyears.

Warpdrives can be optimized for operations as spacetime shots - typically, they are monosource drives with only two or three coils and extremely atypical power consumption curves. These modifications make them quite inefficient as warpdrives, but make the ships mounting them extremely agile and excellently suited to adapting to the rapidly changing conditions of Quantum II.

Stable wormholes are natural loci which are different points in realspace, but congruent in some high level hyperspace. No, I don't know how they work, either - you just go in one side and come out the other.

Okay, folks? Comments on the above?

...Oh, dammit. Forgot about the boom thing again. Okay, steal from a writeup I just read...

Operation of a warpdrive causes a buildup of verterons in the warp coils. Sympathetic vibrations with active Quantium-40 (such as is found in the vast majority of jump drives and/or gates) cause these verterons to actually -rip- -apart- the coils on a molecular level as they pass into hyperspace.

In short - you can take it into hyperspace, if you're willing to completely rebuild the drives afterward.

Oh, and the difference between Ahb spacetime mines and everyone elses Photon Torpedoes is basically their ability to manuver - photorps are pretty much dumbfires. Mines seek like nobody's business - which is needed, given the way QII would fuck with their targeting otherwise. Mines also carry much bigger warheads, on a bang-for-your-buck logic.

Blessed be.
-n

well going with this theory of hyper, why does the additional life increase magic (which was said to be manipulation of hyper and brining it into realspace...).

if it was the currents craeted by the mass shadow then any mass would do. if it's the shifting of those currents you should be able to flik two hyperspace inhibitors on and off and that should produce massive currents if you time it right allowing incredible acts of magic, and how would belief then make gods if it's just the shifting of some gravity currents?

You also have shifted from warp = NO hyper at all (worse explosion than bonehead manuver), to warp = only hyper two (but practically nessesarry for that), and now from warp + hyper = boom bigger than a bonehead manuver to warp + hyper = destroyed warp engine...

>Intensity around an earth-mass world is well over 100 m/s^2 - far in excess of the physical limits of most spacecraft.

IIRC (too lazy to look it up, make the damn codex already) then some humanx ships had 20G of normal acceleration, so 10G shouldn't impress them too much.

also as a doomsday weapon drop something with a hyperengine into a well like that and it will hit at a pretty good clip destroying a planet if heavy/fast enough (IE: Enough Kinetic energy.)

I also don't understand why it's not a viable option to send in a drone with a hyperdrive to a jump gate and bonehead your enemies. Expensive? Hell yeah, but so are precision ammunitions, and few of them have this big a bang, and IIRC many space stations (B5, certainly was) are close enough to a gate that it would either severly damage or destroy them.

This system needs more of an overhaul if you ask me.

>well going with this theory of hyper, why does the
>additional life increase magic (which was said to be
>manipulation of hyper and brining it into
>realspace...).

I vote "Mu." Something about sufficiently complex organic systems (i.e. life, especially life with a more developed nervous system than, say, a fish) interacts with hyperspace. The more life, the more interaction. The interaction is well-documented, recorded, and can even be controlled to a limited extent.

*Why* it's there in the first place, nobody can figure out. Lots of theories, but none of them deliver the same results twice.

>well going with this theory of hyper, why does the additional life increase magic (which was said to be manipulation of hyper and brining it into realspace...)<

It doesn't. They (magic/esp effects and gravatic wierdness) have nothing to do with each other - they're both simply observable consequences of something deeper, involving hyperspace, realspace, and mass.

> if it was the currents craeted by the mass shadow then any mass would do. if it's the shifting of those currents you should be able to flik two hyperspace inhibitors on and off and that should produce massive currents if you time it right allowing incredible acts of magic, and how would belief then make gods if it's just the shifting of some gravity currents? <

Belief has nothing to do with mass or gravity - it has to do with esp. Interdictors have nothing to do with mass, either, and nothing to do with esp - but they do have to do with gravity.

They don't touch those deeper issues I mentioned earlier - they only simulate the observable effects of solar scale mass. And the observable effects are the least of it.

> You also have shifted from warp = NO hyper at all (worse explosion than bonehead manuver), to warp = only hyper two (but practically nessesarry for that), and now from warp + hyper = boom bigger than a bonehead manuver to warp + hyper = destroyed warp engine... <

I'm trying things on for size, trying to figure out what I like best. Input helps.

> > Intensity around an earth-mass world is well over 100 m/s^2 - far in excess of the physical limits of most spacecraft. < <

> IIRC (too lazy to look it up, make the damn codex already) <

That's what this -is-, or part of it, anyway.

IOW, I'm working on it. ^_^

> then some humanx ships had 20G of normal acceleration, so 10G shouldn't impress them too much. <

1st: With high-grade acceleration protection, humans can take 10Gs. Barely. For short periods. And there's not much point designing even a combat craft to take much more than the pilot can... let alone a civilian craft. And those are small, fighter scale ships, unlike the big boys that have to deal with the cube square law...

2nd: 10G in five different directions on different parts of the spaceframe?

3rd: I picked 10Gs as an arbitrary low-end figure that wouldn't put the high end figures for stars and such -too- insanely high. There's no real reason the general flux couldn't be higher, that's just the number I thought was convenient at the time.

4th: 'Possible' is not even remotely the same as 'safe' or 'wise' or 'considered by anyone except the desperate and the mad'.

5th: Hyper isn't dangerous because it tears you apart... It's dangerous because it gets you lost.

6th: What is bad for spaceframes is, in this case, catestrophically bad for gravity-based drives, such as used by, well, everybody who can get them.

Finally... that figure was for an early draft of the Commonwealth's version of Minovski tech. It's by no means finalized yet.

> also as a doomsday weapon drop something with a hyperengine into a well like that and it will hit at a pretty good clip destroying a planet if heavy/fast enough (IE: Enough Kinetic energy.) <

If it's in hyper, it has no effect on the planet at all. If you dump it through a gate right before impact (to avoid interception or some such), the Council and all its minions (that is, the entire civilized galaxy) get medieval upon your ass.

The Council has a few things that it Does Not Allow. Topping the list are weapons and acts of catestrophic destruction, among them even -accidental- bombardment of nonmilitary targets, the creation and deployment of self-replicating weapons (bioweapons, nanoplagues, von-neumanns), scorching, cracking, or otherwise destroying inhabited worlds, and destruction of jump gates.

> I also don't understand why it's not a viable option to send in a drone with a hyperdrive to a jump gate and bonehead your enemies. Expensive? Hell yeah, but so are precision ammunitions, and few of them have this big a bang, and IIRC many space stations (B5, certainly was) are close enough to a gate that it would either severly damage or destroy them. <

See above. The particular reason is that jump gates are tied together in a close, tight network. Removing a link in that network puts every gate for thousands of lightyears into flux, as routes and links change and reset.

Right out from under anyone traveling them.

This was what made the First Succession War a galactic catastrophe, instead of a local one - the diplomatic and social repercussion have a lot to do with why none of the Successor States have been able to rebuild their infrastructures. The old sanctions and such are only now coming up on their expiration dates...

Admittedly, it's not a particularly good design, but half the jump gates out there were built by races and civilizations that don't even -exist- any more, which means that altering the protocols of the -entire- net (which is what it would take) would be more trouble than it's worth when you can reduce the rate of such cases to essentially nil.

> This system needs more of an overhaul if you ask me. <

That's what it's out here for.

Blessed be.
-n

>The Council has a few things that it Does Not Allow. Topping the list are weapons and acts of catestrophic destruction, among them even -accidental- bombardment of nonmilitary targets, the creation and deployment of self-replicating weapons (bioweapons, nanoplagues, von-neumanns), scorching, cracking, or otherwise destroying inhabited worlds, and destruction of jump gates.

This is going to get nasty when the council starts disolving then I take it?

Somehow I forsee the mass destruction of either enemy gates or the shutdown of their own so that other's people military can't find them.

And with no-one left to enforce the 'don't nuke planets' rule...

>And with no-one left to enforce the 'don't nuke
>planets' rule...

Well, nobody really *does* enforce the rule, it's One of Those Things that civilized people accept. The Council has no military per se, just 3WA and other assorted small forces. It can levy sanctions - and if the Guild agrees to go along with them the effect can be devastating - but that's about it.

The "enforce" part comes into play when the Council effectively declares open season on the offending party; releasing all blackmail material and revoking "civilized" protections - de facto turning the entire polity into a pirate gang.

Nasty in the extreme, but it happens *very* rarely.

>The "enforce" part comes into play when the Council effectively declares open season on the offending party; releasing all blackmail material and revoking "civilized" protections - de facto turning the entire polity into a pirate gang.

>Nasty in the extreme, but it happens *very* rarely.

I don't really see the Juraii, the Taidani, the Vorlons and maybe some other forces caring (for military power) about being declared as a pirate gang, not that the Juraii would go planet killing anyway, but the Taiidani might and I don't see the Guild puting an embargo on their strongest supporters...

And you think that Lionheart might go on a planet killing spree? She does build deathstars doesn't she?

And we all know the Vorlon atitude about planet killing.

> I don't really see the Juraii, the Taidani, the Vorlons and maybe some other forces caring (for military power) about being declared as a pirate gang, not that the Juraii would go planet killing anyway, but the Taiidani might and I don't see the Guild puting an embargo on their strongest supporters... <

At that point, it'd pretty much be a choice between staying with the Taiidani and -every other civilized state in the galaxy-, so...

> And you think that Lionheart might go on a planet killing spree? She does build deathstars doesn't she? <

Well, yes, but as we've noted elsewhere, Lionstone likes running on the jagged rocks.

> And we all know the Vorlon atitude about planet killing. <

Only when the alternative is infinitely worse?

Blessed be.
-n
(Out of curiosity, why are you so up on the planetcracking, anyway?)

> Out of curiosity, why are you so up on the planetcracking, anyway?

good question.
Maybe I think it's underrepresented as a realistic scenario in most SF, since the destructive capabilities of technology seem to increase fater than the protective ones (only natural, they have the second law of thermo on their side) and esspcially since even we would be capable of building planet crackers (the rusians did in fact desing one during the cold war. They never built it though, their leadership realized that was going too far.)

Maybe it's because no-one else seems to worry to much about it, I wonder what defensive messures are being taken to prevent that (there must be something!)

Maybe it's just a hobby of mine.

Maybe I like big explosions.

I can think of some other reasons, but I think the last two are the most proabble :)

----

There is no such thing as too much overkill.
If violence isn't solving your problems you aren't using enough of it.

>but the Taiidani might and I don't see the Guild
>puting an embargo on their strongest supporters...

The Guild only cares about Arakkis. If they can convince the current Clan administrator (or Imperial fleet commander) to break from the Empire, or work a deal with the AAnn or the Minbari or the Humanx or one of the smaller nonaligned states coreward to guarantee Dune's protection in exchange for a cut of Guild profits (1%, but that's still a -lot.-) then the Guild will happily hang Lionstone out to dry if/when she crosses the Line.

Well, the guild's only spice supply is on one of the more heavily defended planets in Taiidani space. Their head office is on a different heavily defended planet in Taiidani space. They probably have most of their shipyards on various other planets in Taiidani space. It's also their biggest client. Finally, the Guild exists because the Taiidani have promised that anyone who harms them will be found and made an example of, and their family will be made an example of, and their friends, and their pets. Also, the Guild owns the Taiidani hypernet, and it's a thriving secondary business with important strategic factors. The Taiidani are very, very important to the Guild. They are almost, but not quite irreplacable. If the Universe as a whole turns against the Taiidani, well, the Guild really, really doesn't want to see that happen.

On the other side, the Taiidani are far more dependant on the Guild than anyone else is. Aside from the fact that they're the only large-scale shipping concern in that part of space (elsewhere, they have at least some competition) they own the Taiidani hypernet, and they are very, very important to both commerce and control in imperial space. They also funnel information from across the galaxy, and their intruiges are almost invariably in the Empire's favor. The Guild almost needs the Empire. The Empire does need the guild. Honestly, at this point, I suspect that Lionstone is holding back on the planet-crackers not out of fear of retribution, but rather as a personal favor to the leadership of the guild. I don't see her going in much for that "fear" concept.

Still, all things considered, I don't think that just nuking a planet from orbit would be quite enough to turn the Guild against the Empire. At least, not if the planet were technically theirs to begin with.

By the way, how does an F class, say, stack up against a death star in terms of size? In other words, does she have one, maybe two, or does she have a small fleet of the things?

Note that anything in the "that's not a moon" size class has its own mild gravity well, and the associated affects on hyper. Taking one into hyper is...well...I have no idea what would happen.

Fibula

I noticed that this says a few things, and I wanted to point them out to you.

- First, the only way into Q2 is through swards.
This implies that the Navigators use swards, and thus that there is a sward at every planet the heighliners visit. This also means that Our Heroes can't access Q2 in a fit of desperation without a sward. I'd suggest rather that (as originally stated) the Q1/Q2 barrier is basically the same as the sidereal/Q1 barrier, once you've aligned yourself with Q1. This realignment is finicky, requires competence and quality gear, but is doable. On the other hand, this pretty much means that you need a ship that can handle Q2 by itself (hah!) and some way to figure out which direction you're going in (hah! hah!) or, like the navigators, enough hyper-specific telesenses/precog to cover both. Having a native of hyper along for the ride helps a *lot*.
For the Ahb, either have swards be vital for their particular method of "warp your way through hyper" or have both them and warp deal in subspace, rather than hyper. After all, in the original, the swards take you to a 2-dimensional place. Why not just say, in addition to everything else, each level of hyper adds a dimension? Q1 has 4 and Q2 5, Q!1 has 2. Experiments into Q!2 is similar in nature to experiments in Q3, except that instead of exploding, the poor experimental subject simply doesn't come back, vanishing from the face of detectable reality.

You also haven't covered the "hyperdrive plus warpdrive go boom" issue, which seemed to me to be rather important for power balancing.

Actually, the value of swards can be very simple, if they're the only way to get a warpcraft into hyper without explosion. You could even have them only pierce into Q1. Of course, the sward won't work at all unless you warp into it in the first place. Collapsed swards, rather than pumping out energy, would make it very, very easy, cheap, ect to warp normally. Thus their use in Ahb starships before their value as gates was discovered.

This, then, would give one of the Ahb's major tactical advantages - they'd have warpships that could be moved rapidly across the galaxy, and could even exploit warp for attacks in Q1. Also, since they'd have been working with warp for longer, they'd have more advanced stuff.

- You're still implying pretty hard that anyone who's traveling anywhere except between hypergates Just Gets Lost. There has to be a way for people to make gateless hypertravel at least reasonably reliable, or the entire structure of large parts of the Spiral falls apart (military, commercial, ect, ect, ect.) At the very least, they should be able to pop out of hyper, reorient, wait for their cores to recover, and move again with better accuracy from the distance (in mostly the right direction) that they'd travelled that far.

- uniform gravity fields are not, in and of themselves, damaging, no matter how intense. the damage is going to come either from gravity going two dramatically different ways on two different parts of the ship, or from getting dragged into something even uglier (like actual overlap with the planet)

That's about what I see.

Also, I notice that after all of the concepst get set in stone, you're going to need at least one revision (by you or someone else) to make it easily understandable, flow well, ect. Nothing wrong with that - not worrying about it speeds things up for the moment. Just to point out that it's going to need to be done later.

Fibula

Okay, a little bit of an idea which I came up with while browsing an old copy of 'House Atreides'.

Not on hyper-theory as much as on the ships that travel it and some construction issues.

Guild 'Liners specifically, and the transition to Q2 from realspace. We all agree that Guild Navigators are insanely good at what they do, and damn the costs, right? And that Q2, for all the quirks and weirdness, is to Q1 what Q1 is to realspace. Ergo, rules that would hold in realspace and, to some extent, Q1 don't neccessarily hold true in Q2 and heigher (I'm _not_ going there, just stating the obvious).

Going to Q1 first - matters of speed, acceleration and such. The frank truth is that, for whatever reason, be it particle density (the proverbial ether), gravitic waves, ripples in the fabric of reality or whatever else would invariably be found once someone put their minds to it, not only do sensors usually get as scrambled as the picture in an old TV set in rough weather, but beam dissipation, strength, thruster efficiency (or drive efficiency in general) go down to ... oh, 80% efficiency for the drives (though a bit better for gravitics), 60% for any beam and energy weapons firing over any significant range, and 40% for sensors both active and passive. This is pretty much obvious, and the drives' drop is hardly noticable when it comes to transit times in such warped spatial conditions.

Okay, but while spaceships can travel via jumpgate corridors easily enough, with little or no modifications being required to make the journey safely, jump capable ships ... no, Q1 capable starship, yes, that's more like it ... right, so Q1 capable starships use their hyperdrives to open their own personal jumpgates, or jump-points, or whatever we're going to call them. As far as costs go, for the drives at least, there's no reason for Corps and Cartels to have fleets of hypercapable ships at _relatively_ affordablecosts ... _not_!

Stating the obvious _again_, no n-space ship that isn't built with transit into and out of hyper in mind can be made h-capable by simply slapping on a jump-drive. Hyperdrive. Whatever. Not because of power requirements, though those are a factor (easily nullified by the simple process of adding extra Fusion Plants or whatnot).

Ever wonder why gates look like they do, aside from the obvious answer? They're sturdy, built to last, but ultimately ... couldn't they have been made in another form and through that avoid the risk of being rammed by inept pilots trying to fly though (it happens)? Nope. The gate is a lens, used to focus power fed into it and 'stretch' realspace back until it 'splits' in the middle to allow entrance into hyper. It's the most efficient way to do it, power-wise at least.

But gates are fuckin' huge, and there's no way something similar mounted on a ship would work, simply because the focus point needs to remain stable for it to work. Therefore starships use an altogether different method.

They don't 'stretch' n-space until it 'splits', and then slip through the gap. They punch through it, using their ships' _hulls_ as a focus, which puts some significant strain on that same hull.

At least it's done like that by those navies that use reaction drives and don't have shields.

The Manties for example use their wedges, which let them slip through into Q1 thanks to the process of reconfiguring them into 'sails', flimsy as those may appear.

It costs a helluva lot more to build a starship than a spaceship, and not only because of the drive, no. The hull has to be able to take the stress caused by that drive _working_. Which is the reason most of those navies avoid hyper-battles like the plague. An undamaged ship can, in theory, make a passage and then tow a damaged one through (though it's _hell_ on the drive and hull). This implies that there's an undamaged ship left afterwards (or at least one with enough hull integrity to open a passage back into realspace)., which as we all know, doesn't really happen all that often. If none are in good enough shape, well, them's the breaks.

The thing is that the stress need not neccessarily be the hull's, and that is one of the reasons the Taiidani are so dead-set on their shield technology development. Even a battered ship with a crippled hull can make the transit if its shields are fully charged and taking the brunt of transit stress.

As for Q2, that's another story altogether. In _stable_ regions, which are plentiful ... *grin* but _move around_ much like weather above an ocean would ... the base procentage values for drives/sensors/weapons and such are halved. And that's on a good day. Without some hyper affinity you do not want to travel Q2, period. Not to mention the _ship_ this requires, because a normal Q1-design ship - no matter how sturdily built, be it an E-Class or a Destroyer, no matter the drive they have or their shields _will_ be literally ripped apart as soon as it makes to crossing.

You see, Q2 capable ships _have no hyperdrive_ ... inasmuch as hyperdrive is understood for Q1. They _are_ the hyperdrive. Plus, they have to be built using principles totally different than Q1 craft. Where Q1 drives need only a short burst of focused power to create the passage, Q2 needs to be engaged near constantly ... Juraiian treeships have no problems with this, structural or otherwise, because of their very nature and natural resonance with Q2.

Heighliners? The behemots of Q2 are _flimsy_ things in Q1 and realspace (though less in case of the latter), and while their hull harmonics is perfect for the surreal/unreal conditions of Q2 transit/entry/exit ... well, lets say that liners were _designed_ for Q2, their drives (I'll commit the ultimate treason to doctrine and _assume_ they use gravitics) specifically designed so that they could be re-configured for Q2 conditions. In Q1 it would be the gravitic 'bubble' that allowed them movement in Q2 would be the only thing keeping the ship together.

Aside from that, Q2 ships can do some insane things with the right operators and pilots ... like say the Guild's trademark 'spacings' of their liners. The Heighliners are built underground, in bays with no discernible exits ... the ship's Navigator simply shunts it through directly into Q2, gravity well be damned, and brings it out in orbit around the planet. OTOH, _that_ is something you don't do without a precoq. Even though mass shadows don't work out in quite the same way in Q2, its still suicide going near them otherwise. Just in a far more graphic and gruesome manner.


Mind, these are just random ideas that came together. Don't hesitate to ignore them if they don't fit.

-Griever