Hi, I'm new here, I plan on checking out the forums and commenting and hopefully helping and contributing to the community over the next few weeks. But in the mean time, I began to write down the world building ideas I have for my new story. This is a large work in progress, and hopefully will take a long time to complete with lots of learning in between. This world building sort of turned into an intro into the world of my story (with a little tweaking) and I felt it was appropriate to post it here. I'm mostly looking to see if it interests you or not and if you feel it could be an interesting tale. I would describe the story as a mash-up between A Deepness in the Sky and Akira, though the later is more hinted at here then explicitly shown. Anyone who has read ADitS will see some heavy borrowing which I apologize for, I tried to come up with a unique world which achieved many of the same exciting restraints and conditions that ADitS did but failed many times. There is still tons of background work, character and plot development to do, this is mostly to whet appetites. It will be a long time before I post more of this. Anyway, here it is: Space travel is a slow plodding affair, taking on a range of decades to hundreds of years to move between solar systems. Civilisations come and go, with systems rising and falling over the course of thousands of years, occasionally seeding a new system with a nucleus of civilisation. Technological sophistication is fleeting, though no known limit has been found (except for max interstellar velocity ~0.4c). Common world ending problems include material limitations, spatial congestion, and technological post-human developments. But also, war and terrorism. Technological trade is therefore the only possible form of interstellar trade. A group of star faring traders, living separately from colonised worlds, uses cryosleep to make the journeys between stars on massive, mostly self sustaining ships. They barter the technological achievements of one civilisation for that of another and obtain technical resources to maintain their ships and expand their fleets. An interstellar information broadcast system was developed and implemented by the early trader society. It is designed to be easily detectable and understandable to any human civilisation listening in. This system achieves various useful goals. First it establishes a common root language to expedite communication between traders and customers. Secondly it broadcasts (relatively) basic but still world changing (for first listener civs) scientific research, principles, practices, and ideas in all important aspects of civilisation (cultural, economic, etc). Essentially all the best ways to build up a civilisation to become a model customer to the traders. This includes creating a common technological base allowing easier interoperability between trader tech and homegrown stuff. These trader ships are also highly sophisticated war machines, though it is not possible to subjugate a planet in a profitable manner, conflicts do arise. Customer civilisation may feel a desire to confiscate the traders technology, as well, there are known and investigated incidents of trader ships destroyed by unknown assailants. Traders themselves do not attack each other as they all descend from and belong to the same culture and families. There is no profit to blowing each other out of the sky. Therefore some unknown, possibly alien, force is at work. The story begins with the Saladin, an advance ship some thirty years of travel ahead of the regular fleet. It is a larger, faster, specialized battle vessel. Top of the line with high powered, long range, turret based laser weapons, enough nukes to glass a planet, and equipped with sophisticated counter measure and stealth systems . It is the fastest vessel ever constructed, the most efficient design ever made. This ship left a system, Joshen, a system soon to be invaded by a small, unknown force. The main fleet remained to see what assistance it could give, until it saw that nothing it could do would help. This small invading fleet bellied an incredibly powerful and precise destructive force. Nothing could stop it. Joshen a system at the peak of its civilisation was completely destroyed. The traders abandoned the system. Messages were sent at lightspeed to all known worlds, as well as the central trader counsel, hundreds of years will be lost as the messages travel through space, but they will still arrive before any more invasions occur. Meetings will be held, counsel will be had, forces will be raised. But the traders fear they cannot withstand such an unknown force, even if they bankrupt every human world from the edge of colonised space to its antipode. The fleet is headed to a system known vaguely as Calvaria, near the relative top of human space, a few hundred years journey from Joshen. They head their in chase of ancient reports of possible former alien habitation and the remains of its destroyed civilisation. The system is known to be colonized by humans, but last visited by traders some thousands of years ago. They go in search of answers or clues to the identity and power of Joshen’s assailants. They have no idea what waits for them. Enter the Saladin, in retrograde thrust entering lagrange orbit of the innermost gas giant in the Calvaria system...
This is good. I like the fact you have tried to create a workable universe without the use of FTL. It got me thinking,, Assuming you use a really fast acceleration method such as an orion style nuclear pulse drive, your best duration journey to Proxima would take around 100 years. That would exhaust your fuel supplies so it would be a one way trip. It would take much longer using ion drive, photonic sails, thousands of years. Also having a maximum speed ~0.4c as you suggest implies that for some reason acceleration would have to stop at this point. Or are you suggesting that this is the max velocity reached at the midpoint of the journey? Perhaps you might have some kind of fusion drive fueled by bussard ramscoops? Anyway, I like the idea...
This is good. I like the fact you have tried to create a workable universe without the use of FTL. It got me thinking,, Assuming you use a really fast acceleration method such as an orion style nuclear pulse drive, your best duration journey to Proxima would take around 100 years. That would exhaust your fuel supplies so it would be a one way trip. It would take much longer using ion drive, photonic sails, thousands of years. Also having a maximum speed ~0.4c as you suggest implies that for some reason acceleration would have to stop at this point. Or are you suggesting that this is the max velocity reached at the midpoint of the journey? Perhaps you might have some kind of fusion drive fueled by bussard ramscoops? Anyway, I like the idea...
Hey, In ADitS they use ramscoop ships, so perhaps I'll borrow that as well. The main reason that there is a speed limit is that as soon as you start approaching relativistic speeds the amount of energy required to achieve an incremental unit of speed increases exponentially, so that only hyper efficient designs can achieve greater speeds. In this universe there is a hard limit to achievable speed with the technology possible because it becomes too energy intensive and therefore inefficient to go faster. The amount of fuel needed rises faster than the possible gain.
In our universe the speed of light is the limit for the same reason, so you would have to introduce some kind of very large interstellar "drag coefficient" that would counteract ship efficiency. Perhaps it's just me, but several thousand years sounds like an awfully short span of time for space-faring civilizations to emerge and die out within. Are these mysterious aliens wiping them all out? What environmental factors are making this happen?
