Proposal: A Collaborative Science Fiction Universe

[Brady Kj]

Wow. Thanksforallthefish has some clever ideas. And I'm not a fan of a planet-state idea either. I think people can get along without them all paying taxes to the same mighty government that rules over billions. The United States gets along with Canada better than it gets along with itself. And I think the Americas are a good model for imagining how space colonies would most likely end up. Mostly independent nations, some colonies, and some of the independent nations have colonies themselves, elsewhere. And I think that if humanity's careful, we can make a future that's more peaceful and democratic than the present.
And I want to read a story about humans learning to successfully get along with aliens who are very different than us. Aliens I've thought of:
Big fuzzy blue fat things that trumpet like cats and sometimes make sounds like gongs and church bells, and have spider legs with pinchers. They move slowly and love to cuddle.
Tiny skinny yellow things that hop 3 meters in the air, with two oversized frog legs and 8 tongues that they use to manipulate tools, and they communicate with whistles. They come across as very playful and fond of licking. Their society functions a collection of many small hives, and they don't understand the concept of individuality. Each of their nations has a count of the hives in it, but not a count of the bodies in the hive.

And I have an idea for creatures called Medusas. The females are intelligent ones, with a head and torso shaped very roughly like a human, a lower body like a snake, little vestigial bat wings on the back a big walrus-shaped head with a beak and dozens of stalk eyes writhing around on top. The stalk eyes are actually the males of the species. The larvae look like one-eyed flying snakes, and the male larvae latch onto an adult female's head, and connect their nerves to the female's brain. The female Medusa's uterus is in her head and heck, protected by her skull that covers the whole area, and she coughs up eggs out her beak. The Medusas say that when a male latches onto a female, his little brain connects to hers, amplifying her intelligence.

 

[Emote Control]

This is currently phrased for the space opera proposal I put up before, but with modifications would work for many space opera settings. It is intended to provide a "unified justification" for all the various unobtainiums space opera abounds with, from Quadium-40 in Bablyon 5 to dilithium in Star Trek. The term was suggested, in fact, on a Star Trek thread on this very site.

Non-Mendeleevian Elements

Even before the Normlamins, a few species suspected that the 92 stable elements of the Mendeleevian periodic table did not account for every phenomena. Rare ores or minerals sometimes seemed odd, with bizarre and unaccountable physical or optical properties, even occasionally seeming to violate conservation laws. Scientists who claimed these had potential were scorned on worlds without enough of them to suggest the experiments for a different paradigm, while races in systems blessed with large quantities often had trouble developing coherent theories of chemistry and materials at all, because of the odd behavior.

When the Norlamins discovered the metaparallel dimensions, allowing them to travel and communicate and sense and do battle faster than light, their researchers realized that sometimes the levels of reality failed to be discrete. In the past and present, "leakage" (a term the applied cosmologists don't really like) had altered matter in the conventional reality, giving it properties -- and therefore uses -- which defied the previous paradigms. Without non-Mendeleevian elements, using the metaparallel dimensions for technology is possible -- that's how the Norlamins did it -- but much harder than if you don't have them. Thus they are very valuable to an interstellar society, and command prices high enough for it be economical for prospectors to check asteroid after asteroid for them, or sift through an entire gas giant, or sometimes even crack a rocky planet in half to get to its core, if necessary.

Much of the fighting and corruption in the Burning Millennia was over access and control of non-Mendeleevian substances, and even in the peaceful and honest Unity they formed a backbone of the technology and economy. After the Aynians destroyed everything, and the long-distance shipments stopped, this was perhaps the most important factor in society being unable to maintain its previous level of development.

 

[Thanksforallthefish]

Wow. Thanksforallthefish has some clever ideas. And I'm not a fan of a planet-state idea either. I think people can get along without them all paying taxes to the same mighty government that rules over billions. The United States gets along with Canada better than it gets along with itself. And I think the Americas are a good model for imagining how space colonies would most likely end up. Mostly independent nations, some colonies, and some of the independent nations have colonies themselves, elsewhere. And I think that if humanity's careful, we can make a future that's more peaceful and democratic than the present.
And I want to read a story about humans learning to successfully get along with aliens who are very different than us. Aliens I've thought of:
Big fuzzy blue fat things that trumpet like cats and sometimes make sounds like gongs and church bells, and have spider legs with pinchers. They move slowly and love to cuddle.
Tiny skinny yellow things that hop 3 meters in the air, with two oversized frog legs and 8 tongues that they use to manipulate tools, and they communicate with whistles. They come across as very playful and fond of licking. Their society functions a collection of many small hives, and they don't understand the concept of individuality. Each of their nations has a count of the hives in it, but not a count of the bodies in the hive.

And I have an idea for creatures called Medusas. The females are intelligent ones, with a head and torso shaped very roughly like a human, a lower body like a snake, little vestigial bat wings on the back a big walrus-shaped head with a beak and dozens of stalk eyes writhing around on top. The stalk eyes are actually the males of the species. The larvae look like one-eyed flying snakes, and the male larvae latch onto an adult female's head, and connect their nerves to the female's brain. The female Medusa's uterus is in her head and heck, protected by her skull that covers the whole area, and she coughs up eggs out her beak. The Medusas say that when a male latches onto a female, his little brain connects to hers, amplifying her intelligence.

Thank you!!

I also don't think most planets will be united in the surface, HOWEVER, when space trade (and warfare) becomes a significant industry, they will probably have organizations to represent them in interestellar affairs. One good model could be Greek city states and leagues; nations would be independent but represented in trade and warfare by loose alliances. As the scale grows, the city-states could become planets which themselves are leagues of nations.

Also I like very much those aliens! They are alien enough yet they would fit right into a space opera setting. I like how hive minds are represented by the hive itself and not by queens or anything like that. And Medusas look creepy yet mythological.

This is currently phrased for the space opera proposal I put up before, but with modifications would work for many space opera settings. It is intended to provide a "unified justification" for all the various unobtainiums space opera abounds with, from Quadium-40 in Bablyon 5 to dilithium in Star Trek. The term was suggested, in fact, on a Star Trek thread on this very site.

Non-Mendeleevian Elements

Even before the Normlamins, a few species suspected that the 92 stable elements of the Mendeleevian periodic table did not account for every phenomena. Rare ores or minerals sometimes seemed odd, with bizarre and unaccountable physical or optical properties, even occasionally seeming to violate conservation laws. Scientists who claimed these had potential were scorned on worlds without enough of them to suggest the experiments for a different paradigm, while races in systems blessed with large quantities often had trouble developing coherent theories of chemistry and materials at all, because of the odd behavior.

When the Norlamins discovered the metaparallel dimensions, allowing them to travel and communicate and sense and do battle faster than light, their researchers realized that sometimes the levels of reality failed to be discrete. In the past and present, "leakage" (a term the applied cosmologists don't really like) had altered matter in the conventional reality, giving it properties -- and therefore uses -- which defied the previous paradigms. Without non-Mendeleevian elements, using the metaparallel dimensions for technology is possible -- that's how the Norlamins did it -- but much harder than if you don't have them. Thus they are very valuable to an interstellar society, and command prices high enough for it be economical for prospectors to check asteroid after asteroid for them, or sift through an entire gas giant, or sometimes even crack a rocky planet in half to get to its core, if necessary.

Much of the fighting and corruption in the Burning Millennia was over access and control of non-Mendeleevian substances, and even in the peaceful and honest Unity they formed a backbone of the technology and economy. After the Aynians destroyed , and the long-distance shipments stopped, this was perhaps the most important factor in society being unable to maintain its previous level of development.

I LOVE this idea, especially because it gives a rare resource to propel space colonization and exploration, and also could be (reasonably) used for the more space opera things of a setting, like FTL, interestellar communications, power armor, artificial gravity, megastructures, and other things. And much like rare resources like oil and rare earths in our world, they could spark conflicts, resource curses, rich 'petrostates', and so on.

Some ideas of where you could find them;

• Asteroids, of course, but very rarely. Nuggets of NMEs (hey there's a nice acronym and everything!) could be found in one on a thousand asteroids, maybe in ten thousands. That's enough of course for justifying a huge asteroid industry; common asteroids and comets can be sold for materials, but NMEs can make you very rich. And also goes VERY nicely with my proposal for asteroid herders (and bandits).
• It is theorized that in water worlds, as in rocky worlds covered completely by water thousands of km deep, would have very strange forms of matter at the bottom of the sea, including "Ice X" made by the pressure of all the water turning it into a solid. They could be major sources of NMEs, perhaps extracted by floating rigs that would have to be very strong indeed to both reach the bottom of the ocean and resist the titanic storms of such worlds.... maybe even giant predators... Similar goes for gas giants.
• Nebulae could produce have them, as consequences of supernovas. They could be dispersed in the star dust and gas, and be catched by huge "nets" and trawlers. Same with some particular star coronae.
• Pulsars, neutron stars, white dwarfs, etc. could also have them but extracting it from them would be very difficult, but maybe their (most likely dead) planets would be bathed with them. It wouldn't be an easy job by any means still, they most probably are also irradiated and dead cold.
• Dusty worlds were the NMEs are in the dust, but you have to catch it and process them, a difficult and time consuming proposition.
• Of course, there's also the option of All Purpose Crystals that can be found in rare worlds.
• A few, selected ecologies could incorporate them into their biochemistry or just fix them as 'waste' products. The idea of cutting down giant trees and deforesting ancient forests to get rare elements is a classic, isn't it...
• And of course, the rare habitable planet that has NMEs (perhaps brought by asteroid impacts or tectonic activity) in a shirtsleeves enviroment that is comparatively easy to mine would be come very rich very quick indeed (or be opressed by resource megacorporations...)

I'm also thinking they should be very hard to process and maybe transport, so even worlds that have them in abundance would have trouble exploiting them fully. Maybe they need to be stored in magnetic containement fields like plasma or antimatter, or maybe they need to be cristalized by a time-consuming, high tech process.

Also, there would be different kinds of these rare elements. Some are used in FTL, others can produce artificial gravity fields with the proper energy and machines, others are superconductors, others can be used for interstellar communications (tachyon particles are often the name given for them) and maybe even augument psionic and spiritual abilities...

 

[Emote Control]

Thank you!!

I also don't think most planets will be united in the surface, HOWEVER, when space trade (and warfare) becomes a significant industry, they will probably have organizations to represent them in interestellar affairs. One good model could be Greek city states and leagues; nations would be independent but represented in trade and warfare by loose alliances. As the scale grows, the city-states could become planets which themselves are leagues of nations.

Also I like very much those aliens! They are alien enough yet they would fit right into a space opera setting. I like how hive minds are represented by the hive itself and not by queens or anything like that. And Medusas look creepy yet mythological.



I LOVE this idea, especially because it gives a rare resource to propel space colonization and exploration, and also could be (reasonably) used for the more space opera things of a setting, like FTL, interestellar communications, power armor, artificial gravity, megastructures, and other things. And much like rare resources like oil and rare earths in our world, they could spark conflicts, resource curses, rich 'petrostates', and so on.

Some ideas of where you could find them;

• Asteroids, of course, but very rarely. Nuggets of NMEs (hey there's a nice acronym and everything!) could be found in one on a thousand asteroids, maybe in ten thousands. That's enough of course for justifying a huge asteroid industry; common asteroids and comets can be sold for materials, but NMEs can make you very rich. And also goes VERY nicely with my proposal for asteroid herders (and bandits).
• It is theorized that in water worlds, as in rocky worlds covered completely by water thousands of km deep, would have very strange forms of matter at the bottom of the sea, including "Ice X" made by the pressure of all the water turning it into a solid. They could be major sources of NMEs, perhaps extracted by floating rigs that would have to be very strong indeed to both reach the bottom of the ocean and resist the titanic storms of such worlds.... maybe even giant predators... Similar goes for gas giants.
• Nebulae could produce have them, as consequences of supernovas. They could be dispersed in the star dust and gas, and be catched by huge "nets" and trawlers. Same with some particular star coronae.
• Pulsars, neutron stars, white dwarfs, etc. could also have them but extracting it from them would be very difficult, but maybe their (most likely dead) planets would be bathed with them. It wouldn't be an easy job by any means still, they most probably are also irradiated and dead cold.
• Dusty worlds were the NMEs are in the dust, but you have to catch it and process them, a difficult and time consuming proposition.
• Of course, there's also the option of All Purpose Crystals that can be found in rare worlds.
• A few, selected ecologies could incorporate them into their biochemistry or just fix them as 'waste' products. The idea of cutting down giant trees and deforesting ancient forests to get rare elements is a classic, isn't it...
• And of course, the rare habitable planet that has NMEs (perhaps brought by asteroid impacts or tectonic activity) in a shirtsleeves enviroment that is comparatively easy to mine would be come very rich very quick indeed (or be opressed by resource megacorporations...)

I'm also thinking they should be very hard to process and maybe transport, so even worlds that have them in abundance would have trouble exploiting them fully. Maybe they need to be stored in magnetic containement fields like plasma or antimatter, or maybe they need to be cristalized by a time-consuming, high tech process.

Also, there would be different kinds of these rare elements. Some are used in FTL, others can produce artificial gravity fields with the proper energy and machines, others are superconductors, others can be used for interstellar communications (tachyon particles are often the name given for them) and maybe even augument psionic and spiritual abilities...

All great suggestions. And yeah, the worst thing that could probably happen to a non-spacefaring race would be a big hole in the ground on their world that spouts money.

As for processing and transport, my idea is that you can't just lug them around -- to make practical use requires specialized expertise and equipment, and nanotechnology won't work because the molecules they form don't react quite right. Instead you have to have "old-style" industrial technology.

An interstellar civilization is possible without them, in my thinking, with artificial gravity and FTL and whatnot, but to access the metaparallel dimensions more fully NMEs are required, especially at lower tech levels.

 

[Thanksforallthefish]

Here's a suggestion that is designed for a Space Opera world but could also work in a more realistic world:

Startrees

A Startree is one of the names given to a very diverse clade of photosynthetic spaceborn lifeforms, that grow on comets and watery asteroids in or near habitable zones. Startrees are gigantic organisms; the largest can be 50km in diameter, as huge as a small moon, but tipically grow between 1 and 5km in diameter. Most startrees follow a basic growth pattern of huge 'roots' that extract CO2, water and nutrients from asteroids and comets, which then grow into a tangled network of branches and leaves with large internal spaces where most of the symbiotic creatures that maintain the startree reside, and also serve as reservoirs for water. Startree wood is very hard, vaccuum resistant, and it incorporates metallic strucutres in its growth. Startree leaves vary in color depending on their star's light spectrum, but they are most often very dark green, with iridiscent structures. Many have huge 'currents' of bioluminiscent fungi that illuminate the interior leaves.

Phylogenetic analysis shows that all startrees came from the same common ancestor around 4 to 5 billion years ago and then dispersed over seeds transported by star winds (and doubtlessly, civilizations using them), diversifying across the star systems of the Galaxy. There is an ongoing debate about if the original startrees were a bioengineered work or a product of natural evolution, with many theories supporting both proposals. In any case, startrees have already long become an essential part of galactic ecology, having diversified for a lot of different star types and niches, including planetary rings and nebulae. A few worldjungles, like those in the worlds of [name pending] and [name pending], have been confirmed to be descedend from startrees that survived planetfall; this is understood to be a rare occurence as startrees adapt very poorly to high-gravity enviroments. There is evidence that many startrees have been genetically modified over the eons*, though by this point, they are nearly indistinguishable from natural evolution.

Startrees have a complex symbiont ecology, with many bacteria, fungi, plant and animal species cleaning up the tree, producing and transporting nutrients, pruning dead branches, and keeping in check other species. These are even more diverse than startrees themselves, and often are completely different even between individual trees in a single star system. While bacteria and fungi are common to most startrees species many of the symbiotic species might have been introduced by ancient civilizations, in fact, some might be the last living fossils of their long-extinct planetary biospheres. The trees produce non-fertile fruit and 'nutrient' fountains to feed them; some are edible for many species, others are highly toxic. A very few startree species accumalate NME in their wood, like those in the [name pending] system. They are very sought after by miners.

Startrees themselves often congregate in 'forests', sharing pleasant, resource-rich orbits. The mechanics of startree communication, if any, are very poorly studied, though they do have mechanisms to detect liveable asteroids. Startree reproduction is a rare, long, and extremely complex process, highly variable from species to species. The recorded events of natural startree flowering and fructification (or sporification in some species) are so few that they are in the low thousands in the entire recorded history of the galaxy. They most often spread by asexual budding, sometimes aided by artificial means, but startree cultivation is still a young science.

There are many biologists, scientists and ecologists that exclusively study startrees; astrodendrology is a very prestigious profession in systems with high populations of them.

Startrees are often a welcome sight by space travellers, they represent a little bit of green and water in desolate systems, and the fruit, vegetables and meat they produce are delicacies in many systems. Their wood is extremely hard to work with, but it can be used to build space habitats and even small spaceships. Some of the largest forests even host small nature-based cultures, a few are considered native to the trees and nowhere else. However, they are also very fragile, and they can easily die from overexplotation or disruption of the symbiont culture. Their low reproduction rate and very long growth times (they often take centuries to reach adult size) means that they are very hard to replace, and some woods of the Galaxy like the [name pending] Woods are already gone forever. Many nations have forbidden any startree explotation at all, or limited it only to ocassional stops for sustainable gathering. Of course, these laws are difficult to enforce in the most remote systems.

*I use this literally, as in eon as a piece of geologic time...

 

[Emote Control]

Love it, @Thanksforallthefish. Lots of potential.

In fact, we could have the NMEs and the startrees together. Startrees require specific NMES to violate the usual thermodynamic laws that would seem to forbid them. As they grow their connected to metaparallel dimensions allows them to create more NMEs, in a manner similar to sapient races manufacturing technology, until they have enough built up to slingshot their seeds to another star.

And of course, cutting them down can allow one to process the wood and extract the exotic material, at the cost of killing the startree.

EDIT: In fact, my proposal for a history can be incorporated too. During the Burning Millennia, the startrees were ravaged, only a few percent surviving. The Ecological Restoration Bureau of the Unity was able to largely reverse this through delicate and expensive "reforestration" efforts, but now the collapse brings the startrees under threat once more.

 

[245]

So is this going to be a hard-scifi project or a space opera project, or both?

Also, here are some videos about FTL travel, to help you guys:

And here is a video about space empires and how they might look like in hard-SciFi:

 

[Thanksforallthefish]

All great suggestions. And yeah, the worst thing that could probably happen to a non-spacefaring race would be a big hole in the ground on their world that spouts money.

As for processing and transport, my idea is that you can't just lug them around -- to make practical use requires specialized expertise and equipment, and nanotechnology won't work because the molecules they form don't react quite right. Instead you have to have "old-style" industrial technology.

An interstellar civilization is possible without them, in my thinking, with artificial gravity and FTL and whatnot, but to access the metaparallel dimensions more fully NMEs are required, especially at lower tech levels.

Oh, that is a classic conflict unfortunately.

Possibly one could use the equivalent of particle accelerators to produce some of them, but that would be massively expensive technology only available to the greatest industrialized spots of the galaxy. If you are in a system that has something like that, you know you are in the pinnacle of galactic civilization.

I like the idea of there being many tiers of galactic industry, you have the dyson spheres and ringworlds which have the highest levels of population, industry, technology and comfort, then you have highly developed systems that have been through terraformed and/or industrialized, then you have frontier colonies that often are colonized for rare resources or ideological reasons, then scattered habitats and supply stations across the galaxy that are the equivalent of country towns with a gas station and not much else, and then the still primitive worlds for which the technology used in a small space habitat is virtually magic.

Of course this is massively expansive and will change depending on the scale we choose. That's why we should decide at least vaguely on a scale in time and space.

Love it, @Thanksforallthefish. Lots of potential.

In fact, we could have the NMEs and the startrees together. Startrees require specific NMES to violate the usual thermodynamic laws that would seem to forbid them. As they grow their connected to metaparallel dimensions allows them to create more NMEs, in a manner similar to sapient races manufacturing technology, until they have enough built up to slingshot their seeds to another star.

And of course, cutting them down can allow one to process the wood and extract the exotic material, at the cost of killing the startree.

EDIT: In fact, my proposal for a history can be incorporated too. During the Burning Millennia, the startrees were ravaged, only a few percent surviving. The Ecological Restoration Bureau of the Unity was able to largely reverse this through delicate and expensive "reforestration" efforts, but now the collapse brings the startrees under threat once more.

Thank you!

I was thinking of them being wholly biological, I think that some kind of biological structure or activity (I was thinking of a kind of fungi covering an asteroid) would be enough to warm up the water to be usable for a plant-like organism, but I'm still researching it for another project.

But NMEs could be used both to heat the surface and sending seeds through *FTL* which would explain how they're so widespread (though I gave them a couple billions of years of headstart). I think the forests that actually accumulate NMEs should be rare and highly prized, while the rest of the trees are mostly space wildlife, with many uses and even inhabitable, but not a major source of resources.

No setting is complete without Space Whales and Space Giant Worms... and Space Sargasso too...

And yes, I like the idea of many forests being planted during the Golden Age and now those methods are lost, maybe only a few new cultures retain them but they're time and resource consuming. Nature-based cultures will find them worth the time though.

So is this going to be a hard-scifi project or a space opera project, or both?

Also, here are some videos about FTL travel, to help you guys:

And here is a video about space empires and how they might look like in hard-SciFi:

So far the space opera option is narrowly winning (the poll expires tomorrow, vote now!) but even if it's not going to be full hard sci fi I hope we can keep plausibiity for it, maybe even going full hard-sci fi with some exceptions for the sake of the space opera setting (we would have FTL almost inevitably so that's always one...)

And yes, Isaac Arthur is awesome. My other big inspiration is Winchell Chung's Atomic Rockets website: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/. Both are a treasure trove for writing sci-fi.

 

[245]

While FTL exists, will wormholes and laser roads still exist as well?

 

[Deleted member 90949]

If FTL is used, it may be worthwhile to look at how Orion's Arm deals with the causality issue, something most sci-fi ignores.

 

[Brady Kj]

There's a lot of contributions that are coming together to a pretty unique but coherent universe. Feel free to flesh out the aliens I listed. I came up with the blue and yellow ones on the spot, and the Medusas are from a sketch I drew a year or two ago. I'll add that the little yellow things were successful in getting widespread through space because they didn't mind generational ships, since they consider the hives to be people. And the blue ones got successful at it because they don't age. And while the Medusas do age, the ones who make it past the larval stage tend to live a long time. They're an r-selection species, the most intelligent r-selection species known to science. Ooh, and if someone can think of a way to combine elements of a jellyfish life cycle (because they are also called Medusa), that would be epic.

 

[DannyPlayz989]

I also want to be involved!

 

[Deleted member 90949]

Okay, here is an idea I have. Think of this as Orion's Arm meets the SCP foundation.

It is set in a single system that was colonized by humanity long ago. For the vast majority of humans, they live in utopian wonder. All human technology is strictly hard-sci fi, no FTL or artificial gravity (other than inertia). If you looked at the setting from the perspective of one of the billions of inhabitants things look pretty good. Think of a retro sci-fi utopia.

The focus of this setting however is a secretive department dedicated to the study of unexplained and mysterious phenomena. Consider stuff like this from Orion's Arm:

A large megastructure with abandoned and unexplored regions.

Areas of human-colonized space that have stopped emitting signals.

A distant galaxy with a message from an alien civilization stating that a massive object is moving towards them.

A strange sphere billions of years old orbiting a star younger than it that has mysterious properties.

A wormhole leading to extragalactic space, that some believe may exist beyond the observable universe or possibly in a different universe.

Some ideas of my own:

Evidence is found that humanity has been present in this system for much longer than initially believed.

Ruins, human or otherwise, are found under the arctic ice sheet of one of the colonized planets.

Erratic messages from another colonized system become increasingly panicked and strange, until suddenly they suddenly go back to normal and start inviting everyone to come visit...

Cultist gangs that worship strange ruins.

A mysterious wormhole leading to a mysterious place.

My hope is that the lack of FTL will make them feel more isolated and detached from a cold, horrifying universe. A universe that makes their 1950s retro sci-fi utopia feel all the more warmer.

 

[Thanksforallthefish]

Here's my take on a semi-plasuible FTL drive that also works for a space opera:

Alcubierre-Zavoisky Drive:

The Alcubierre-Zavoisky Drive, colloquially known as the AZ Drive, or just the Drive, is the piece of technology that holds galactic civilization together. By warping space in front and behind of it, through a negative vacuum bubble projected by Zavoisky Coils, a starship is able to move great distances without going into relativistic effects, thus effectively allowing faster-than-light travel, though the ship itself never approaches the speed of light, it just warps space enough for displacement, thus it is only an 'apparent' faster-than-light travel. The 'thicker' such a bubble is, the 'faster' a starship can warp space and thus travel large distances beyond what the speed of light and relativistic travel can allow.

The AZ Drive was first conceived by Miguel Alcubierre in the late XX century on Earth, through a creative interpretation of Einstein's General Relativity, the Alcubierre Metrics. Over the years, many scientists advanced in their understanding of the Alcubierre Metric, but they couldn't apply it in practice, with the requirements of exotic matter and energy seemingly unsurmountable. In [year pending], the engineer Ivan Zavoisky first demostrated a working vacuum bubble projector, [...] Newer designs have been improved by contact and trade with other species that use the drive, and the rise of NME industry[...]

[this part is intentionally kept vague because the history of such a drive will depend on the history of our setting. Zavoisky, and the rest of the engineers mentioned, are all fictional]

Zavoisky Coils are an incredibly sophisticated piece of machinery; even with centuries of development and mass-production, they are still extremely hard to manufacture and maintain. Extending as a ring around the starship, they use Repetto Projectors to create a negative vacuum bubble, estabilized by Shuang Estabilizers, which require a constant stream of exotic matter to sustain the bubble. Gu'ainti Rudders allow the starship to proppel itself and Lozano Microbubbles allow the crew to manuever. While the energy requirements to move the ship are rather modest, the energy invested to maintain the bubble and the exotic matter consumed increase with the 'warp factor', that is the ability to warp space and thus the effective 'speed' of the ship. Maintaining higher warp factors consume large amounts of energy and exotic matter, especially if the size of the ship (and bubble) is very large.

Once an Alcubierre bubble is dissipated, the ship rejoins 'regular' space, though failures might (and have) mean a starship exploding violently into Hawking radiation. Alcubierre bubbles are very 'noisy' and relatively easy to detect, they produce a constant stream of tachyons; while these can't be used for interstellar communication despite several experiments like the Arce Radio, they can be used to detect certain ships in a range, a factor that has been very much used in interstellar warfare. Attempts to make 'stealth' AZ drives have so far been unsuccesful.

[Effectively, exotic matter is our fuel here; the faster a ship goes the more exotic matter it consumes to maintain the bubble, and the larger it is the more energy the correspondingly bigger warp bubble needs. Exactly how limited these are will depend in our setting, unless someone understands theoretical physics and can help out... Also, the tachyons while can't be used for communcation, CAN be detected, so they can be used by Space Radar]

Alcubierre bubbles are sensitive to gravity fields and do not work well in matter-rich space, because of Solano Interference. This initially limited AZ drive starships only to 'clear' interstellar routes without any major bodies or dust. Modern AZ drives are more resistant to Solano Interference, but they're still seldom used inside star systems except in 'clear' orbits. A major component of space infrastructure are 'icebreaker' ships that clear paths inside solar systems for AZ drives to work through.

[Your standard excuse for why ships can't enter FTL from the atmosphere of a planet. Suck it, J.J. Abrams. Also, Space Roads]

While the interactions of the AZ drive with General Relativity are beyond the scope of this introduction, it is worth noting that despite early fears that it would break casuality, (especially with some espectacularly violent failures in early development that were attributed to 'the Universe protecting its own timeline', the Chronological Protection Conjecture proposed by Stephen Hawking in the 20th century has held. The AZ drive does not violate the conjecture, because it doesn't ever surpass the speed of light, it only warps space so it looks so. So there are no casuality violations.

[It sounds stupid when you write it like that, but it's logical. If our FTL drive violated casuality, it couldn't exist. But it exists. So it doesn't violate casuality. QED.]

Despite technically never breaking the speed of light, AZ drives are still measured by light speed or "c", because they 'cut' the travel time that light would take. Early starships could only reach 10 c before the Alcubierre bubble became unestable, and their range was limited by the supply of exotic matter and energy, especially in long trips. This effectively meant that only large starships with huge power plants and extremely sophisticated components could do interstellar travel.

With the development of mass production, nowadays, most commercial starships can reach speeds of 1000 c [?], allowing civilian galactic travel. Starships are still limited by refuelling and maintaince facilities; an AZ drive starship spends about a quarter of its life undergoing maintaince. Most starships are between a hundred meters and a kilometer long, the upper limit for stable Alcubierre bubbles with current technology. Small spaceships can't afford the huge energy and equipment requirements of a full AZ Drive, so they're transported in Ferry starships, a major factor of the galactic economy.

[GOTTA TRIPLE CHECK ALL THESE FIGURES, THESE ARE THE IMPORTANT PART; HOW PEOPLE USE THE DRIVE ITSELF. I did intentionally make the average sizes *near* most classic sci-fi ships. The smaller interstellar ships would be roughly comparable to a nuclear submarine or destroyer, and just as complex, to keep in mind. This also prevents people creating FTL missiles, you need a huge energy plant and complicated machinery to have a FTL ship, not something you would want to waste in a Holdo Manuever or bombing a planet]

 

[Emote Control]

I would have, for theme's sake, that when two vaccuum bubbles meet the interactions get very complicated, and cancel each other in suprising, yet predictable, ways. Thus boarding actions can exist in outer space.

We should also have that the bubbles not only can't enter in anything like an atmosphere, they can't exit in an atmosphere. That's a better excuse for not having FTL suicide bombers than "the cost".

Finally, I'm partial to "vacuum density variations" rather than space dust requiring the interstellar ships to stay, for large part, in established lanes. It's cooler.

 

[Thanksforallthefish]

While FTL exists, will wormholes and laser roads still exist as well?

I'd rather stick to a single method of FTL, whatever it is wormholes, an Alcubierre drive or something else. Micro-wormholes could exist to create an interestellar 'internet' like in Orion's Arm, but I much like better the idea of space only connected by spaceships, like in the age of sail.

By laser roads I assume you mean laser propelled ships? Yes, of course, I can see them being a major piece of infrastructure.

If FTL is used, it may be worthwhile to look at how Orion's Arm deals with the causality issue, something most sci-fi ignores.

Ahhh, causality makes my head spin. I don't understand it at all. I just handwaved it in my proposal for a FTL drive by saying that since it technically there's no violation of relativity, there are also no violations of causality. Which make sense; otherwise, it just wouldn't work at all.

But if we do wormholes, yes, Orion's Arm is pretty much the best source on how they would work around.

There's a lot of contributions that are coming together to a pretty unique but coherent universe. Feel free to flesh out the aliens I listed. I came up with the blue and yellow ones on the spot, and the Medusas are from a sketch I drew a year or two ago. I'll add that the little yellow things were successful in getting widespread through space because they didn't mind generational ships, since they consider the hives to be people. And the blue ones got successful at it because they don't age. And while the Medusas do age, the ones who make it past the larval stage tend to live a long time. They're an r-selection species, the most intelligent r-selection species known to science. Ooh, and if someone can think of a way to combine elements of a jellyfish life cycle (because they are also called Medusa), that would be epic.

Nice, it's working very well so far!

I'll see what can I find in my invertebrate biology textbooks...

I also want to be involved!

Feel free to suggest or comment just about anything!

Okay, here is an idea I have. Think of this as Orion's Arm meets the SCP foundation.

It is set in a single system that was colonized by humanity long ago. For the vast majority of humans, they live in utopian wonder. All human technology is strictly hard-sci fi, no FTL or artificial gravity (other than inertia). If you looked at the setting from the perspective of one of the billions of inhabitants things look pretty good. Think of a retro sci-fi utopia.

The focus of this setting however is a secretive department dedicated to the study of unexplained and mysterious phenomena. Consider stuff like this from Orion's Arm:

A large megastructure with abandoned and unexplored regions.

Areas of human-colonized space that have stopped emitting signals.

A distant galaxy with a message from an alien civilization stating that a massive object is moving towards them.

A strange sphere billions of years old orbiting a star younger than it that has mysterious properties.

A wormhole leading to extragalactic space, that some believe may exist beyond the observable universe or possibly in a different universe.

Some ideas of my own:

Evidence is found that humanity has been present in this system for much longer than initially believed.

Ruins, human or otherwise, are found under the arctic ice sheet of one of the colonized planets.

Erratic messages from another colonized system become increasingly panicked and strange, until suddenly they suddenly go back to normal and start inviting everyone to come visit...

Cultist gangs that worship strange ruins.

A mysterious wormhole leading to a mysterious place.

My hope is that the lack of FTL will make them feel more isolated and detached from a cold, horrifying universe. A universe that makes their 1950s retro sci-fi utopia feel all the more warmer.

That's an amazing idea! Even with FTL though, there will be vast, and I mean VAST stretches of space unexplored where we can fit all sorts of mysteries and terrors. I can see major space powers having 'Unexplained Phenomena Bureaus' (basically a formal, not-secret SCP Foundation) to deal with all the weird stuff they can find. Most probably they compete with each other for control of the really good stuff.

Orion's Arm gets quite scary sometimes with all the god-like AIs, viruses, the lurking chaos that could destroy galactic civilization and such. I would probably be some kind of ludd who wants to go to a remote planet/habitat and leave all that AI god nonsense behind...

I would have, for theme's sake, that when two vaccuum bubbles meet the interactions get very complicated, and cancel each other in suprising, yet predictable, ways. Thus boarding actions can exist in outer space.

We should also have that the bubbles not only can't enter in anything like an atmosphere, they can't exit in an atmosphere. That's a better excuse for not having FTL suicide bombers than "the cost".

Finally, I'm partial to "vacuum density variations" rather than space dust requiring the interstellar ships to stay, for large part, in established lanes. It's cooler.

Hmm, I see boarding actions working better in 'real' space. I don't know what would exactly happen when two vacuum bubbles meet, but I think they would just dissolve themselves. So maybe ships could meet in deep space...

Yes indeed. My thought is that in a high-gravity enviroment (how much gravity is something to define) a bubble just can't be maintained, and you have to turn it off or risk the destruction of your ship. (One major problem with the real-life Alcubierre drive is that warping space would probably destroy anything in front or behind you... I'm cheerfully assuming that warping space isn't as destructive as it sounds...)

That could work better, yes, and could give us established space routes like hyperlanes in Star Wars. I don't plan it to be a drive fixed on routes, though. You can potentially go anywhere with it, but much like real life ships, there's no guarantee you won't hit a reef or a sandbank or harsh seas... So you have to navigate carefully. The routes between the major systems are well explored and mapped, other place less so.

 

[245]

I'd rather stick to a single method of FTL, whatever it is wormholes, an Alcubierre drive or something else. Micro-wormholes could exist to create an interestellar 'internet' like in Orion's Arm, but I much like better the idea of space only connected by spaceships, like in the age of sail.

The way I see it, I can see wormholes being used first in the same way horse were used before cars to travel long distances, with FTL being the cars. I can even see other civilizations creating wormholes and using them instead of the Alcubierre-Zavoisky Drive thanks to different technological developments.

Another way that wormholes can be used is maybe as weapons, like someone using a wormhole as a giant space laser to attack their enemy or like a wormhole bomb in what was shown in cowboy bebop.

 

[Emote Control]

We can have both wormholes and "regular FTL" like in Honor Harrington (an SF series where the missiles had character development than the people, there was so much technobabble).

We can say that wormholes exist and like in most of SF, provide nearly-instantaneous travel between distant areas (possibly not even in the same galaxy). However, they are rare, and not all of them exit at useful points (so what if the nearest galaxy is two hundred years travel instead of eight thousand), and require special equipment to open when they do travel between two developed areas. So you need the AZ drive to go travel around where there are no convenient openings. Or maybe the wormholes aren't paired, but in cycles, That would be cool. By that I mean you can't go from B to A just because you can go from A to B. Rather it's A to B to C to D to ... K to A. I can actually see specialized transport ships designed only for wormhole travel, carrying cargo and passengers on routes, and at the stops unloading their wares to sell or trade to AZ-drive ships, and going on to the next wormhole.

 

[Emote Control]

An idea for AIs in this setting, trying to embody the limited computer technology found in many Space Opera universes with modern ideas about information and psychology.

Technobabble ahead.

Consciousness is closely tied to the individual body in organic life, and in artificial systems as well. Thus a conscious computer system is tied very heavily to its hardware and sensors as well as its software. Copying an AI to another system without extensive preparatory work and post-transfer acclimatization is a very bad idea, greatly degrading its capabilities. In addition, AIs slowly degrade unless tended to by cyberpsychologists, becoming less and less rational and intelligent as time passes.

In the age of the Unity, therefore, conventional computer technology and expert systems were greatly preferred, and while AIs were an important part of the interstellar government they didn't run things totally. This practical issue was reinforced by a deep cultural suspicion of hyperintelligent computers dating back to the Burning Millennium, when irrational machine intelligences were weaponized along with everything else, and stopping them was a major job after the wars ended.

Today, two hundred years after the collapse of the tech base, AIs are rarely created anew. Those that exist are almost always far less capable and able to interact with the material world than they used to be, since the expertise to maintain their minds has largely vanished.

 

[SIngemeister]

So, here's something I whipped up quickly for consideration. A friendly neighbourhood species of horrifying space-crab-spiders which totally aren't a giant reference to David Bowie

ALIEN PROFILE

Species name: Ch!alerancasada (Xenarachne sapiens)
Alias: Boweys, Star Spiders, Armour-Spiders, Challies
Origin World: Kontatarikikikikin; a dry, red-floral iron-rich world orbiting the blue giant Hachach!akach!anatar
Notable Interstellar Polities: People's Republic of Irritikkanet, Acharrallch!kan Autocracy, Tokkan-Tor State

Biological Overview:

• Pseudo-radial symmetry
• Nine motor limbs, four manipulator limbs (two light, two heavy)
• Reproduction via idiobiontic oviposition
• Average 2.1m height and leg joint
• Produce venom with paralytic effects on Kontatarikikikikini wildlife, administered through stingers on light manipulator limbs
• Average lifespan of 55 terran years
• Broadly similar mindset/mutually understandable mindset to humanity, asides from attitudes to cannibalism and infanticide
• Series of fleshy antennae organs around the eyes act to detect sound and scent
• Non-sapient for the first sixth months of life, and siblings will attack and devour over this time period. Normally, under 3-8 of the 60+ eggs laid will survive to become full adults.
• Silicate-based endoskeleton and scute-armour on skin

Political Overview:

• Hachach!akach!anatar is expected to begin descent into the next stage of the solar life cycle within millenia. As such, plans are being made to slowly evacuate Kontatarikikikikin of people and cultural history. Disputes have erupted between the various Ch!alerancasadan nations as to who gets what.
• The Ch!alerancasada were the first species to make contact with humanity, and as such the two species enjoy relatively good relations. The planet of New Keynes-Orich!kankar serves as the first major joint-species settlement.
• Due to the gravity well of Hachach!akach!anatar, the Ch!alerancasada did not get beyond their solar system before the discovery of (either an FTL drive OR possibly a weird wormhole that is the reason Hachach!akach!anatar managed to stay as a stable blue giant. The eventual decay would be linked to the wormhole fading as well).
• Ch!alerancasadan clothing tends to incorporate large amounts of iron trinkets,due to the iron-rich nature of the planets
• The broodbeast, a large and extremely docile herd animal is a key part of culture, as it is the culturally accepted best host for Ch!alerancasada spawnings.
• One of the Ch!alerancasadan religions, Annanatar-Ch!esk has developed into a fad in certain human colonies, focusing specifically on the constructions of iron windchimes and bells arranged across a weblike structure as a meditative aid

Spoiler: Ridiculously rough image