Thanks to a fellow trekker friend of mine, Ive gotten into the new BSG series. One thing I like about the new BSG is the idea of their "jumps". Described as FTL travel which requires preparations, the way a jump is shown has become of interest to me. In BSG we see the ship disapear then reappear at a different location. There is no scene where we see the ship extending and compressing like a rubber band in Star Trek. I rather like BSG's idea of FTL travel. But now I wonder: which would be more realistic: BSG's jump as described above, or Star Trek's warp speed? It was always my understanding that in FTL travel, an object would disapear and then reapear like we see in BSG, but likewise if standing on a nonmoving object, when going into FTL, we could theoretically see ourselves before our arrival. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
ST Warp Speed and BSG's Jump
- Thread starter Brannigan
- Start date
Both are about equally "realistic", they just involve different methods. The rubber band effect seen on warp-driven ships is actually an optical illusion due to the fabric of space-time expanding rapidly behind the ship. Warp ships do not disappear instantly because it takes time for the engines to spool up to warp 1 from sublight speeds.
And yes, if you warp or jump over a distance short enough to still use a telescope, you could turn around after your journey and watch yourself departing. Then of course there's the possible issue of ALL FTL drives doubling as time machines, and thus obliterating temporal causality:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3v.html
You should read this page and anything else you can on this site. Lots of great "realistic" info on future space vehicles.
And yes, if you warp or jump over a distance short enough to still use a telescope, you could turn around after your journey and watch yourself departing. Then of course there's the possible issue of ALL FTL drives doubling as time machines, and thus obliterating temporal causality:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3v.html
You should read this page and anything else you can on this site. Lots of great "realistic" info on future space vehicles.
Both are equally feasible... but in Trek, warp speed is achieved using another dimension... aka "subspace". In BSG, no mention is made of another realm used for travel.
BSG's FTL jump is also instant, and thus much faster than the warp speeds on Trek.
BSG's FTL jump is also instant, and thus much faster than the warp speeds on Trek.
One thing BSG doesn't tell us is how long a jump takes for an observer -- say I'm sitting here on Earth and a Raptor jumps to Alpha Centauri, and after a few minutes proper time (for them), jumps back. Does it similarly seem like a few minutes for me, or might it be days, or even weeks, or some other random period of time?
I have a feeling that a "jump drive" rather than a "warp" or "hyperspace" drive might get around the problem of superluminal reference frames allowing you to break causality and therefore travel back in time (as relativity would seem to indicate for most FTL travel) by instantly removing you from one reference frame and dumping you in another. But I'm rusty.
Lots of famous sci-fi authors have preferred jump drives over warp drives.
Specifically, Issac Asimov's Foundation universes uses jump drives, as does Jerry Pournelle's books, and some of Larry Niven and Arthur C Clarke's work, also.
I have a feeling that a "jump drive" rather than a "warp" or "hyperspace" drive might get around the problem of superluminal reference frames allowing you to break causality and therefore travel back in time (as relativity would seem to indicate for most FTL travel) by instantly removing you from one reference frame and dumping you in another. But I'm rusty.
Lots of famous sci-fi authors have preferred jump drives over warp drives.
Specifically, Issac Asimov's Foundation universes uses jump drives, as does Jerry Pournelle's books, and some of Larry Niven and Arthur C Clarke's work, also.
The storytelling advantage for warp drive is, of course, maintaining a sense of the journey and travel time.
By the way, we don't know if BSG's jump engines are ultimately faster than warp drive. It seems to take time in between jumps to recharge, and we don't know what the range is.
By the way, we don't know if BSG's jump engines are ultimately faster than warp drive. It seems to take time in between jumps to recharge, and we don't know what the range is.
We sort of do. They've let it slip a couple of times. From "33," we know they can run the jump engines every half-hour, though probably not at their maximum range. From "The Hand of God," we know the scouting range of a regular raptor mission is six light years, and behind-the-scenes interviews say that that's the writers' assumption for the range of a single jump with a Colonial FTL system. From "Crossroads" we know that at a non-emergency pace, the Fleet can make about three jumps per day.
The only outlier is that in "Rapture," the Ionian Nebula 13,000 light years from the Fleet, and they arrive there in "Crossroads," around four to six months later. At the pace established in "Crossroads," with the range from "The Hand of God," it should've taken them almost two years to cover that distance. The easiest piece of data to throw out is the "Hand of God" reference, since it's the least specifically related to jumps, so it could be explained away as saying the raptors have a shorter single-jump range than the larger ships of the Fleet. That's already been implied, anyway, so if we say that the Raptors have about a quarter of the jump range of the larger ships of the Fleet, all the numbers check out and everything fits. I'd really prefer if they hadn't said the Ionian Nebula was that far away, though. It really inflates jump ranges.
Also, the Cylons have a considerably longer jump range than the Colonial Fleet. In "Pegasus," Starbuck says the Galactica is over two hundred jumps from Caprica, assuming they cut corners and jumped beyond their maximum safe range and were lucky enough never to miss their mark and get lost. A Cylon raider was able to make the jump from Caprica to Kobol in a single bound. Now, it's impossible to tell exactly how much distance had been covered between Galactica leaving the area of Kobol in "Home" and Starbuck's statement in "Pegasus," but it's safe to say that the Cylons' jump range is at least a hundred times that of the Colonials when traveling through charted space (more on this later). And in "Lay Down Your Burdens," the Raptors, using a Cylon jumping system, the Colonials were able to make a twenty jump round trip in five days. Assuming that they reserved a day to actually land and execute their mission (because that makes the math easier), that gives the Cylon FTLs a minimum traveling pace of five jumps per day.
The last thing to remember is that the limiting factor of jump range doesn't seem to be mechanical or fuel-related, but computational. Plotting a jump seems to require carefully taking into account all of the gravitational effects of all of the surrounding astronomical bodies, like making a bank shot at pool, or playing this game, using the ways gravity will alter the jump's trajectory so that they will still come out where they want to be. So the Cylon jump drive's increased range might simply be because their computers are better, and can calculate long-ranged jumps faster and with more confidence. That advantage would be negated in uncharted space, which is where the Fleet and the Cylons spend most of their time. That would explain why the Cylons haven't lapped the Fleet a dozen times in the race to Earth.
Ah. Admittedly I'm not a huge follower of BSG, and must have missed the direct references to jump ranges. Very interesting, though. Thanks for the info.
One decided advantage of warp driven ships over jump-types is that they can engage sublight targets while at warp, without their opponents being able to effectively return fire. Plus, you get to see where you're going. Jump engines, on the other hand, offer the benefit of instant escape from danger.
One thing that's always puzzled me about jump drives - at least the type where you can jump from anywhere to anywhere in range - is that they make the concepts of borders and defense rather obsolete, as described on the atomic rocket page. What's the point of having a defense fleet if your enemy can jump into orbit behind your lines and start lighting up your homeworld with nukes? Or if objects maintain their kinetic energy through a jump, it would be a really good way to blow up a planet with a reletivistic bomb - gather speed way out in space, and then have it jump to within a mile of the planet's surface. Boom.
One decided advantage of warp driven ships over jump-types is that they can engage sublight targets while at warp, without their opponents being able to effectively return fire. Plus, you get to see where you're going. Jump engines, on the other hand, offer the benefit of instant escape from danger.
One thing that's always puzzled me about jump drives - at least the type where you can jump from anywhere to anywhere in range - is that they make the concepts of borders and defense rather obsolete, as described on the atomic rocket page. What's the point of having a defense fleet if your enemy can jump into orbit behind your lines and start lighting up your homeworld with nukes? Or if objects maintain their kinetic energy through a jump, it would be a really good way to blow up a planet with a reletivistic bomb - gather speed way out in space, and then have it jump to within a mile of the planet's surface. Boom.
The most common way Sci-Fi authors have solved this problem with their jump drives in the past is to suggest they can't be used near gravity wells -- i.e. close to a star or planet. So, jumping from star to star from points as far out as, say, Saturn is possible, but not jumping right in to orbit of an inner planet. Another explanation is to suggest that jumps are only possible to specific points within a star system (Pournelle does this).
BSG's jump drives don't seem to suffer from this problem, Galactica being able to jump in to the upper atmosphere of a planet, or to the midst of an asteroid field, or in to a planet's orbit. However, perhaps jump drives are a little bulky to attach to your average nuclear bomb, although a small ship full of firecrackers would surely do the job. Some aspects of jump-based warfare have been explored in the series, as Cylon fighters are able to perform short-range jumps at will, but it's not been thought out very clearly. Perhaps there's an "anti-jump field" that can be used to protect a planet or short-range attacks on a large starship?
As for defense lines in space in general -- I've always found the ideas of 'borders' to be somewhat ridiculous, given the scales involved you'd need millions of relay stations or defense platforms to patrol a 2D border in 3D space. Much better to protect your inner solar systems and leave interstellar space 'to the wilds'. Perhaps this may lead to overlapping empires and polities in a more realistic scenario.
BSG's jump IS instant... on at least 2 occasions, we have seen a FTL jump, in-process, from a first-person POV... the first time, when Kara leads the team back to Caprica, and the second, when she goes looking for the Base Ship near the gas giant. BOTH times, the transition from point A to B has been absolutely instant.
Well, as stated Cylon raiders and Raptors seem to be able to jump across interstellar distances just fine, and a relativistic bomb doesn't use explosives, merely mass and velocity. Something the size of Galactica slamming into a planet at any substantial fraction the speed of light would annihilate all life on said planet most effectively. Hell, at those speeds even a Raptor would royally frak things up.
The jump drives in BattleTech seem to work on a similar basis, with the ship emerging at a distant point, and they have had malfunctions. There was an Inner Sphere ship (the region where most action is centered) that miscalculated its jump and wound up in Clan space, where it was quickly captured. The Clans invaded the IS soon after.
I will admit that I was never fond of the Cylons having better jumping in the nBSG pilot. It was too much of an advantage compared to the old version, where the raiders were carrier-based like the Galactica's fighters.
This, then, is puzzling in itself. Where does all that energy go? And at what relative velocity do they emerge from a jump at? Say a ship is in a stationary orbit above a planet its about to jump away from. Even if their velocity relative to THAT planet is zero, jumping into the orbit of another, distant planet would be problematic in that what was a stable orbit speed and vector in relation to the former planet might be a screaming descent course relative to the new one. How can they possibly adjust for this, especially when jumping into unexplored space?
There's a gadzillion other things that won't be preserved if an object suddenly disappears from coordinates XYZ, or appears in coordinates X'Y'Z'. Apparently, the balance always goes to "jumpspace" or "subspace"...
Or then the BSG jump drive acts like a stasis field: the trip takes a couple of moments in Newtonian timeframe (that is, we'd see the ship blink out at XYZ and then reappear at X'Y'Z' a few moments later if those coordinates were close to each other), but the traveler doesn't experience any passage of time during the trip. Asimov milked the ambiguities of this to a good effect in one of his positronic brain / Powell&Donovan crossover short stories...
Timo Saloniemi
Or then the BSG jump drive acts like a stasis field: the trip takes a couple of moments in Newtonian timeframe (that is, we'd see the ship blink out at XYZ and then reappear at X'Y'Z' a few moments later if those coordinates were close to each other), but the traveler doesn't experience any passage of time during the trip. Asimov milked the ambiguities of this to a good effect in one of his positronic brain / Powell&Donovan crossover short stories...
Timo Saloniemi
I asked him essentially the same thing. His response? "The jump drive is probably physically impossible. Don't worry about it."
The only thing I've heard of which MIGHT make a "jump drive" plausible is the semi-factual (ie, we have a tiny bit of evidence which MIGHT support it) theory that you can "couple" particles instantaneously over large distances.
I asked him essentially the same thing. His response? "The jump drive is probably physically impossible. Don't worry about it."
This could give a "jump drive" which would effectively create a perfect duplicate of you at a remote location with NO time effects (or so the theory goes).
The problem with this is that the original would still be at the original location!
This is one of those things that would have to be the basis of any "real" Transporter device (if we ever actually come up with such a thing), and could provide some form of FTL "propulsion."
The problem is best explained in a dramatic presentation in the movie "The Prestige." I won't go into any more detail, in case anyone hasn't seen the flick. But if you haven't, and you're interested... it's a good movie, well worth your time!
That's possible. In "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down," when the damaged Cylon raider was jumping around the Fleet, there was a good second or so gap between it disappearing and reappearing on the DRADIS scan. On the other hand, there are a dozen explanations for such a gap if the jump is objectively instantaneous (for instance, in that one second gap, the DRADIS spotted a new object, analyzed it to make sure it wasn't a glitch or piece of debris or something, determined that it was, in fact, a Cylon raider, and then threw it up on the screen once it had a positive ID), and there wasn't a continuous VFX shot showing the raider jumping and reappearing (which is pretty much the only definitive evidence I'd accept outside of a character actually saying so one way or the other).
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