Sci-fi world ideas

  • So I've got two different ideas for FTL travel. Both are basically just magic, but it counts as sci-fi if you make up the rules for how it works. Totally...
  • The first is the less-believable of the two I think: "Fusion Hearts", the full power of a sun condensed down to a single engine core. To be fair, in my series Stars have already been established as being alive, so it's more like powering your ship with an angel's soul (Which is less scientific obviously, but seems more likely to produce FTL travel, since real-world stars can't exceed the speed of light. Kind of by definition)
  • This is a very safe and reliable method of travel, though it would be relatively  rare (I don't imagine many Stars would agree to live their lives as glorified battery packs. Although, I suppose that's what they already are for solar systems?). Only about a thousand or so of these would actually exist, maybe even only a few hundred
  • It would also be much slower than the other method: I think a decade from Earth to the edge of the Milky Way is about right. That's 25,000 light years, so about 2,000 times faster than the speed of light. A snail's pace, compared to Warp speed or Hyper space. This, combined with the rarity, leads to sparsely explored Galaxies
  • The second FTL method would be the use of a technobabble radiation. The upside would be top speeds far in excess of even most sci-fi series, making the journey between Galaxies take less than a year
  • Downside number one would be the radiation, obviously, is very bad for you. Only certain races with a high tolerance for radiation poising would be able to crew these ships. Passengers of other races might be a possibility on larger ships, where they can be kept far enough away from the engines
  • Downside number two is this radiation being bad for the environment. As in "breaks down space/time" bad for the environment. So these engines could only be used in the empty void between Galaxies, where they can't hurt any habitable systems
  • I don't know, I think these two systems combined could lead to an interesting set up, where trade between Andromeda and the Milky Way is more common than trade between planets within the same Galaxy
  • This got me thinking, for whatever reason, about a way to capture that "post-civilization" vibe from dystopia and zombie stories, without having to resort to the overused (and overly depressing) tropes of those kind of settings.
  • What if Humans discover these ways to travel FTL... and simply leave? Like, who would want to stay on boring old Earth when you can live on Pandora or Maktaba or the starship Enterprise?
  • Obviously not everyone would leave, but give it a couple centuries and Earth's population could be counted in the millions, instead of the billions. This gives you that bittersweet "empty" vibe for the planet, without resorting to climate change of viruses or nazis or anything
  • The homeworld of Humanity is remembered fondly, but for most people... it's that place where your Grandparents lived, but left for better job opportunities. Now it's inhabited by the sentimental, the introverted or the just plain crazy
  • Which, frankly, sounds like an awesome setting...

Comments

  1. Sort of like the exodus from Europe in America's history, but on a larger scale. Kind of like it.

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  2. In my series the Veritas can produce a black hole, smaller then a pen head, and that draws the ship faster than light because it's traveling over less space. The drawback being the completely impossible amount of power it would take to make a black hole.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You could just call it a TB drive and not go into details, but that wouldn't be as much fun/satisfying.

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