Jump Gates vs Jump Drives

[FrankR]

What are the rules of this universe?

Are ship board FTL drives possible?
How difficult to maintain are FTL drives?
Are they fast or slow? (ie months to go 1 LY or less than a week)
How long does it take to build a jump gate?
How expenive is an FTL drive compared to a jump gate pair.
What percentage of the cost of a ship is the FTL drive?
Is the FTL drives safe for long term exposure?

 

[Good]

In B5 at least, it was really a question of size and economy. the bigger ships had self-contained jump drives, but they seemed to imply that such drives were expensive, and thus limited to military ships and high value cargos. The gates allowed bulk transit and ships too small for a drive to jump from place to place. It made a lot of sense to me, both from a pretend tech and a storytelling perspective.

 

[ThunderAeroI]

I stand by the fact that they are useless.

Did you even read my post?

- If you build one, and have to manually travel to the other end, everyone who would use it is dead already.

- if you build one, and travel close to c to build the next one, everyone else is still dead.


The jump gate is just too time consumming to be practical.

It took Voyager 2 12 years to reach Neptune. It took 25 years to reach the heliosphere. I was alive when Voyager 2 took off and I'm still alive now. Was Voyager 2 too time consuming to bother with?

How about this one: The Space Program was launched in 1958 ('56, really). Apollo was initiated in 1961. We landed on the moon eight years later.

If you can go half the speed of light, you can be in Alpha Centauri in eight years.

Is that too time consuming to bother with?

I read your post, all I am saying is that if your going to use the gate structure, you have to have a valid reason to build it. It has to go somewhere usefull. You may be able to build a network of gates within a system rather quick, but to go anywhere usefull for population or planets you have to go along way away.

 

[ThunderAeroI]

What are the rules of this universe?

Are ship board FTL drives possible?
How difficult to maintain are FTL drives?
Are they fast or slow? (ie months to go 1 LY or less than a week)
How long does it take to build a jump gate?
How expenive is an FTL drive compared to a jump gate pair.
What percentage of the cost of a ship is the FTL drive?
Is the FTL drives safe for long term exposure?

Well thats the trick is it not. This is our universe and no other. You can use other sci-fi shows as the base of your reason, but none of that really changes the context of the question.

Why build the gate structure when in the end it cant go anywhere within a reasonable amount of time that your civilation would still care about it when its finally built.

Once you get a fully working node done between two planets, then your good. But you can reasonably expect any civilization capable of building such a device should have some longivity in it. The problem being that type of thought process isn't followed in any source material. The people that built the gates are usually long dead.

The notable expection being B5 where we know how they do it and are around to do it.

 

[USS KG5]

Why build the gate structure when in the end it cant go anywhere within a reasonable amount of time that your civilation would still care about it when its finally built.

Why assume they take a long time to build? If it is even as much as a couple of years it still makes sense to establish trade routes. The Panama canal for example took far longer, without space-age tech!

Once you get a fully working node done between two planets, then your good. But you can reasonably expect any civilization capable of building such a device should have some longivity in it. The problem being that type of thought process isn't followed in any source material. The people that built the gates are usually long dead.

Like in "Mass Effect"? Well in that they aren't dead just absent - did you have a particular story in mind?

The notable expection being B5 where we know how they do it and are around to do it.

Well ACTUALLY in B5 everyone found the gates, took them to bits and learnt how to build more. Presumably Lorien's race built the very first ones and the first ones many more. Who invented them is never really explained though.

 

[Anticitizen]

In Wing Commander and The Forever War, 'jump gates' or 'jump points' were not physical mechanisms, but instead something natural about the stellar cosmology that allowed a ship to use whatever FTL tech it had to move from one of these points to another. It made for good storytelling, because these became tactical assets in war.

 

[Snaploud]

Another possibility is that jump-gate technology is created centuries or millenia after humanity has colonized other planets via much slower means. Each planet is self-contained until details of the invention is sent via some means of communication (radio or something much faster).

I believe something similar was discussed in a science fiction book I read in the '90s. The idea was that an alien race made contact with humanity, but each side would have to build a wormhole for any physical contact to be possible.

 

[Lindley]

^Contact?

 

[Snaploud]

^Contact?

Good thought...but I was thinking of something more obscure:

Einstein's Bridge by John Cramer

http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Bri...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240893692&sr=8-1

Although, looking over the description:

I remembered the plot incorrectly. They didn't need a wormhole on both ends. Rather, they just needed a signal with which to target a particular location/universe/dimension.

"Arriving too late for a full review, physicist-author Cramer's latest hard science fiction yarn (Twistor, 1989) begins in an alternate ``bubble'' universe where the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project didn't collapse through lack of funding in the 1990s. Instead, in 2004, the search for the elusive Higgs boson begins--but the operation of the SSC inadvertently sends a signal into another bubble universe, this inhabited by the malignant and utterly ruthless Hive, who colonize new universes by completely obliterating the competition. Fortunately, the benevolent Makers also receive the signal and send a message back alerting Earth to the danger. Cramer splendidly demonstrates just how fascinating and mind- boggling real science can be, and shows exactly how vulnerable basic research is to political whim."

I enjoyed the last hundred or so pages of this book the most. It's a little dry over-all, though.

 

[PurpleBuddha]

^Contact?

Interesting.

If there are several other races out, the number of them that are much older than ours could be pretty high. Given that, how likely do you think some form of instantaneous quantum entanglement type communication could be developed and employed by multiple species?

How amazing would it be to carry on a real time relationship with a species half way across the galaxy? If things such as jump gates really are possible, part of the distance issue in gate planting would be solved.

Or, short of that, maybe multiple transmissions could be sent in every direction containing specific instructions on how to make the gate. For the most part, those advanced enough to figure out how to read the message would also be able to understand it. This would be more like Contact, I supposed, though not quite the same.

 

[Kaziarl]

If I recall in B5 it was power consumption. It took so much energy to open one of these gates, that most ships just cant do it on their own. They also served as navigational points so they wouldn't get lost in hyperspace.