Random pieces

[sojourner]

So, was a little bored and thought I would just throw out these random pieces. Maybe they will inspire someone or by posting them, re-inspire me.


“It's traveling at .89c in standard space. We cannot catch it using warp engines.”, said Science Officer McCay.
“What? But with the warp engines we can go hundreds of times faster than c. It should be easy to overtake that ship”, said Tactical Officer Vruust.
“Wrong again. We can effectively go hundreds of times faster than c, but in truth, warp drive imparts no momentum. Our ship is standing still inside this warp bubble. Imagine what would happen if a ship traveling at .89c tried to interact with a ship standing still?”
“McCay, there must be some way to stop that ship. What if we tractor it?”, Captain Levee said.


“Captain, a tractor would pull the ship into our warp bubble with it's momentum intact at which point it would be the same effect of us trying to grab it from a standstill as it flew by. Not pretty”

***************

​

“It's like the other sites”, Mary called out to me as I approached.
She waved down at me as I climbed the mound that was her current dig. The twin suns of Darnester were large but dim, resulting in a cold climate for planet II, called “Darncold” by the colonists. I had just returned from surveying the planting on our outer belt of farms. Mary grabbed me in a hug as I closed the last few steps, her dust covered gloves getting my shirt dirty. I didn't care.
“MMMmm, Hi honey”, she said, kissing me.
“Hi yourself”, I said, smiling down at her in my arms.
“So, what did the Fendrals leave for us to ponder?”, I said.
“Oh, it's great! You know how every site we have excavated has come from the same time period?”
“Yeah, didn't you say that was one of the things that bothered you? There was no sense of history? Like they just sprang up all at once?”, I said.


************

What You Take With You

Charlie peered out the window from the backseat of the family cruiser. At this altitude he could already see the coastline of the ocean rapidly approaching.
“Dad, why do we always go to the beach for vacation?”
“What's wrong with the beach?”, replied his father in the drivers seat.
“We always go there. I wanna go someplace different.”
The air car started to descend, banking left to approach a small house on the coast. The house was part of a small town that had sprung up to support the summer tourists. It was made of local materials and only supported the most basic of technologies. Charlie remembered last summer when he realized that the house did not even have it's own power unit. Dad had been loading a backup unit from home every year.
“Like where?” his dad replied.
“I want to go to another star! Like maybe Cinnam 3! Bobby went there last year and said it was so cool! They rode the beanstalk and visited the blue pools and stayed in a huge hotel in one of the KM scrapers!”, Charlie's excitement at the idea was apparent as his voice rose, “Why can't we go somewhere like that?”
His mother, who had been listening from the front seat, replied, “And how are we going to pay for that? We don't have the money to go on an interstellar cruise”
“Mothers' right Charlie, Bobby's parents have had some good fortune these last few years”



Charlie is woken by alarms 30 years later. Knocked unconscious, ship badly damaged, fighting to survive


jump to the “beach' again, Charlie is still moping along, but also doing the things kids usually do. His father talks to him more about “being there”


back on ship, charlie continues to fight the enemy and for survival


beach: final lesson by father. Charlie doesn't understand


final scene: on ship, charlie is near the end “sorry dad, maybe next time” or “thanks dad”
​

​

 

[Gangsta_Author]

“It's like the other sites”, Mary called out to me as I approached.
She waved down at me as I climbed the mound that was her current dig. The twin suns of Darnester were large but dim, resulting in a cold climate for planet II, called “Darncold” by the colonists. I had just returned from surveying the planting on our outer belt of farms. Mary grabbed me in a hug as I closed the last few steps, her dust covered gloves getting my shirt dirty. I didn't care.
“MMMmm, Hi honey”, she said, kissing me.
“Hi yourself”, I said, smiling down at her in my arms.
“So, what did the Fendrals leave for us to ponder?”, I said.
“Oh, it's great! You know how every site we have excavated has come from the same time period?”
“Yeah, didn't you say that was one of the things that bothered you? There was no sense of history? Like they just sprang up all at once?”, I said.

--------

Hmm...interesting. Perhaps I'd make the characters Bev & Jean-Luc. A few months into their honeymoon, post-Nemesis. During the events of "Titan: The Red King" as Titan encounters The Neyel.

 

[Myasishchev]

“It's traveling at .89c in standard space. We cannot catch it using warp engines.”, said Science Officer McCay.
“What? But with the warp engines we can go hundreds of times faster than c. It should be easy to overtake that ship”, said Tactical Officer Vruust.
“Wrong again. We can effectively go hundreds of times faster than c, but in truth, warp drive imparts no momentum. Our ship is standing still inside this warp bubble. Imagine what would happen if a ship traveling at .89c tried to interact with a ship standing still?”
“McCay, there must be some way to stop that ship. What if we tractor it?”, Captain Levee said.


“Captain, a tractor would pull the ship into our warp bubble with it's momentum intact at which point it would be the same effect of us trying to grab it from a standstill as it flew by. Not pretty”

I like this bit.

Although if this an Alcubierre drive thing, the tidal forces at the edges would destroy anything incoming (and I suppose spray it at the ship).

I had to do some thinking along these lines too, for something I was doing, involving a high-fraction-of-c vessel and a FTL starship. If tractor beams are just artificial gravity writ large, there's no reason why the starship couldn't tractor something at any range--the range of the gravitational force is infinite, and it propgates at at least c. You could eventually slow the high-relativistic-speed object down. It would just take a while.

Alternatives are parking the ship in front of the object and slowing it down with the navigational deflector (however that works) or perhaps a low-velocity phaser beam. These are also solutions that would take hours, days, or weeks.

At the end of the day, I think I'll probably go with the navigational deflector option, because it seems the easiest and least prone to failure, plus, critically, it's the only option that has the crewed section of my STL ship facing the frontal aspect of the Federation starship.

The main thing, though, was to accurately portray the difficulties with the interface between warp-capable and STL ships. I don't see why the starships of the magic-FTL future should be able to approach even .1c, let alone high fractions. I also don't like the apparently fashionable notion of a warp-impulse hybrid, and reckon that if a ship has an impulse drive, it's to move it in situations where a warp field would pose a public hazard, like above a planet like Earth with transporter beams and hundreds of small orbiters filling cislunar space. (And if it's a Newtonian drive, how much propellant can a Galaxy possibly pack? Virtually nothing).

In any case, a time lag between detection and capture presents the crew of the STL sleeper ship with time to prepare themselves.