The Soliton Wave Is Going to be THE AWESOME!

[Trekker4747]

... says Geordi, paraphrased.

Oh, except that you need massive emitters on BOTH the departure and destination planets. Which pretty much means you can't "go where none have gone before" and you need a conventional drive to get to the destination to make the dissipation units.

And you can't change course enroute.

And the wave messes up subspace comunication.

And if the wave fucks up it'll cut a planet in half.

But, yeah it'll be like the next first flight, or the first use of warp drive!

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Yeah, fuck the Wright brothers anyway - so you can fly a few feet down a beach. So what?

 

[T'Girl]

The advantage of the soliton wave is that the majority of the ships in the federation likely travel solely between well populated federation planets. Passagers liners, cargo ships, tanker ships, ore ships. Using the wave none of these ship would require warp engines, just impulse tug boats at either end of the trip. Might not even need to be ships, just something like a barge. Got to figure that the cost of the warp engines is a big piece of the total expense of a new ship, plus operating costs.

Starfleet, private exploration ships and other long range ships would still be equipped with warp drive.

 

[DonIago]

The Soliton Wave might have become more important once it became clear that warp engines were damaging subspace as well.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The advantage of the soliton wave is that the majority of the ships in the federation likely travel solely between well populated federation planets.

Which would of course become tempting targets for enemy attack. Knock out the sending or receiving stations and they make interstellar travel impossible...

 

[Timo]

Trains are useless in warfare, because of their obvious vulnerabilities. Yet a nation could never go to war without a train network...

Odds are, there's always gonna be demand for ridiculously inefficient, slow and unmaneuverable things like tanks, just like there's demand for efficient and fast modes of transportation for which the entire concept of maneuverability is meaningless. Tanks won't be used for mass transit now or in the future; starships might be solely reserved for warfare and exploration in the future of TNG, too.

The soliton thing sounds like it would do to warp travel what the ability to fly without aircraft would do to air traffic. Just flap your arms and lo, you are on another planet in another star system. The infrastructure is massive, yes - but the result is freedom from infrastructure, just like cell phones liberate our communication whilst requiring vastly more infrastructure than, say, a telegram system.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ Actually, the field generators and reception areas represent infrastructure in and of themselves. The analogy you're looking for is really mass transit systems like cross-country rail and such like that.

People still fly, of course, and the military barely uses trains at all. The two systems are likely to exist in tandem for centuries, each having their own advantages and disadvantages.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

I prefer the soliton wave as a weapon. Fire it at an enemy fleet, enemy planet or enemy star and watch it go poof.

 

[Ronald Held]

Do we have any evidence that this FTL technique was ever used even commercially?
Not canonically, AFAIR.

 

[Saquist]

This was an awful idea.
The wave actually increased speed without adding additional energy to it's Dynamo. That's not possible.

 

[Timo]

What about it would be impossible? The amount of energy there could be constant - it's just concentrated more as the wave moves on, rather than dispersed. Or the process itself could leech energy from the environment, leaving local subspace "depleted" for a while. All sorts of mechanisms are imaginable here - there's nothing fundamentally wrong about a constant-energy device accelerating. (Just look at a pendulum...)

^ Actually, the field generators and reception areas represent infrastructure in and of themselves. The analogy you're looking for is really mass transit systems like cross-country rail and such like that.

Umm... What analogy did I just use if not cross-country rail? And why wouldn't the generators and reception areas already be the "massive infrastructure" I was referring to? I don't get it - but I'd like to, because obviously there's some good point here I'm missing.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

You said:

The soliton thing sounds like it would do to warp travel what the ability to fly without aircraft would do to air traffic.

I'm saying that's probably the exact OPPOSITE of what it would do. It would be more like what the development of cross-country railways did to personal vehicular travel. Civilians and other people who can't be bothered to maintain their own space ships will just hop on a soliton ferry, but starship designers would simply design slightly different types of starships that can do things soliton ferrys can't.

Just seems like you had it backwards. Soliton wave represents a new infrastructure project to bridge heavily developed centers of commerce and allow mass transit between major planets. For everywhere else, there's still starships.

 

[T'Girl]

A good metaphor for the soliton wave would be the cable car system in San Fransisco. The cars go up and down fairly steep hills all day, but none of the cars possess onboard motors. The motors are located at the base of the hills in medium sized buildings.

Hopefully the Federation continued with the development of this idea. As for the wave being a potential weapon, so would detonating the total antimatter stores of a Starship while it was in orbit.

 

[Tiberius]

The inability to change course is the biggest weakness. Even trains can be switched onto different lines if needed. They can slow down and speed up with control too. Without onboard engines, any vessel travelling by soliton wave can't do either of these things.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It can always ditch the wave, of course. And technobabble will undoubtedly come up with a way for one of the ships riding the wave to dissipate it "emergency stop" style.

 

[tau136]

It would totally change the political & career dynamic of the Federation. The society, as known, is based on autonomous, complex craft needing highly trained crew. Shuttling between Soliton Stations puts the emphasis on ground crew & negates any independence of the craft themselves, as well as (presumably) only needing button-pushing-monkeys to drive them — that is if they needed to be crewed at all, or could just be push/pulled from the base stations.

 

[Timo]

Just seems like you had it backwards. Soliton wave represents a new infrastructure project to bridge heavily developed centers of commerce and allow mass transit between major planets. For everywhere else, there's still starships.

I thought that was exactly what I said?

"Mass transit" comes in a variety of modes; trains are relatively effortless for the traveler, escalators even more so. Aircraft require considerable effort and discomfort, as getting aboard one may be a process taking the better part of a day and involving lots of careful planning. With soliton tech, "boarding" a warp flight would become as easy as hopping onto a subway car, as opposed to booking a flight. And traveling at warp could be done without a warp engine, which IMHO would be similar to flying without an aircraft: you could "board" the wave without having to mind things like pilots, flight plans or co-passengers. When the system really got going, you would probably barely have to mind schedules.

Apart from the "unstoppable wave" problem, though, one wonders about the problems of crisscrossing waves. Rail transit doesn't work too well if the tracks cross each other a lot; a cable car system won't work at all if the cables are entangled into a net. What happens when two soliton waves intersect? Can the system be equipped with "grade separated junctions", perhaps by utilizing waves of different, non-interacting characteristics ("frequencies")?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Manticore]

Apart from the "unstoppable wave" problem, though, one wonders about the problems of crisscrossing waves. Rail transit doesn't work too well if the tracks cross each other a lot; a cable car system won't work at all if the cables are entangled into a net. What happens when two soliton waves intersect? Can the system be equipped with "grade separated junctions", perhaps by utilizing waves of different, non-interacting characteristics ("frequencies")?

Timo Saloniemi

Considering the size of space, even if a soliton wave was as big as a planet (say, Jupiter), it'd be childishly easy to avoid intersections even inside star systems. I imagine that intersections would be bad (don't cross the streams), but space is so mind-bogglingly big that I just don't see it ever happening with even the most minor of foresight.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It would totally change the political & career dynamic of the Federation. The society, as known, is based on autonomous, complex craft needing highly trained crew...

You seem to be confused. "Starfleet" and "The Federation" are two completely different things; probably 90% of Federation citizens have ever left their own homeworlds, and I'd be surprised if half of those had ever seen the inside of a starship.

Shuttling between Soliton Stations puts the emphasis on ground crew & negates any independence of the craft themselves

And since the vast majority of Federation citizens live on the ground... so what?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

With soliton tech, "boarding" a warp flight would become as easy as hopping onto a subway car, as opposed to booking a flight.

If it was that easy, then booking a flight would be as easy as hopping on a subway car too. The complications involved in flying have alot to do with the amount of infrastructure required, and soliton waves require a hell of a lot of infrastructure.

And traveling at warp could be done without a warp engine, which IMHO would be similar to flying without an aircraft

Only if you expect the average wave rider to travel between planets with a surfboard and a space suit. Since the soliton wave may theoretically allow transit by smaller/slower craft that can't make interstellar voyages, it's possible that a single wave might sweep an entire flotilla of shuttle taxis and commuter ferries from one planet to another on a regular schedule, but that still requires GETTING ON some craft or another for the wave to carry you. That by definition requires alot of scheduling, booking, permits, safety checks and inevitably, ALOT of customs-related screening.

What happens when two soliton waves intersect?

Considering the enormous vastness of space, I really doubt that will ever be a problem. Probably more worrisome is what happens if an unsuspecting ship accidentally wanders into a soliton's flight path as it approaches its final destination; the wave would obviously pick it up and sweep it along, presenting a possible hazard to other vessels already positioned within it.