Design Monologue 14: Homeworlds Trek

Homeworlds defiantly says "no". The jump gates create interesting drama and possibilities, namely reinforcing the reality of the massive distance between stars, and allowing a system to be one destroyed jumpgate away from total isolation.

Of course, this kind of drama would suit Homeworlds better if it were a TV show or a movie.

The reality is, if jumpgates work the way they do, and the Homeworlds have been around for as long as they have, then all dramatic possibilities are lost, and here is why.

In every remotely important system, there would be a hub with dozens, if not hundreds of jumpgates, each within a few minutes' travel from the others. From any given planet, you could get to every other important planet, moon, or space station within the system or in the next 5 systems over. Hell, there's no reason you couldn't have a gate to the Core Worlds in every single colony system.

Just in case a gate is damaged or destroyed, there would be backups, guarded by the military, perhaps in a secret location, to avoid the many years it takes to send a new gate to a system. Of course, there is already a lot of redundancy built in, as many routes can be drawn between systems.

In EVE, players are made to travel long distances (many AUs) from gate to gate, perhaps being assaulted by pirates on the way. However, there is no need for this. Unless jumpgates have an unfortunate tendency to explode (wouldn't they have fixed that over the last 600 years?), every jumpgate in a system would be in close proximity to the others. If there were multiple such hubs in one system, they would be linked by in-system gates.

Hell, there's no reason why all the gates in a hub couldn't be contained within a space station, which wards pirates and terrorists away with all the force of the Homeworlds (or whatever local power reigns).

What little opportunity the players would have to actually fly through space would be along well-established lanes, patrolled either by the Foundation or whoever provides local security. In any case, a hostile encounter would probably not be a fair fight; the police (or local pirate gang) would overwhelm hapless travels with superior numbers and firepower. Not super fun.

This leaves several options.

Option 1: Now we have warp drives, ho ho ho

As previously mentioned in the history, Earth (or whoever built those drones) figured out how to jump without setting up the gates in advance (or at least without setting them up in the same place). This surprising development led to the Earthgate War.

Thankfully, the drones didn't have a true warp drive, but rather had to conquer the jumpgates already built by the Homeworlds. When the gate leading out of the Earthgate system was destroyed, the drones (if any remained) were trapped.

Much was learned by studying the drones the Homeworlders were able to capture. Breakthroughs in dark matter and dark energy science have led to such wondrous inventions as artificial gravity and particle shields.

It may well be that such technology could lead to true warp drives.

For the uninitiated, a warp drive bends the fabric of space-time, much as planets and stars do. The drive literally decreases the distance from point A to point B, so that, when you travel between them at speeds greater than the speed of light, you aren't actually breaking any cosmic laws.

It is unknown, of course, how such drives work. Even if the possibility of bending space-time through the accumulation of dark matter or energy existed, surely the degree by which it must be bent would vastly exceed the capacity of a mere ship, and possibly harm nearby celestial objects, or damage the very fabric of space-time itself.

And yet, if it could be done, it would probably take one of two forms:

====Star Trek style====

The warp drives in Star Trek use coils containing intense energy (in the form of plasma created through a matter/antimatter reaction) to somehow bend space-time. This propels the ship forward, much like any other drive. These drives can propel them up to speeds thousands of times faster than light (where warp 9.9 = 3,053c).

These drives are insanely convenient, and would probably be used more often than they seem to be (who needs impulse?). They come with the caveat that the warp core is stupidly dangerous (as it is trying to contain a plasma which would otherwise explode the ship a million times over, not to mention all that antimatter), a point which the show beat to death.

All in all, warp drives are a fairly solid approach to FTL travel. You get the benefit of it being just like regular travel, complete with the ability for enemies to chase you down in warp-ships of their own, perhaps overtaking you and making it a real fight.

Another benefit is that you get those nice, long, kind of dangerous runs between systems, that take days or more, and always leave at risk of being stranded in deadspace due to engine failure or lack of fuel. That also means such remote places are accessible, giving bad guys and monsters alike new places to lurk.

====BSG style====

Another possibility is that warp drives pinch the fabric of space-time, bringing two distance points together, and at the moment they touched, you instantly teleport to the destination.

One assumes this would involve a long build-up, where your jump drive slowly bends the continuum in the desired direction. Interrupting this process would cause the continuum to snap back into normalcy, aborting your expeditious retreat.

While it has been used to neat effect, with Galactica jumping out just before a horrible cascade of nukes impact it, or Pegasus blinking into the sky just in time to rescue the eponymous ship, all of these things can probably be done with Trek-style warp as well. Forgetting the effects we've all seen in the show, a ship coming out of warp would probably just pop out of nowhere, perhaps in a burst of light (photons traveling with the ship suddenly coming back into real space) much like the jump drives of Galactica. On the same token, in the first fraction of a second of a ship's acceleration to warp speed, it would probably blink out of view in a space too small for the human eye to register.

EVE uses this approach; capital ships, being too large to make use of existing jump gates, have their own jump drives. Of course, they must be at 95% capacitor, and expend an atrocious amount of fuel. What this means is that, even if you have enough fuel, you are immediately vulnerable after jumping, because your jump capacitor is at 0%-5%, and it will take quite a while (at least a few minutes) to get enough energy to jump again. In that time, presumably, bad things might happen.

With Trek warp, the above situation requires some extenuating circumstance, such as a ruptured warp coil, which, implausibly, your engineer can fix for you in 5 minutes. Hell, with this guy on board, how does anything ever break in the first place?

The EVE method (presumably similar to the BSG method) builds in a circumstance for drama, necessitating a resting time between jumps. Since it usually requires several jumps to travel any appreciable distance (one assumes), this still provides an opportunity for a ship to be set upon by pirates, Cylons, or what-have-you, despite the teleporty nature of it all.

Option 2: There were never jumpgates

Even if warp drives exist now, why use them when you don't have to? It takes a lot of energy to bend the fabric of the space-time continuum, and potentially angers any Qs who might be napping in that particular cubic parsec of empty space you just ripped apart.

As previously mentioned, any place worth going to would already have a gate or two to connect it to every other place worth going to.

It could be that, given an alternative in the form of warp drives, scientists finally admitted that, all this time, jumpgates were actually killing everybody who passed through them, and creating clones on the other side. After all the scientists (actually, scientist clones) were all slaughtered mercilessly, a terrible despondency would set in over the Homeworlds, given the certain knowledge that everybody you'd ever known (including yourself) had died many times.

No, that's just too weird (even though it's probably true).

Thus, it makes more sense if there were never jumpgates to begin with. The initial colony ships were able to make the trip to nearby star systems in reasonable time frames (16-28 years or so). There were no jumpgates being delivered to the destination systems; that's why they sent colony ships. The colonists were to establish their own homeworlds, breed their own populace, and supply themselves with all they needed. Future developments might have linked the worlds together with something more convenient than a 16 year trip, but, that always remained a possibility.

As in the current version of the history, the Homeworlds spent many long years (generations, in fact) as hopelessly distant from one another as they would have been if their original mission had actually gone as planned.

But rather than finally shipping jumpgates to each other's systems, they just eventually managed to invent a working warp drive. History continued much as it had in the original version.

As far as the warp drives themselves, simply insert one of the two options above.

The reality of material science is that, ever since missiles, rockets, and atom bomb, it has been far easier to destroy something than to protect it.

Earthbound vehicles rely on cover and concealment for protection; it is far easier for a tank or jet to avoid detection than it is to soak a hit from a missile.

In space, cover is hard to come by. Concealment isn't; a ship can become nearly invisible by shutting down systems which emit EM radiation, but the dramatic possibilities of submarine-style stealth warfare are limited, at best.

This makes shields a necessity. The pre-war ships may not have had them--thus the usefulness of massive dreadnaughts--but today's do. It's all part of that dark matter/dark energy package that was lifted from the Earthgate drones.

Shields work by channeling dark matter (or perhaps dark energy) in high concentrations to warp space around a ship. This can slow or deflect anything from particles, explosions, and even lasers.

Dramatically enough, shields are some of the most complex and costly systems on any ship, making it not uncommon for shields to fail during a crucial battle. Also, it is quite possible to overpower even fully functional shields; a small shuttle can hardly produce enough of a shielding effect to block a direct hit from a laser meant to destroy capital ships.

As has been established by a wide range of sci-fi offerings, shields have many caveats. They ruin any attempt at cloaking; while Homeworlds eschews exotic "cloaking devices" by simply recognizing how easy it is to disappear in space, by either token, shields would produce a rather obvious effect which spoils concealment.

Shields, drawing as they do tremendous amounts of energy, do not play well with other high-energy devices, such as warp drives. In many craft, one must drop shields, or at least weaken them long enough to build up the energy to warp.

Shields are also vulnerable to electronic warfare. Most shields employ a rather weak static field to deflect minor particles and some harmful rays. Against any serious threats, such as artillery shells or lasers, they employ a focused beam to ward away the attack. This produces an effect orders of magnitude greater than that of a static field of the same energy. However, in order to do this, the shields rely on a network of sensors to detect incoming attacks, and a computer to prioritize them and calculate the necessary response. This ranges from simply detecting projectiles using ordinary spectrum analysis, to predicting imminent high-speed (near or at the speed of light; i.e. railguns and lasers) attacks by monitoring enemy vessels. If this support system is disabled, the shields cannot function.

Other Defense Systems

This is to say nothing of the other defense systems available to ships. Tried-and-true countermeasures are still employed; most ships employ a network of lasers and machine guns to shoot down incoming projectiles and missiles.

A new innovation in ship defense is the Armor Hardening System.

This system requires high-tech (read: expensive) armor plates, which can dynamically alter their mass with gravity manipulation. When the impact of a weapon is sensed, the plates increase in mass dramatically. The increase in mass brings a corresponding increase in inertia and ability to absorb energy. The technology is still very new, but has the potential to be more energy-efficient than shields.