Re: Quasi-FTL, FTL, and causality in a fictional setting

On May 14, 6:09 pm, raphfrk <raph...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Two species meeting each other is more complex and as another poster
said, the defender has a big advantage.

This, too, is potentially useful for plot needs.

Imagine in your AC case, that there was a species in AC when your worm-
hole arrives and they (or you) destroy the worm hole. If you send
another worm-hole, it will arrive almost immediately after they
destroyed the first one (small delay due to you not being able to get
the mouth to 100% c). OTOH, if they send you to you, it will arrive
8
years later (in your frame). They call this Empire Time. It is the
time in the home system's frame of reference, assuming that your
travel through all the worm-holes.

k, following you so far. I like the implications of this, btw. It's
something I was wanting to explore and never really got my head
wrapped around.

This gives Earth a big advantage. The only way they can attack Earth
immediately is to gain control of the worm-hole you sent. The same
applies if there are 2 'cones', as they push you back, they are
arriving later and later in your Empire Time. This means that the
defender can gain centuries/millennia by just destroying their
wormholes and falling back. When the aggressor arrives, they will be
more than capable of defending themselves.

This is definitely where I was wanting to start heading with this,
strategic use of the wormholes et al in order to gain production,
tech, military, etc advantages.

Empire time defines a surface that passes through every point in the
worm-hole network. In the original Empire Time paper, there are lots
of cones centred on each species' homeword. The cones then merge into
a single surface.

An interesting feature is that all species should have roughly equal
tech levels. When a species reaches the tech required to setup their
own cone, they can reach the edge of the universe in something like 30
years. This means that all species should have similar tech +/- 30
years.

OTOH, there is a strategy where a species would expand and develop its
galaxy first and then attempt linkup. This would mean it would be
much more advanced at linkup.


The scenario I've actually got in mind is this....the actual wormhole
network in use is the legacy of a long-dead artifact race that was
capable of doing nifty magic tricks with the basic structure of the
universe, which they could use for transit, computation, whatever you
like. They had some industrial accident, and what do you know, big
bang. For whatever reason, they left "legacy code" in the universe
itself, so that some rules could be broken with the right knowledge.
True FTL being one of these, so in most instances, the rules of
causality we know are held and enforced by the universe, via the
wormholes simply collapsing, jump drive being restricted to c, etc.,
but not *always*.

Ok so fast forward to the scenario in question....the alien sphere of
empire time that is already developed uses the causal-FTL wormholes,
but they are only causal due to having been "programmed" as such and
still synch with the original Empire Time. When Earth is contacted,
it's not via wormhole from the established alien sphere, but rather a
re-activated connection to Earth that has gone dormant. So basically
the spheres are synchronized, using this cosmic clock legacy coding
built into the universe.

In any event, this has started me thinking again; there are multiple
factions of Man that are jaunting around and using the causal-FTL
systems to expand, so the warring Empire Times is certainly one I'll
take note of. One thing that just hit me is some sort of alien device
or knowledge that allows the user-party to break the FTL restriction
on the wormholes, so that they would have the advantage in terms of
being able to create CTLs and so forth.

Oh, and did I mention the architects of the original wormhole grid,
that have the insta-FTL cheat codes, are still active, and decide to
occasionally check in with Man both in and out of their Empire Time?
Once this is discovered, there's a big impetus to find defenses to
that sort of thing, so that could help out as well.

Convoluted, I know, but I'd like to see what kind of time-bending
scenarios can play out here, and I'm definitely brainstorming again,
which is good.

Thanks for the help.

Matthew Perryman

.

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