Difference between revisions of "Interstellar exploration in Fenspace"

Revision as of 00:33, 23 January 2016

Tired of the glories of the Solar System? Or maybe you want to really go where no one's gone before? Either way, the only solution is to pack up your bags, fly past the Cochrane Line and head for the stars. Thanks to handwavium, interstellar flight is within the reach of the dedicated fan, but to do it and then successfully come back to gloat about it requires not just dedication, but careful planning. Not many fen have traveled beyond the edge of the solar system... or at least, very few have gone and come back from their travels without preparing before their expeditions.

A Short History of Interstellar Flight

The majority of us have dreamed about interstellar flight since we first got hooked on science fiction. We dream about zipping through the stars on warp drive, blasting away into hyperspace, etc. The idea of being able to go to the stars and back within our lifetimes is just as much part of Fandom as the general idea of spaceflight. We want it with a burning passion.

When fen first started to filter out into space in '07, one of the first things tried was faster-than-light travel. All of the early attempts to engage warp speed or jump to hyperspace failed; nowadays we know why, but at the time the First Fen figured it was a limitation on the 'wave. So instead of immediately leaving for the stars they started building in the Solar System, leading to the creation of Fenspace as we know it.

It was a couple of years later, when the Trekkies and the Warsies really started moving out in force, that we finally figured out 'wavetech FTL. It was a team of Trekkie mad scientists and their ship (the Phoenix, naturally) who stumbled over the secret. They'd been on a Starfleet research mission to Sedna when they realized that they were moving a hell of a lot faster once they'd crossed Pluto's orbit. A few experiments later and they realized that about 40 astronomical units (5,983,920,000 km) away from the sun, their drive speeds shot up, way up. Crossing the 40 AU line made all that speed vanish, pulling the ship back down to its top-rated velocity of 6% lightspeed.

Mountains of Solace, near Ptichka's Landing, Gallifrey, Tau Ceti

Having proved that it could be done, the Trekkies then set out to make a serious interstellar voyage. The Trekkies aimed Phoenix at Proxima Centauri and opened up the throttles. Three and a half days later, they were there. Not that there was much in orbiting Proxima of interest, but hey. They spent a week surveying, turned right around and came back to acclaim from the entirety of Fenspace.

The Phoenix expedition was only the beginning. While Fenspace didn't have - still doesn't, really - the resources and manpower necessary to do a proper exploration of the nearby stars, small Lewis & Clark-style missions have hit many of the closest promising targets. The Phoenix went back to the Centauri trisystem, the Ptichka explored the Tau Ceti and Epsilon Indi systems, the Juraians sent one of their wooden boats to Sigma Draconis, and so on. Even with this activity, there's still a hell of a lot of stars nearby for the enterprising fan to explore for the first time.

FTL Basics

The thing you need to know about interstellar travel is that it takes forever to do. Given that a lightweight vehicle can make the Earth-Mars run in less than six hours even during opposition, a lot of fen don't realize that making a jump outside the Solar System is a very long haul.

The night sky as seen from Eayn (HD 69830 d 1)

Part of that is the Limit. Cochrane's Line, whatever you want to call it, it's the boundary inside of which FTL is - for now - impossible. Nobody's entirely sure why this is, but the best theory so far says that it's the sun's gravity that keeps the 'wave engines from forming a proper gravity warp in which the normal laws of physics take a hike. The Limit doesn't have a sharply defined "line," instead being a fuzzy zone between 35 and 40 AU out. The exact point at which FTL becomes possible varies depending on drive design, solar activity and a million other little variables. For simplicity's sake, just figure that getting 40 AU out is the minimum.

(An important thing to note for interstellar travel is that every star has a different Limit. The Limit around Sol is perfectly spherical, whereas the Limit around Alpha Centauri is more like a giant ameboa 30 AU by almost 90 AU across, or the Limit around a dwarf star like Proxima Centauri is only 5 AU. The Limit around a star like Rigel might be somewhere around 100 to 500 AU, and so it goes.)

St. Valentine's Bend, Lombardi River, Gatewood, Lalande 21185

Once you're over the Limit, you're home free, right? Not exactly. It turns out that there's a ceiling on FTL travel. Much like nobody's ever managed to get a speed drive to exceed 25% lightspeed inside the Limit, outside the Limit nobody's managed to exceed a top speed of 500c, or five hundred times the speed of light. Now that's nothing to sneeze at, 500c is a hell of a lot faster than any mundane scientist would've ever expected us to travel, but at the same time it's tiny compared to the scale of the galaxy. For example, if you wanted to go to the galactic core, at 500c it'd take you 50 years of nonstop travel to get there.

At least one thing seems to be working in our favor: the mass/speed curve for FTL travel is flat. So instead of larger=slower like in STL travel, everybody can move FTL at the same speed. This is useful to know when planning an interstellar expedition because while a large ship may take longer getting to the Limit, it'll spend the same amount of time in FTL as a smaller ship.

Navigating in interstellar travel is a little tricky. You can't just point your ship at the star and hope for the best. Everything in the galaxy is moving, and that point of light you see doesn't mark where the star is, it marks where the star was however many years ago. Thankfully, most stars don't move that fast ^[1], and a half-decent computer armed with shareware science programs can figure out where a particular star's going to be at any point. This is one of those "forewarned is forearmed" situations; get a navigational program built for FTL work off the internet before you start out, otherwise you might end up in the middle of a whole lot of nothing. Otherwise you have to correct your heading every few lightmonths or -years.

Destinations

Movement of Barnard's Star, as seen from the sky of Earth

The stars on this table either have a special significance for science fiction fandom in general (Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Altair, Barnard's Star, Zeta Reticuli), have some specific astronomical interest (Van Mannen's Star, Vega, Beta Hydri) or were pulled from the Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems, meaning they were determined to (possibly!) have the conditions needed to support habitable planets. This is, essentially, a list of the candidate inhabitable systems within 100 light years of Earth.

Gallery

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  The Epsilon Eridani system

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  The Gliese 581 system

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  The Chara system (also known as the Beta Canum Venaticorum system)

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  Planet 61 Virginis d

Notes

1. ↑ The average speed of our sun compared to close neighbor stars is 20 km/s
2. ↑ Limit to Limit only, getting to a planet inside will take additional time