Now I've tried bending and redefining the Lares drive idea a bit but it still ends up with around three months average per system at the lower tech levels just to pass through. Twice that or more if you have to refuel! I thought about putting refueling and trade space stations near Lares regions but they need a fairly extensive (and expensive and fragile) investment in station keeping hardware and need quite a bit of mass devoted to heavy duty storm shelters since they're around 0.6AU from the sun in our solar system, and it is quite possible some systems would have higher radiation levels at the equivalent gravity gradient.
It is still possible to make Lares drives work in the setting, but it is starting to look borderline. So, since given the choice is change the current handwavium or add more handwavium to alleviate the problem, I started looking around for other FTL ideas.
I have a personal preference for point to point FTL, though I don't like forms that can be blockaded with minefields or that require an infrastructure in place. Put another way, I don't like 'go anywhere' drives. The reason is there are no choke points between harbors and surprise attacks are way too easy leading to widespread planetary destruction as the order of the day in warfare. Makes for a rather ugly story.
The stutterwarp idea as given in 2300AD and as alternate rules in FF&S is an interesting one but at the expense of pretty much eliminating interplanetary travel by ordinary means. Worse, it ends up taking space combat in a completely different direction. A good idea overall, but too pervasive for the Dark Stars setting.
Another option would be a version of the standard Traveller jump drives that take no fuel and have a gravity gradient threshold that puts them further away from planets for transitions to/from J-space. That is an attractive option except for one small wrinkle. Without the need for refueling between jumps, there are no longer any choke points.
My original idea for Lares drive was to give a nod to physics and relativity by restricting travel to that between causally 'safe' gravity wells. To escape the need for a Langston device, I invoked quantum physics handwavium and used virtual wormholes in the quantum foam. So, while admittedly a huge hand wave, it at least didn't break anything.
Since then I've run across another fringe physics theory that, while admittedly non-mainstream, gives me a little more wiggle room. It is called Lorentzian Relativity, alternatively LET, which basically says special relativity is wrong in respect to the non-existence of a special frame. Interestingly enough, there's nothing except Occam's Razor to choose between the two theories given current knowledge. You can, of course, spark a flame war quite easily by bringing up that point on any physics forum. Of course, with the existence of a preferred frame, causality problems vanish!
So handwavium theories in place to excuse some pretty strange departures from commonly accepted physics in regards to FTL, what can we make of them that solves our need for FTL travel in Dark Stars ATU better than the Lares drive? How about a hybrid Lares/Jump/Stutterwarp? Heh! Rube Goldberg physics, here we come!
Let us suppose that around each star there are two hollow spheres. The inner has a radius at the 0.024 m/s^2 gravity gradient, and the outer has a radius at the 0.00024 m/s^2 gravity gradient. Further, let us suppose that if you extend a tube with a radius of say 50 light seconds or so (0.1 AU) between the outer spheres of two adjacent star systems, the intersection of the interior of the tube with the surface of the outer sphere (give or take 0.1 AU) defines a safe path entrance/exit thru L^-1 space between the two stars for our new drive.
Sounds a lot like the original Lares drive mechanics or Alderson points so far right? Now for the wrinkle. Inside a star system, while within the boundaries described by the surfaces of the inner and outer spheres and not crossing the 0.00024 m/s^2 boundary of any local objects, the same drive can be used to access L^1 space. However where L^-1 space effectively gives a large multiple of light speed, L^1 space gives a small fraction of light speed.
What does that mean in English? For our solar system the radius of the inner sphere would be about 0.5 AU, the radius of the outer sphere about 5 AU, and no closer than 100 diameters of Earth (3x moon orbit). In system jumps travel 100 light seconds (0.2 AU) in 24 hours. Jumps between systems take about 24 hours.
There is an important artifact of jump space entry/exit, namely a burst of energy biased in the direction opposite the direction of the jump. Another limitation is that L^1 space has a fixed jump distance of about 100 light seconds. Incidentally, it takes just as much energy for each L^1 jump as each L^-1 jump, and just as much calculation.
So what happens if you engage this drive outside of the prescribed limits? No one knows. Every time it has happened the craft disappears with an omnidirectional burst of energy and never returns. Another failure mode is a little more common, at least in wilderness travel, and that is due to the poorly understood but nonetheless true fact that not all star systems have connections to all neighbors. In this second failure mode, the craft disappears with an omnidirectional burst of energy, and about 24 hours later returns in the same spot. There are also suicidal paths that have exit regions in non survivable environs, and there are the rare but verified one way paths.
So, our new drive, without a name yet, acts as a restricted FTL drive between systems, and as a STL but still useful drive within certain limits inside of a system. It doesn't require handwavium high Isp from our reaction drives in order to travel in space opera time frames, nor does it eliminate the need for either high Isp and high thrust reaction drives in normal space. As a side note, this new drive, like the Lares drive, supposes that the energy spent by the drive is merely used as a lever to unlock energies at the quantum level, it is those unlocked/leveraged energies that perform the work.
See the name that drive poll over on CotI..
Update: currently under consideration is the idea of extending the in system operational limits to the 0.000024 m/s^2 gravity gradient which would allow a bit more access deeper into the outer system (nearly 16 AU which in the Sol system would put Jupiter and Saturn within reach and nearly close enough to Uranus for reasonable travel times by reaction drives).
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