Yes I'm waffling again. The other day after some conversations I was about to just toss in the towel on the whole idea I'd had originally - or at least started with this time around. A friend remarked that all scifi soap opera anymore is sailing ships in SPAAAACCEE. That holds especially true for Traveller, it always has been that sort of setting.
When you start to introduce reality into the picture, or at least physics as we know it, even including some fringe physics, the fundamental barrier between soft soap opera scifi and hard scifi pops up and smacks you in the face. Initially you might think it is all due to slower travel times but that isn't it, the obstacle is the civilization model. Soft soap opera scifi concentrates on ye olde planetary civilizations connected by handwaviums. Handwaviums because otherwise the cost of interface operations (surface to orbit) is *huge*.
But wait you say, what about beanstalks, laser boosted launch, electromagnetic assists, etc? Well all of that certainly helps, those solutions reduce the problems by an order of magnitude. Too bad soft soap opera scifi settings require a reduction of at least two if not three orders of magnitude in interface costs.
Even worse, soft soap opera scifi includes what I call the wilderness scenario: a relatively small and cheap trading ship that can travel surface to orbit, orbit to interplanetary, FTL between the stars, interplanetary to orbit, orbit to surface - all on one fuel load in a couple weeks time. A few days later, refuel and do it all over again. I cannot find a realistic solution to this scenario even with using rather severe handwaviums in the interplanetary realm.
The last attempt with the Quantum Skip drive handwavium and using a somewhat realistic LANTR variant reaction engine still requires 80% of the ship's mass - that's mass not volume - which leaves precious little mass for cargo (as a percentage of ship) in any design that would be even remotely small and cheap. In fact, it'd be large and expensive, so large that it would probably have to use secondary 'shuttles' for the actual interface. That doesn't completely solve the problem either as now your shuttle has to make numerous trips.
At that point you realize that to keep anything remotely resembling the Traveller setting, you need to throw realistic physics out the window. Switching to the 2300AD setting helps a bit but still requires more of a handwave than I really am comfortable with for any remote claim to a hard scifi label. I'll admit it, at a certain gut level I don't care much for the stutterwarp idea. Perhaps its the feeling that stutterwarp is more of a arm wave than a hand wave. That and it puts the 'magic' center stage nearly all the time.
Way way back, though unfortunately the documents have been lost in time, I had been working on another hard scifi concept also named Dark Stars. That first version of Dark Stars was so wildly different in setting that this time around, aiming for a Travelleresque setting, the only thing I borrowed initially was the name. Well, turns out, maybe I need to borrow far more than just the name.
The original Dark Stars setting was so hard scifi that there wasn't even any FTL. In it, mankind used what is now called brown dwarfs (and similar interstellar planetary scale objects) as stepping stones to the stars. The idea came out of some astronomy reports regarding a few isolated but recorded instances of unexplainable obscuration of certain stars, the theory at the time was that the cause was planetary objects between small gas giant and true stars. I believe this was an early observation of what is now called brown dwarfs.
Obviously in the original Dark Stars setting, civilizations around the brown dwarf stepping stones weren't planetary civilizations. The setting's back story was that as mankind expanded into interplanetary space, civilization became less and less planetary bound until by the time deep space colonizes were first established orbiting the nearest 'dark stars' there were more people who lived their entire lives in deep space than those who had ever lived on planets. After that point, planets basically became irrelevant except as possible sources of raw materials that could not be obtained from lesser gravity wells. Even that slim importance fades away as technology progresses and it becomes cheaper to create heavy elements or replace them with lighter elements than dig and lift them out of a deep gravity well.
One interesting side effect of this model is that planetary defenses and slag weapons become irrelevant. Another is that it is hard to wrap your head around it as it is so foreign to the way we planet bound think. Evolution of civilization.
So the original Dark Stars setting ends up becoming a collection of hordes of space habitats clustering around energy and resource points in orbits that minimize the costs. You might well have specialized facilities in addition to habitats, such as facilities orbiting fairly close to stars in order to turn stellar output into a stored form such as antimatter. Other facilities might be in low orbits around gas giants engaging in various refining activities. Yet others are situated near larger rocks or collections of rocks in various places engaging in the processing of raw materials. Populations, and their habitats, are mobile. They shift with changing trade patterns and perhaps for other reasons as well. I'm reminded of the scifi story where I first encountered a form of the stutterwarp idea, hyper-assistance, in Asimov's classic Nemesis novel. In truth that novel, along with a few others, really laid the seeds for the original Dark Stars setting in my mind.
That first Dark Stars setting, while interesting, doesn't make for a good space opera on an interstellar scale. Without FTL and with realistic reaction drives up to and including antimatter, the time scales are rather beyond the space opera norm by a few orders of magnitude. The question of the hour becomes, what form of FTL would enable near space opera travel times between neighboring stars without widespread changes in the basic underpinnings of the setting? Further, at what technological point should it become available? Too soon and the setting doesn't have time to evolve to true planetary independent civilization, too late and the science becomes completely unrecognizable.
Before setting down the operational criteria for the FTL mechanism, it is a good time to realize something inherently different between the first Dark Stars setting and most all soap opera scifi settings. In Dark Stars a solar system's population and infrastructure is spread out all through the system, with varying densities near various points of interest. In traditional soap opera equivalent terms this turns every world into a Dyson's sphere! Traveller RPG is basically a collection of Kardashev I worlds into a Kardashev II civilization; the Dark Stars setting is somewhere between that and a collection of Kardashev II solar systems into a Kardashev III civilization. Population and energy usage in the Dark Stars setting are almost assuredly beyond those of core worlds in the Traveller OTU setting.
Along with that, the scale of travel across a 'world' is far different, roughly 5000 to 10000 times greater. It would be like being restricted to the speed of sail on each world assuming some relatively realistic fusion torch drive is commonly used in Dark Stars for interplanetary scale travel. This suggests that, to maintain the interstellar civilization soap opera feel, the maximum travel time between two points of interest orbiting adjacent stars should be no more than around three times the average 'across the world' travel time. That is, if it takes a month to go from one side of the system to another, it probably shouldn't take more than three months on average to go from a point of interest in one system to another point of interest in an adjacent system.
While a standard soap opera setting can have pre-space flight technology worlds, in a Dark Stars setting that makes little sense. There is a minimum tech level required to support civilization in space. In order to satisfy the evolution of civilization argument above, this tech level must be significantly less than that required for FTL travel.
In order for space opera style interstellar warfare to make any sort of sense, there needs to be some limitations on the FTL travel mechanism, either some sort of choke points, or some distance limitations, or both. To allow for manageable multiple star system empires, our speed of information transfer needs to be restricted as well. In the absence of FTL communications, the time for a packet of information to travel from one system to another through a third is expressible as 2Tt + 2Tc1 + 2Tc2; where Tt is average FTL travel time, Tc1 is communications between decision center and FTL courier, and Tc2 is the communications time between two FTL couriers, assuming that a single courier cannot be used as quickly as two.
If we consider our elapsed time for scale of travel desired and our elapsed time for interstellar communications desired, we can calculate how long our FTL travel between two adjacent star systems should take on average.
Now zooming out a bit to look at the shape of an interstellar civilization composed of a collection of space based civilizations, a few questions spring to mind. First, what differentiates one star system from another as far as desirability? Probably a combination of stellar type, availability of easily accessible hydrogen, and asteroid belts - the more the merrier, perhaps small planets and/or moons might also be a bonus as a raw material source. Beyond that location, location, location. Of course that depends on the topography of our FTL mechanism. While still zoomed out at this level, consider the ramifications of the FTL mechanism's topography on interstellar warfare as well.
I'll probably choose the Alderson point-ish Lares region type of Quantum Skip drive as the general FTL mechanism since a bit of time and effort has already gone into it. It also has a somewhat more hard-sciencey technobabble behind it. If the FTL points occur at roughly the 0.001 m/s^2 gravity gradient radius, that would put them around 2.5 AU from the sun in our solar system. That also puts them at a reasonable distance for the average travel time target given realistic thrust levels of high delta-V reaction drives. Now this assumes that the average interstellar tech level is a bit higher than normally found in Traveller, but given that is also a target criteria, we should be fine.
One aspect of this setting is that it gives us a bit of a way out with regards to our reaction drives and our power plants. We can sidestep most of the issues with magnetic bottle fusion and go to various forms of pulse mode antimatter initiated fusion.
I'll have to take more time and consider the pluses and minuses with this idea further. It seems to give a realistic hard scifi (with FTL exception) soap opera/RPG setting at the price of sacrificing the sacred cow of planetary based civilization.
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