So there I was, distracting myself with some sci-fi reading (Larry Correia's Gun Runner, if you must know), and there was a description of how interstellar gates are kept and (in general terms) used....
... And, naturally, my mind wandered off to another universe, refining aspects of gate technology in a story framework I have vaguely sketched out.
I actually have two interstellar-civilization frameworks vaguely sketched out, and little likelihood of actually writing any stories in either of them. One (the newer one) uses gates, the tech gimmick involving quantum entanglement, and gates having to have paired magic quantum boxes in order to connect to each other. This, of course, is whither my mind wandered, fiddling with the concept of various classes of quantum boxes, according to the required long-term stability for the application - this affecting the size and the price of the gadget.
The other framework... you know how all the gravitic tech in the Honorverse was contrived to allow Age of Sail naval battles in outer space? Well, I had to come up with tech constraints to justify a silly throwaway scene in a story that never quite took shape. Basically, interstellar communication needed to be cheap, if not exactly fast, but interstellar travel needed to be expensive and interstellar battle fleets utterly impractical. The answer? Well... it looks a little like a Niven hyperdrive, with a couple of twists. For one thing, the energy required to establish a drive field is proportional to the enclosed hypervolume, so the fourth power of the radius (drive fields are always spherical), and for handwaving reasons the point of diminishing returns is such that it takes about a dozen of the largest practical ships to carry the people (mostly sedated or in gene banks) and equipment to start a colony on a reasonably hospitable world. The other thing is the nature of the Nothing outside the window when in hyperspace; in my version, there is no outside for light (or anything else) to radiate to, so the inside of a drive field is a perfect mirror; this limits the time a ship can remain in hyper before needing to drop back into normal space and radiate waste heat, and also strongly favors tiny ships.
Anyway, this morning I was wandering off and pondering other cool things one could do with the lower classes of quantum boxes - the cheap ones that might have a decent chance of lasting for a year after they leave the factory, not the ones that go into big expensive infrastructure that needs to last for centuries. Large amounts of handwavium are required, but that's the case with the gates anyway.
Ah, well. Time to escape the distractions and make a couple of important phone calls.
Afterthought: In my conception of gates, there's an important unresolved question: what happens if you try to carry a quantum dingus through a gate? Like, you're trying to pair a gate at a far-distant location with the local one, and it makes a lot more sense to use the existing gates to get close to the target location than to spend many decades carrying the dingus through normal space. I see a range of possibilities:
- Everything is fine.
- The quantum box comes disentangled from its mate, thus becoming useless. (A sub-question in this case is what happens if both pass through a gate together, for whatever reason.)
- You softly and suddenly vanish away and never are heard from again.
- The gate (including the one at the other end) softly and suddenly vanishes away, taking you with it.
- The gate (including the one at the other end) very energetically vanishes away, taking two entire solar systems with it.
- The universe promptly disappears and is replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.
I'm sure there are still stranger options. For example, the quantum box becomes disentangled until the entanglement catches back up with it at the speed of light. This would make gate transportation of quantum boxes less convenient than one might wish, but still effectively much faster than using STL transportation.
More: Correia gives a detailed (and very movie-oriented) description of the gate's appearance as it opens, and of the lengthy passage to the distant destination. Both of my universes are lacking in the visuals department. The one with the hyperdrive, well, all hyper-capable ships are as close as possible to featureless spheres. And the gates? Inactive, you look through and see the stars beyond. Active, you look through and see the stars beyond the gate at the other side. The transition is as near instantaneous as makes no difference, as is the transit. The only fun part is the alignment tracking - a gate needs to be fairly well parallel to its counterpart, so they rotate about two of their axes to maintain alignment.
Another things about both these universes is that, whether you travel by hyperdrive or by gate, you still need to match intrinsics (as Doc Smith called it) with your destination. Much use of gravity wells is generally involved; this has implications for gate placement and orientation (and flight scheduling, for that matter).
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