With Endeavors now in full swing, I thought I’d share some of the world-building process and hopefully inspire other writers to take similar steps to make sure their worlds are also not just fleshed out, but consistent.
While I do love me some Star Trek and Star Wars, I decided early on that Endeavors would be hard science fiction. That means no teleporters. Real engineering and physics. You want gravity on your ship? Either accelerate or make it spin, spacer! Engines will be nuclear rockets in the 22nd and parts of the 23rd centuries, but by the time of the main stories in the 24th century, ships will have full-blown Heinlein-style torchdrives. However, I did want to give myself SOME fantastical elements, and one of the most important ones was faster-than-light travel.
And figuring out THAT element would color how else the rest of the world would work.
Setting up rules and limits might seem arbitrary, but when dealing with the fantastical, it is absolutely essential. Let’s say you’re making a fantasy world with magic. What can magic do and not do? Who can perform it? If any Tom, Dick, and Harry can just pick up a book and learn how to fly or teleport or make crops grow with just a few hours of study, then either the teaching of magic will be TIGHTLY controlled or your world will be filled with millions of demigods vying for power.
In a science fiction universe like Endeavors, how people travel between worlds has consequences as to the kinds of stories that can be told and the kinds of civilizations that will form in the mid-24th century.
Looking through science fiction history, there have been HUNDREDS of types of FTL systems. Some are straightforward, like the warp drive from Star Trek. Put a few terawatts through the nacelles and now you’re superluminal. You’re moving… just really fast now. And then you have systems with all kinds of rules, like the gates in Stargate. And each of these systems has consequences. In Stargate, you could have a galaxy-spanning civilization without the need for actual starships, for example. The existence of the gates, and the various rules for gate travel, inform how war and economics are structured.
So what kind of world do I want?
I know I certainly want travel between adjacent stars to take SOME time. A day or two. Each star system is akin to an island, let’s say. So how will ships move from Point A to Point B without running into Einstein?
Again, I had options, but I decided to keep things relatively simple while also invoking some of the classic tropes of the genre. In Endeavors, ships can “jump” into hyperspace, an 11-dimensional matrix with distances much shorter than our normal three-dimensional space. Think of a sheet of paper. Now imagine our space only had TWO dimensions, but the paper was rolled up into a tiny ball. If we could only move on the surface of the paper, it would take time to cross it. But if we could move through the third dimension, travel could be shortened significantly if we knew how that extra dimension was folded.
And that’s how hyperspace travel works. A ship gets moving via conventional rockets and then jumps into hyperspace, keeps the ‘drive on for a calculated period, and when you turn it off, you jump back into “realspace” and should be much further than before. This means that a ship’s conventional engine and fuel factor into its FTL capabilities. I decided that hyperspace distances are roughly one million times shorter than normal. So if you get your ship moving to around 1.5 km/s, or the average speed of the Apollo missions, and then jump into hyperspace… that would translate to an EFFECTIVE speed of about FIVE TIMES the speed of light.
You could cover the average distance between Earth and Mars in less than three minutes. Jupiter? Less than ten minutes. Of course, if you want to go interstellar, you’d need to go much faster because even at that speed, you’re still going to need about a year to get to our closest stellar neighbor.
I still had a LOT of other things to consider, for example.
How much energy do you need to jump? Do you need a nuclear reactor or can you run the damn thing on a hamster wheel?
How easy is it to make a hyperdrive? Can you scrounge for pieces or does it require exotic and rare building materials?
Are there any restrictions on where you can travel in hyperspace? Can you only jump into hyperspace in certain points or can you enter and exit hyperspace anywhere? This would create choke points, “space lanes” as it were.
It might seem like these are the kinds of things that could just be figured out as the story goes, and most of them probably won’t matter in ever story, but I need to know these things EARLY to establish a few things. So, I set up a series of rules in order to create the kind of world I wanted.
- Hyperspace travel effective speed is proportional to a ship’s realspace speed. The faster a ship can move normally, the faster its FTL speed. By the 24th century, most military vessels can achieve a cruising speed of 300 km/s, which translates to roughly 1000x lightspeed, or 2.74 light years per day. Most civilian vessels have a more modest cruising speed of 100 km/s, or 0.913 light years per day. Vessels in the 22nd and 23rd centuries which used more primitive engines often had cruising speeds less than a quarter of this.
- Hyperdrives can mostly be built and repaired by anyone with sufficient expertise, but their cores are composed of a rare transuranic element that cannot be easily synthesized.
- A hyperdrive requires 3 kJ per kg of ship it must jump. Based on my research, nuclear reactors seem to be able to put out about 2 kilowatts per kilo… which means that a ship must also carry high-density capacitors to store the energy for a jump. This was done so that ships need a “cool down” period where the hyperdrive has to build a charge in order to jump again.
- The initial jump needs a tremendous amount of energy… but staying in hyperspace only requires a fraction of that power being run through the system, so you can run it off of basic power systems without much effort. Once you reach your destination, you cut power and the ship is instantly pushed out of hyperspace.
- Hyperspace travel can be done anywhere, but jumping in or through a gravity field stronger than 6.25% Earth standard is difficult and outright impossible at 50%. This means that the safest way to jump near Earth is to be more than 12,740 km away, or about two planetary radii. This also means that places like gas giants, with their increased gravity, have a much larger “no jumping” zone that would make them ideal candidates for high-security installations.
- Jumping into hyperspace requires very precise calculations. Ships must take into account their mass, volume, speed, relative gravitational topography, ambient radiation, their own power output, etc. This means a ship can be “blocked” from jumping by electronic countermeasures. Simply blasting a lot of EM noise at a ship will prevent it from accurately plotting a jump.
- Hyperspace pushes out all matter and energy within a fraction of a second, meaning sensors and communications outside the ship have a VERY limited range of a few hundred or maybe thousands of kilometers in hyperspace. This means you can’t beam signals at FTL through hyperspace and, once in hyperspace, you’re pretty much blind to the world around you. The only things that CAN travel for long distances in hyperspace are neutrinos… so for FTL communication, ships use low-bit neutrino bursts that can travel a few light years.
So what do all these rules mean?
Well, for one, we can have small ships that can run their hyperdrives off of pretty small reactors as long as they have their capacitors. It also means that communication across interstellar distances actually has some lag since neutrinos can travel through hyperspace but do so at the speed of light… so that translates as 1.9 light years per minute.
It also means that you could theoretically detect ships in hyperspace by finding their reactor signatures since nuclear reactors give off neutrinos. But shut the reactor off and run off of batteries and you could have a real Das Boot situation since conventional sensors have a very limited range. There’s an in-universe justification for STEALTH IN SPACE. It also means that a ship’s engine and fuel still play a key role in space travel, and distance MEANS something.
Early ships running on nuclear-thermal rockets might take weeks or months to travel to other star systems, meaning the early age of exploration will be similar to the exploration of the New World. Crews will be cut off from any type of help should anything go catastrophically wrong. As engines become more advanced and infrastructure gets built in other star systems, help may arrive in hours or days… but space is STILL dangerous.
There’s a LOT more to how the world is shaped by these simple rules, but as you can see, now I have a framework to start populating the world. I can start setting up what trade and exploration look like. Combat, too. You can’t just jump into low orbit and fire off a few nukes. You’re going to be, at best, tens of thousands of kilometers away from your target. And you better believe populated worlds will have defense systems close to the planet.
This also means that even with this FTL communication system, worlds more than a few dozen light years away will experience significant lag in communication. While the area around Earth will be fairly connected, people venturing far out will still really be on their own.
Stay tuned for more on the world of Endeavors and more behind-the-scenes breakdowns!