Scrapyard Station worldbuilding
Jun. 7th, 2022 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariStrictly speaking, most races in Scrapyard Station can’t go faster than light. There are two workarounds, the shitty one and the scary one.
Shitty “FTL”: raise the speed of light! It’s possible to do this in the area between two linked devices, and the devices remain linked no matter how far apart they are. Put one in space near your planet, and another in space near your destination. So in order to use FTL, you need to get the device to its destination without FTL. You’re not gonna be exploring Alpha Centauri with this alone.
(Space is pretty empty. Once the device is set up, there’s only a miniscule, almost immeasurable chance you’ll crash into an asteroid at FTL speed . Of course, since everything in space is constantly moving relative to everything else, you can never be perfectly sure there isn’t an asteroid field in your way that wasn’t there the day before. And if, hypothetically, there was such a field in your way, you’d be obliterated in an instant and no one would ever find out what happened to you. Maybe this is the scary method, too.)
Scary “FTL”: there’s a dimension that interlaces with our own, colloquially known as hyperspace. Distances there don’t work the same as distances here. You can send an automated probe there, and it will come out at any programmed destination you want, crossing light-years in a matter of weeks or months.
Now, if you’re from the race known as the Nomads, this is no big deal. You can naturally enter and leave hyperspace anytime you want. But when Tinkers (humans) discovered hyperspace, the probe footage came back impossible to process. No matter how long you looked at it, you’d never be able to describe what you were seeing. And no Earth lab animal sent into hyperspace ever returned alive.
Combine the two methods, and you have space travel. Send one of the lightspeed-raising devices into hyperspace, automated to come out at your destination, then travel faster than normal lightspeed to get there. Of course, the devices are pretty expensive, and they only work for two points, so you’ll have to take an indirect route to get to the obscure corners of the galaxy. Plus you can only get from point A to point B half the time, because the other half the time, ships are traveling from point B to point A, and no one wants a head-on collision in FTL. (Spacers are very, very precise about maintaining a universal calendar, such that nobody thinks it’s time to go from A to B at the same time someone else thinks it’s time to go from B to A.)
There’s a reason why Nomads have more colony worlds than every other race combined, and why Tinkers, Builders, and Scholars all use Nomad messengers. Being able to travel through hyperspace yourself negates a lot of issues.
Parasites don’t care about any of this, of course. They want to travel faster than light, so they do, and they have no apparent issue with relativity. Weirdly enough, the human renegades known as the Pure have access to true FTL as well, though even Tinkers don’t understand how they pull it off.
A side effect of all this mess: since non-Nomads can’t travel in both directions at the same time, refugees from Parasite attacks need to travel to a different planet than the one they’re getting military reinforcements from.
Shitty “FTL”: raise the speed of light! It’s possible to do this in the area between two linked devices, and the devices remain linked no matter how far apart they are. Put one in space near your planet, and another in space near your destination. So in order to use FTL, you need to get the device to its destination without FTL. You’re not gonna be exploring Alpha Centauri with this alone.
(Space is pretty empty. Once the device is set up, there’s only a miniscule, almost immeasurable chance you’ll crash into an asteroid at FTL speed . Of course, since everything in space is constantly moving relative to everything else, you can never be perfectly sure there isn’t an asteroid field in your way that wasn’t there the day before. And if, hypothetically, there was such a field in your way, you’d be obliterated in an instant and no one would ever find out what happened to you. Maybe this is the scary method, too.)
Scary “FTL”: there’s a dimension that interlaces with our own, colloquially known as hyperspace. Distances there don’t work the same as distances here. You can send an automated probe there, and it will come out at any programmed destination you want, crossing light-years in a matter of weeks or months.
Now, if you’re from the race known as the Nomads, this is no big deal. You can naturally enter and leave hyperspace anytime you want. But when Tinkers (humans) discovered hyperspace, the probe footage came back impossible to process. No matter how long you looked at it, you’d never be able to describe what you were seeing. And no Earth lab animal sent into hyperspace ever returned alive.
Combine the two methods, and you have space travel. Send one of the lightspeed-raising devices into hyperspace, automated to come out at your destination, then travel faster than normal lightspeed to get there. Of course, the devices are pretty expensive, and they only work for two points, so you’ll have to take an indirect route to get to the obscure corners of the galaxy. Plus you can only get from point A to point B half the time, because the other half the time, ships are traveling from point B to point A, and no one wants a head-on collision in FTL. (Spacers are very, very precise about maintaining a universal calendar, such that nobody thinks it’s time to go from A to B at the same time someone else thinks it’s time to go from B to A.)
There’s a reason why Nomads have more colony worlds than every other race combined, and why Tinkers, Builders, and Scholars all use Nomad messengers. Being able to travel through hyperspace yourself negates a lot of issues.
Parasites don’t care about any of this, of course. They want to travel faster than light, so they do, and they have no apparent issue with relativity. Weirdly enough, the human renegades known as the Pure have access to true FTL as well, though even Tinkers don’t understand how they pull it off.
A side effect of all this mess: since non-Nomads can’t travel in both directions at the same time, refugees from Parasite attacks need to travel to a different planet than the one they’re getting military reinforcements from.
