TML::> This question falls from the main lines of the TNE debate.
Let me prefix my remarks with the comment that I am not a
physicist, nor anything even remotely resembling one. These are
just my own views on the topic.
TML::> Would it be possible to hold a jump portal open between two star systems
::>I know, I know, can you say Star Gate boys and girls? And if you can, the
::>second part of my question comes into play...
Given the previous explanations of how Jump works, I'd be
inclined to say not - not necessarily because of technical
limitations, but because of energy limitations. Remember that
most of the energy required for a jump is either to open the
portal itself (according to some explanations) or to maintain a
realspace field around the vessel (according to others). If a
portal stayed open, or could be held open, after a ship passed
through, it would be possible to follow a ship through
jump space, and hence jumping out of a system after an act of
piracy or worse wouldn't allow the bad guys (or your PCs) to
escape.
TML::> Do radio waves propogate through jumpspace? Now! If radio waves propogat
::>through jumpspace and you hold a stable portal open (even a minutely smal
::>one) then couldn't you have a FTL communications network?
Yes, you could, but it wouldn't buy you anything over the XBoats
in terms of speed. Remember, all ships make jumps in a 150-hour
period, plus or minus a small margin of error due to (as near as
I can come up with an explanation) Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle (well, it's a good buzzword for saying "reason or
reasons unknown), regardless of power available, size of the
ship, color of the Captain's socks, et cetera. So opening a
portal between Vland and Tauri and holding it open for
communications would still end up causing each planet to hear
news from the other a week after it happens. So, it becomes
more economical to simply batch up the news and the mail, dump
it onto a ship on a regular basis, and have the ship bounce back
and forth.
But that does in fact assume that pure energy can propagate
through Jump space. Which in _my_ Traveller universe is
impossible to test. Why? Because there is an interface between
normal space and jump space, and energy is reflected from that
interface. So, we can't get a transmission _into_ jump space to
determine whether it could propagate, and we can't put a
transmitter into jump space because we would need a crewed ship
to do it, and if we kill the jump field, we kill the crew, even
if we could recover the ship, which risk nobody is willing to
volunteer to take. It's one of the theories behind misjumps
that result in the ship never showing up...
TML::> The way I've always understood jumpspace was that it was an
::>extra-dimensional tunnel through which a ship travels between two points
::>real-space. These tunnels can be opened by a jump drive, and there are
::>infinitely many between the infinitely many pairs of points.
I always understood it as more a bubble than a tunnel. Think of
the "classical" explanation for the Enterprise's warp engines in
Star Trek.
==========================================================================
Jeff Zeitlin [email removed]
- ---
~ QMPro 1.50 41-4533 ~ Let's re-IPL the world