FTL In Astra Planeta

FTL in Astra Planeta

All known interstellar civilizations in the Astra Planeta canon are capable of faster-than-light travel, in some cases (skae and Calypsians) thanks to the teachings of humanity, but mostly because of their own scientific merits. The only known form of macroscopic FTL travel is the warp drive, which has historically been achieved a few hundred years into each civilization's spacefaring age since the physical and engineering challenges that must be overcome to actually make a working prototype are extremely complex.

A warp drive works by bending spacetime in such a way as to simply amplify the vessel's real velocity; it doesn't actually generate any acceleration. An object's real velocity at warp drive activation determines its FTL velocity, but it takes time to accelerate to that real velocity at a safe acceleration (one standard Earth gravity). What results is a tradeoff between the time spent speeding up and slowing down, and the time spent in warp, which varies depending on distance and real velocity.

Finding the optimal interstellar vector utilizes a simple asymptotic formula (created by @catgirlbionics, thanks again!) involving three variables: the distance to the target in lightyears (d), the warp amplification factor (a), and the maximum real-space velocity of the object as a decimal value of the speed of light (v). This function equates to the total flight duration in days (T).

(707.646*v)+((d/(a*v))*365) = T

By plugging in specific values for (d) and (a), and then deriving the function, its positive local minimum will be equivalent to the shortest possible travel time and ideal velocity for the given interstellar vector. For example: a modern Generation VI warp drive has a maximum amplification factor (a) of about 4000, and the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri (d) is about 4.34 lightyears. Using these values in the formula results in an optimal velocity (v) of about 0.0237c, and a minimum travel time (T) of 33 and a half days!

Warp drives have limited usefulness due to the enormous amount of power they require and the peculiar effects of bending spacetime. Acceleration must be accomplished in real-space or else the exhaust from the engine will reflect off the drive's event horizon and cook the ship, and the same goes for any heat radiated by the vessel. This is why warp drives typically operate in "stuttered" format: an interstellar flight is composed of multiple FTL segments interspersed with periods of real-space STL flight where the ship dumps the heat accumulated by the drive into space via radiator.

Warp drives are not the only method of circumventing the speed of light. Wormholes are also physically possible; however, the largest stable wormholes ever documented are of atomic scale, and anything with rest mass passing through the singularity will cause it to collapse. Wormholes, therefore, are only used to facilitate FTL communication in the form of ansibles, passing extremely narrow laser beams around a network of linked wormholes to achieve near-instantaneous communication.

Because of their nature as loopholes in relativity, both technologies incur some very bizarre effects when it comes to temporal reference frames. Ansible connections where one end is moving at relativistic speed create a combination of wavelength shift and frame dragging that render it impossible to communicate in lockstep; a warpship with a relativistic real-space velocity will result in some time-disparity between passengers and their destination upon arrival. However, it's generally agreed that these complications are a small inconvenience compared to an interstellar society without FTL, where time-slips of decades or more would be a haunting reality.

for a daily-garfield strip, i removed a speech bubble and gave jon the ctrl alt del face and realized i had no other plans from there so. this just exists

happy birthday hon!! I love you!!

here’s a birthday ask! 💌

how are birthdays celebrated in some cultures of your worlds? any worlds, any cultures within— just whichever ones you’d like to talk about! I love to hear about the cool celebrations you come up with; I’d love to hear about how different people celebrate getting older, if you’d like to talk about it :3

THANK YOU HON! I LOVE YOU TOO!!! 💚

This is a GOOD question, and one that I don't readily have an answer to! I'll do the thing that worldbuilders do best: improvise an answer on the spot and overthink it later.

[ASP] Birthdays (or hatchdays, if you're a species which emerges from an egg/cocoon) are still a common event planetside, particularly in human cultures! But for spacers it's less meaningful –between time dilation and the wildly different year lengths of various worlds, it gets hard to keep track of. Sure, you can track it by metric time (using the rounded Earth year), but when most of your life is spent in space without the seasonal cycle of a planet, you tend to perceive time as a more continuous thing, or at least segmented in a different way.

[SPH] Birthdays are a big deal to some cultures, but utterly mundane to others. The Orniikh people treat the day with great reverence and joy: it's the anniversary of the day their principal deities chose to incarnate as you! Orniikh people generally spend their birthdays invoking jeha –that is to say, having a lot of fun!

For Aurians, particularly those of the Temoran belief system, one's birthday is a time for gratitude towards the elder spirits and one's community. You were brought into the world by the grace of the spirits, and it is with the help of your community that you have lived through another season cycle.

The dwarves, meanwhile, hail from the depths of the Southern Range, sheltered from the sky and the seasons, and thus don't really have a cultural concept of cyclical time. For them, age is a continuously progressing status rather than a number, and life stages ("youth," "adult," "elder") are gradually transitioned through rather than marked with fixed dates.

MY DATEMATE @riverbright COMMISSIONED OUR FRIEND TO DRAW MY TRAINERSONA AND TEAM!!! (Thank you again hon!)

Cody here is part of a Pokemon AU that my friends and I are making for funsies! He's from Unova. His team is:

Mori (Serperior ♂)

Anubis (Lucario ♂)

Mirage (Flygon ♂)

Cinder (Talonflame ♀)

Tethys (Lanturn ♀)

Shade (Umbreon ♂)

I love them all so muchhhh

Read The Cosmic Fault :: Co'yo/Co'oh - !!!Let's Go!!!

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happy birthday spy 🥳

thank you! 💚