Idea!

[izixs]

So I had an idea for a sci-fi setting of sorts. Remember those movies and games like Event Horizon where we figure out FTL but the down side is that it sends you through some sort of hell dimension first where you're likely to go insane and mutilate yourself? Well! Take that idea, and fast forward a few centuries. After a few horrible horrible

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[ghodamus]

There's a science fiction series you should read called "The Chronicles of Solace" by Roger MacBride Allen. Three books; The Depths of Time, The Ocean of years, and The Shores of Tomorrow.

Part of the premise of these novels is that, even in the year 5200, they still haven't figure out how to do faster-than-light travel. Instead, what they've found is a method for manipulating artificially-induced singularities to produce temporal wormholes.

The theory works like this. Say I'm on planet Alice, and I'm going to planet Bob. Alice and Bob are ten light years apart. I put my entire crew into cryostasis or temporal displacement fields, and I boost away from Alice until I reach 0.1c and +50Y.

After 50 years (and five light years traveled), I reach a time-shaft wormhole. The Trans-Alice-Bob Timeshaft Wormhole is a 100-year drop. I go through, maintain my same position in space relative to Alice and Bob, but am now 100 years in the past (relative to the up-time end of the wormhole, so I'm now at -50Y relative to Alice and Bob). I then boost away from the wormhole, getting back up to .1c again, and travel on for 50 more years to arrive at Bob.

Objectively, my transit time took a few weeks. Subjectively, it took a century. And it leads to a lot of other interesting consequences, like ensuring that arrivals and departures are strictly policed (to prevent paradox), and ships that need to be built with subjective lifespans measured in the hundreds of thousands of years.

[izixs]

I've actually read part of one of those books there. Alas I didn't get very far into it. Just past the part where 'oh crap, someone snuck back in time with a super fast ship' or something like that.

I'm not really looking to play with to much time travel craziness in this story idea. There might be some other spaces that get traveled to that take much longer to get out of than would appear to out side observers, but for the most part the fun is in the mind bending, infections, or hostile nature of the other spaces that can be entered. Sort of a monster of the week in some ways but usually nothing really horrible happens. Maybe some of the paint on the side of the ship gets scraped off or Lt. Binky gets a weird infection that yield strange larva coming out of his fingers while everyone else is fine. But on rare occasions things can go horribly wrong due to the frequency of this group's travels.