The Science of Radiance

[sim_james]

   Radiance is a far-future science fiction setting that I used for a linked tabletop scenario and freeform at Sydcon last year, and will revisit in RADIANCE: RELICS at Eye-Con over Easter.

For the most part, Radiance is Plausibly Hard SF, with futuristic science and technology that includes "things that may or may not be possible, but can

Comments

Re: reactionless drives

[sim_james]

That's right! And it's the primary reason for including them.

For reasons of the plausibility of Radiance's cultures, I've placed most warpgates in fairly remote orbits of their star systems. The fictional history requires a lengthy time in which interstellar travel did not occur, which seems unlikely if warpgates are located within 5 AU or so of their primary.

But this means that travelling from haitable planets to a warpgate ten or twenty astronomical units away will take enormous amounts of time, or enormous amounts of fuel, or technologies that are way too easily used as weapons for my liking.

Using antimatter as a power source to allow decent delta-v is just asking for story problems. If the antimatter engines are very large, then you've got the potential for kamikazi spacecraft that can release their antimatter fuel and destroy small continents. If they can be miniaturised to a size that doesn't create weapons of mass (heh) destruction, you can create relativistic missiles or even bullets.

A reactionless drive can be plausibly large enough that it's restricted to spacecraft, and doesn't require dangerously large energy output. Murderously suicidal players could still accelerate a vessel to relativistic speeds and smash it into something, but I feel that's a lot more obvious and easier to prevent than sneaking a vessel up to the enemy, and remotely dropping the magnetic bottle that contains all of the vessel's antimatter.

So: reactionless drives. They provide an adequately fast way of getting about for a roleplaying game, and if it's something like a bias drive then I can postulate some kind of artificial gravity inside the spacecraft as well. Enormous amounts of fuel are unnecessary, although energy is still required for other vessel functions so operating the spacecraft isn't "free". The only qualm that I have is that the technology required seems a little more advanced than that which is readily available in the current setting - exotic matter is required for warpgates, but those artefacts are beyond humanity's current ability to recreate. It means that humanity has some small-scale technology involving this level of technology, which should be extrapolated to other plausible practical uses.

At the moment I think that humanity uses very small amounts of exotic matter to create a version of the ansible, which they use to basically piggyback communication through the warpgate network. It allows a limited "instantaneous" communication across the interstellar civilisation, while remaining within the same reference frame.