Travel

So a writing buddy of mine has suggested to me that writing a post of Travel in the solar System 500 years in the future is a good place to pick up where I left off.

In the previous post I mentioned that to travel from Earth to Mars with the planets being at there closest points will take a total of seven days.

How did I get that number? Did I just pull it out of my arse?

Actually. I did.

I looked at what a potential story will need to be what I was looking for. So I looked at some of the Science Fiction stories out there and critiqued them. Star Trek had people zooming around almost instantaneously. Note that I said almost. My point is that they go 'warp 9'.

Star Wars had a bit of time that they sat around to talk and stuff, but it still was kinda fast.

My inspiration came from the show Firefly. In the show, there was always spaces of time where they had to wait. They were on transit to another destination. It was fast, but still took days to get anywhere.

I then decided that I wanted my characters to experience that downtime on a journey. It makes it feel a little like a sailing ship more than a space ship. In sailing shows, it always takes endless time to get to one place. And it usually consists of setting a course and sitting on a tack until you need to change the tack.

I still didn't know how fast that they could travel. For that I needed to do some research. I needed to know how fast can we go now and why.

I looked up the different space craft to get an idea on how fast can we go. I learned some information on space travel in the process.

The idea that we can go 'warp' speed is technology impossible. Also there is no 'max' speed in how fast you can go. It depends on the destination. You speed up until half way, and then turn your craft around and slow down until you get there.

NASA, however, uses a transfer system. It takes three to six times as long as a straight journey, but uses gravitational forces that are already in space to hurdle the craft to it's destination with minimum fuel used.

It seems like we have an issue getting stuff into orbit. But we'll talk more on that a different day.

Back to space travel.

At that point I got frustrated with all of the different information out there. I decided to pick a number and roll with it.

I then decided that a week sounded like a good number to a quick trip to Mars.

Now I needed the how.

How does one get from Earth to Mars in seven days?

My answer. A really fast engine.

I looked at the idea of the warp drive and studied it's 'science'. It works not by speeding you up past the speed of sound, but by bending the distance that is being traveled making you go faster.

So in my my future, there are two major speeds that are used.

'Impulse Engine."
The Impulse Engine varies ship to ship. Some use a hydrogen fuel liquid, some use nuclear. Some use an Ion type drive. While other uses Electromagnets or even some Microwaves. There speed varies greatly, but they all aren't that fast. The fastest can make the trip in little over 30 days.

What Impulse Engine is the fastest? I haven't decided that. I may come up with some type of ranking system later, but right now it is a mute point.

'Hypersonic Rail-Gun'
The Hypersonic Rail-Gun is a made up technology. Like a 'Warp Drive' or Hyper Drive'. This technology doesn't exist and probably couldn't exist. The idea is there though. Using a mixture of sound waves and magnetism a giant 'gun' shoots a ship to a destination.

Each Rail-Gun takes a crew of hundreds to operate and maintain. Each requires a space station to support its infrastructure. More on that later.

How a Rail-Gun works is that the gun will shoot off a ship towards a per-selected target. This target has to be within a max and min zone. If there were guns lined up from the Earth to Mars, that ship would have to take a total of 16 trips to the next gun.

Now, each Rail-Gun is not fixed in space. Nor are the planets for that matter. They are all constantly moving around with each other. The Earth rotates around the sun faster than Mars. It would become impossible to keep the same 16 Rail-Guns from Earth to Mars at the same time. That means that each Rail-Gun has its own rotation on its own.

In an ideal world, there would be a central computer system that controls the movement of these way-stations. But with the politics of the world (Another topic for another time), that will not happen anytime soon.

That brings up a very good point. How to navigate the constantly shifting Rail-Guns to get to your destination? You need a navigator of some kind.

Enter the role of an Astrogator. An Astrogator is a person of elite talents. It's his job to plot the course from Point A to Point B with an eye for making the fastest time. Picking which Rail-Gun to shoot off to. With the chaotic shifting of the guns, a wrong turn can put you days off course.

That is all that I have time for today. As you can see, I still haven't scrapped off the tip of the iceberg of my future. I still have weightlessness, stations, cargo, health, safety, dangers of the Rail-Guns and more that is still in the topic of Travel.

But it'll have to weight another day.

For you few readers out there. I need a new name for my Hypersonic Rail-Gun. I need the name Rail-Gun for something else, but I can't find something that is better.

Post a comment and let me know.

Cheers.