Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2009 12:46 am
lovely explanation.
DH [reading and replying on his Wii. not fun, but doable!]
DH [reading and replying on his Wii. not fun, but doable!]
For information and discussion about Oolite.
https://bb.oolite.space/
Disembodied wrote:Alternative technobabble:
The Witchspace drive is the only engine fitted in the ship. By accelerating quirium particles in a closed circular particle accelerator – a torus – it manipulates the fabric of spacetime, drawing it in at one end and pushing it out at the other. The faster the quirium spins, the faster the ship goes. No quirium is consumed in the process. Properly maintained, a closed quirium torus could propel a ship indefinitely.
When local spacetime is sufficiently flat, i.e. not distorted by a large mass or by the actions of another nearby Witchdrive, it can propel the ship at around lightspeed. If local spacetime is too distorted, the torus system can only operate at a fraction of capacity: 0.2C, 0.35C, etc. In these distorted conditions, spinning the qurium at "torus drive" speeds would cause it to rapidly break down, bringing the whole engine to a crashing halt in milliseconds. The "Witchdrive fuel injector" system gets round this, by constantly topping up the quirium in the torus from an external tank.
Of course, the ship doesn't actually move at all: it remains stationary, while space itself is hauled in at one end and rammed out at the other. Because of this there is no inertia, hence the non-Newtonian flight characteristics. When the ship appears to "turn", it's actually revolving the entire universe around itself. Because the torus is fitted in the horizontal plane of the ship, it's easy to move the ship (or rather it's easy for the ship to move the universe) up and down vertically, but almost impossible to move it horizontally. However the ship can be spun around its longitudinal axis (or rather, the universe can be spun around ... you get the idea) by rotating the drive assembly. Some progress has been made towards "yawing" by building a smaller torus set at 90° to the main loop, and spinning it either clockwise or anticlockwise. The internal strain on the ship, and on the drive train itself, though, is massive, and personally I think this is just a passing fad with no real advantage.
The "exhaust" is caused by spacetime emerging from the Witchdrive: as this spacetime wake merges back into the normal flow, the particles and antiparticles constantly being produced from the quantum foam are briefly travelling faster than light, and hence give off the distinctive blue-purple glow of Cherenkov radiation. The faster spacetime is moving as it emerges from the engine, the more intense the glow. The conical shape is a three-dimensional section of the four-dimensional wake.
A large enough mass of quirium, spun sufficiently fast, can distort spacetime to such an extent that it can tear open a wormhole. Again, the faster the quirium spins, the longer the wormhole. Accelerated to 99.9999...% of C (constantly topped up from an external tank, as the accelerated quirium breaks down), the wormhole can reach a full 7 light-years. If it was possible to spin the quirium faster than light, then theoretically the wormhole could be even longer – but it's not possible.
Which makes it a little difficult to explain, though, why pitch is easy, but yaw so difficult. The movement the tori have to make seems just the same in both cases.Disembodied wrote:JameSpal – sweet! I see from your plans that I made an elementary error: the (gold-coloured) Witchdrive torus is of course fitted vertically, not horizontally. Foolish of me.
Actually, I made those before you posted the torus drive explanation. Those were intended to be manifolds for the witchspace fuel injectors. The rest of the in-system engines are supposed to be more like Ion engines - pulling the ionic Quirium vapors from the storage tanks and using electric fields to excelerate the vapor particles up to speed to push the ship along.Disembodied wrote:JameSpal – sweet! I see from your plans that I made an elementary error: the (gold-coloured) Witchdrive torus is of course fitted vertically, not horizontally. Foolish of me.
That kind of stuff.The powerful dual 16 chamber drive engines deliver smooth, reliable, efficient power. The dual injection system - an industry first - gives you the extra dose of oomph when you need it most.
Aha. Right enough. OK, I was right the first time – the thing is fitted horizontally – and the big gold doughnuts aren't the torus part of the torus jumpdrive.Commander McLane wrote:Which makes it a little difficult to explain, though, why pitch is easy, but yaw so difficult. The movement the tori have to make seems just the same in both cases.Disembodied wrote:JameSpal – sweet! I see from your plans that I made an elementary error: the (gold-coloured) Witchdrive torus is of course fitted vertically, not horizontally. Foolish of me.
Fair enough! The only problem I have, from a technobabble point of view, with the ion drive theory is that it's still a reaction engine. If we've got ion drives that produce big flaming jets out the back, why don't we see big flaming jets out the front when we decelerate? We don't have to flip the ship around as per Frontier, and there are no retro rockets ... on the observable evidence it has to be something completely non-Newtonian.JameSpal wrote:Actually, I made those before you posted the torus drive explanation. Those were intended to be manifolds for the witchspace fuel injectors. The rest of the in-system engines are supposed to be more like Ion engines - pulling the ionic Quirium vapors from the storage tanks and using electric fields to excelerate the vapor particles up to speed to push the ship along.