Planets can be connected through portals

>Planets can be connected through portals
>Is the only practical faster than light travel.

Does that sound silly and I should stay with conventional spaceships?

Sounds perfectly fine to me.

I like it better than spaceships, actually. Just take into account that people will not be expecting a regular sci-fi game but something more oriented towards fantasy.

It's definitely fine, Stargate mostly works with this premise, with a network of gates made by ancient aliens.

I like it a lot, because it does away with a lot of the problems that arise from the thoughts on actual interstellar warfare. It creates more stable battlefronts instead of ships jumping and dropping out of hyperspace wherever. It also makes it so that there's no reason to use a relativistic missile that would destroy planets, because you'd still need to use the portal on that planet to continue the campaign. It also creates the interesting possibility of hub worlds that handle a lot of the trade and you could add in that the portal has to be built at both ends, so humanity would have to journey to that planet to put a portal there, which could cause some planets to be hidden like that or create a hierarchy of systems along both of the galactic spiral arms because they allow the most traffic

do both just like freelancer. hyperspace tradelanes that can be disrupted by pirates using normal travel EMP'ing nodes

God Stargate was GOAT.

Sucks that before the "great reveal" the show was permadead.

While this is true, it depends on the exact way it works.
You could make a very Sci-Fi heavy thing with this concept, where while spaceships are not used for interstellar travel, there's still massive fleets in all the star systems, because in order to power these portals, you need huge amounts of some exotic material that needs to be constantly mined and is a great source of corruption because of it.
If a planet, especially a fringe planet fails to hit a quota, their portal shuts down and they get disconnected from the core world. Even worse, if one of the worlds connecting an arm loses its power source for just long enough, you can cut off entire lines of systems from the core-world, creating the ideal situation for a hostile guerilla take-over, and you don't even have to power your portal back, potentially keeping the core worlds permanently, separate unless they send one of the great interstellar colony-ships that will take decades, even centuries to reach your world, the kind that initially established the world and built the reverse portal.

Because of this, if someone can take control of the mining operations, they can hold entire star systems hostage.

How do you get to the planet to build the portal if you don't have spaceships?

I think its moreso that you do have space ships, but theyre not much better than what we have now. So it takes a fuckton of time to get there, then you build these portals when you get there.

Slowboating at relativistic speeds.

FTL is overkill for intraplanetary travel. A cold-fusion powered muon drive could take you anywhere in the solar system in a matter of days or weeks. And fuel isn't a problem, because it uses plain ol' water as its reaction mass. A trip to the asteroid belt and you could scrape all the ice you need.

And fusion engines are something we've been kicking around since the 70s. It doesn't take warhammer tier bullshit to explain away like portals.

>intraplanetary
I fucked that up, couldn't decide between intrasystem or interplanetary

Do you want to be constantly compared to Stargate?

>Swiggity Swooty, i'm comin' for that booty!

We're not talking about intrasolar travel, though, this is for interstellar travel.

My bad. The OP image made me think it was to scale, i.e. they were all in the same system.

I like it, I like it a lot, but how does piracy work and does traveling through portals take time, or is it instantaneous?

It's instantaneous to the traveler, but to everyone else, it takes the appropriate amount of lightyears for them to come through the other side. So if you're walking through a portal to a planet 1000 lightyears away, you come out the other side 1000 years later.

I'm not sure if war would really be possible. It would be pretty much Thermopylae on steroids.

the portals themselves are spaceships. You fire them en masse from the hub world in random directions and wait for them to activate when they crash land into something
just call them fargates
>Cross through portal to sign peace treaty between planets
>When you arrive on the other side the nation you expected to meet has crumbled into dust and been replaced by an entirely different species
>cross back over and find out all your family it dead

Real-time portals like that would basically only be useful as one-way colony projects. About at helpful as a cryoship, except easier to send people in careful waves. No way to tell if the other side is being successful though, so you may just have them marching through the portal and off a cliff or something.

All FTL is batshit nonsense. Do whatever you want with it.

Call them, stellar doors, celestial doorway, something like that.

Maybe you need a portal device on both ends to create a stable passage BUT you can create a rickety unstable portal with just one portal device, a targeted transmitter, a lot of calculations and some guesswork.

The first portals are built by some guys with a high powered telescope beaming robots to other planets. Assuming the robots don't wind up in the depths of space or the planet's core the build a connecting portal. The guys then build a telescope on the new planet and work with the guys on the first to more accurately pin-point the target for the next portal.

This opens the possibility for bandit portal crews. They have a bunch of pirate mathematicians using illegal targeting and portal equipment to raid planets with varying degrees of success.

Depends on what you want from the setting. Something like the Stargate system, which only allowed a few people to travel to or from a world at anyone time, was very limiting. It wasn't really suited for a standard interstellar civilization.

How big and how common are the portals?
What is their range?

It'd be useful as a two-way transport if you have a transcendentalist setting and humanity has turned themselves into immortal robots.

It's better than most FTL.

For science realism, wormholes > alcubierre drive >>>>>>>>> "hyperspace."

Keeps problems like RKKVs and time hjinks to a minimum too.

Wormholes only work as a sphere floating around in space, not as a doorway sitting down on a planet's surface

I experimented with a setting that had a technology like that. It had some funny implications. The portals were ground based and located in city centers, so you could walk from one end of the galaxy to the other. There were also cases when it was faster to get to another city on your own planet by going off world for part of the journey.

...

True, but with enough supertech it could be handwaved as a different geometry of exotic matter. Anything is better than hyperspace.

Why not a sphere sitting on a planet's surface?

lolwut

OP, just look up the Alderson drive

> defining the relative realism of things which aren't real

Why.

The combination of the facts that some things are more feasible than others, and some people care about realism.

That's how sci-fi works.

Hard sci-fi is about complimenting current knowledge about physics with as few assumptions as possible and writing a story around that, thus it makes sense to know which fictional things are closer to our current understanding of reality.

Farcasters were my favorite part of Hyperion

Not him, but how the hell are wormholes more feasible than the Alcubierre Drive?

They require less impossible matter

Wormholes and alcubierre metrics are possible if you have ungodly amounts of energy and precision, and you have exotic matter (which may not exist, but isn't physically ruled out).

Hyperspace OTOH isn't physically possible.

There are known safe conditions for wormholes. There are no known safe alcubierre drives.

Go either for Hyperspace drive like Homeworld, or for the jump portals like in Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2, with similar limitations (relatively easy to track you if you use them in small amount, can't set up for too many at once).

>How do you get to the planet to build the portal

Slowly

We phazon now!

What are alcubierre drivers?

Not at all. Peter Hamilton wrote a series about something like this.

It makes more sense than trying to beat lightspeed. They still use spaceships for orbital construction etc, and the story ends up calling for an alcubierre drive.

>If a planet, especially a fringe planet fails to hit a quota, their portal shuts down and they get disconnected from the core world

>but the planet keeps mining, unbeknownst to the core
>they mine, and they arm
>one day, decades after the fringe planet's connection went dark, the connection burns brighter than ever before
>the fringe's exodus conquest begins

Nothing can physically move faster than light, but space can expand to a degree that two objects appear to be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light, such as galaxies beyond the horizon of the observable universe. They aren't actually moving that fast, space is expanding in between them so the distance between the two points is constantly increasing despite the fact that the speed of the objects doesn't increase.

An alcubierre drive exploits this principle by expanding and contracting space around the ship, rather than attempting to move the ship itself past the speed of light.

Sounds fantastic to me. Doesn't matter if you are sci-fi or fantasy there is kind of a basis for each already in existence. Run with it.

What's the series and is it worth picking up?

It kind of reminds me Wing Commander: Privateer.

>Portal Pillaging Pirates
That sounds awesome, I'm totally stealing that shit

Might want to check out "One Step from Earth" by Harry Harrison.

it's along a similar line.

>I like it a lot, because it does away with a lot of the problems that arise from the thoughts on actual interstellar warfare. It creates more stable battlefronts instead of ships jumping and dropping out of hyperspace wherever

There are a lot of ways of getting around that issue. I've been playing a bit of Stellaris recently, and they handle it pretty well by requiring multiple jumps with long warm-up and cool-down times for distances more than a couple star systems apart.

>exodus conquest

Bit of an oxymoron there.

sounds like mass relays

Hello Stargate.
The seazons after Atlantis were god damn awfull.

I stopped watching; what was the great reveal?

It is the ONLY way to have FTL, to be able to return home, and to not break causality. The only. So sure, be my guest.

Whats the problem with it?

What great reveal?

Muon drive? That's the first time I hear about it, and Google finds nothing. Where can I read up on it?

Not the only.
Simply intoducing a preferred inertial frame leads to other possibilities.

Iain M. Banks' The Algebraist has this exact same limitation on galactic travel (and it's a damn good book, too).
Intergalactic civilization "collapses" every so often and portals to some systems are lost, so they have to be shipped through space again at slower-than-light speeds.