"Stutterwarp Technology in 2300" © 1988, 1998-2005 by
Rob Caswell and Timothy B. Brown, originally
appeared in _Challenge_ #30 (pages 38 - 41).
Text-entry & HTML by:
Steve C.
The single item of technology which has made human colonization of the stars possible is the stutterwarp drive. It is, to date, the only known means of travelling between the stars in acceptable periods of time. Other races encountered thus far by mankind have also discovered and applied stutterwarp technology, and for all of them the same rules apply.
Current research into spaceflight and drives rests mainly in the areas of streamlining and perfecting existing technology. While some theories are being looked into which promise other methods of space travel, the perfection of the stutterwarp is receiving the bulk of the attention of the modern scientific community.
The utilization of the stutterwarp is an area of human experience which is, for some, difficult to understand. Travelling faster than light while really not moving faster than light becomes confusing, and the uninitiated begin to question their grasp of the physical universe. Understanding the anomolies, dangers, and wonders of stutterwarp use is something which even most planet-bound citizens are aware of, at least to some degree - if not from experience, then via media presentations of exploration and life in the distant stellar frontier.
For those few members of mankind's interstellar community who lack an understanding, presented here are the basics of stutterwarp utilization. Advanced studies might reveal the particulars of navigation and communications, but this overview will initiate you sufficiently to deal with that which is the pulse-beat of the 2300 universe, the stutterwarp starships.
With the dawning of the 21rst Century, mankind left behind the most brutal war it had yet known, killing over 50 percent of the world's population (in some estimates - many records of the Third World War were destroyed in that struggle) in the all-encompassing conflict. The psychological scars left on humanity by the conflict have yet to thoroughly heal even today. Though it had been in the minds and dreams of a few during the decades preceeding the war, our race as a whole was compelled to look starward for its destiny. The reality of global thermonuclear devastation demonstrated the fragility and limitations of Earth's environment. Though the populatin was significantly thinned, it would not be long before nations once again felt the need to expand their boundaties or influence in reluctant reaction to the pressures of limited land and resources. If the stars could be put within man's grasp before that time, then perchance an even greater war which could utterly destroy the planet and the human race could be avoided. Humanity had no desire to make its cradle its coffin as well.
It was with this incentive that researchers in all nations labored to find a viable method of interstellar travel during the Age of Recovery (2001-2100). The traditional approach toward achieving an interstellar drive lay in probing the speed of light (C) boundary; testing, measuring, and pushing to see if the predictions of Einstein were indeed true - that the speed of light was an insurmountable barrier. The distances between stars are vast beyond human imagination, and if one could not traverse the distances with speeds somewhere near that of C, then interstellar travel would not be feasible. Unfortunately, it appeared to those early researchers that Einstein was correct, but the scientific community would not admit defeat. In their view there simply had to be a way to "have your cake and eat it too" - a way of travelling at acceptable speeds while staying within the restrictions of the relativistic universe. Undaunted by the seeming contradiction of their goal, the researchers continued.
Finally, diligence paid off. In 2080 a glimmer of hope surfaced in the form of an experiment undertaken by Dr. E.J. Jerome. At the newly constructed synchrocyclotron on the grounds of France's CERN facility, a hydrogen atom was induced to perform an electon tunneling jump. This experiment lay down the foundation for the stutterwarp interstellar drive. The many problems involved in scaling up this original effect to useful proportions involved most of France's research and development facilities (the technology was not originally disseminated beyond France) for over 40 years. However, by 2126 the first interstellar probe ship, the Prometheus, was launched by the ESA.
The Politics of Technology: While French researchers set to work on the fundamentals of creating a stutterwarp-capable exploratory craft, most of the rest of the world was nowhere even near understanding the physics involved. The French research and development facilities were then the best to be found in the world, and much of French-discovered technology was offered for sale on the world market. However, stutterwarp technology had applications which the French government recognized as being tremendously powerful for the future, and that technology was very carefully guarded. Only the ESA member nations (Bavaria, England, and Azania because of its tantalum reserves) were given the technology, but only as they approached it on their own. The French recognized the potential wealth of the stars accessible from Earth early on and tried their best to get the first foothold there for themselves.
The stutterwarp drive skirted the problem of the C-barrier by actually not moving the ship at all. The stutterwarp unit created a field which encompasses the entire starship. It is then capable of "tunneling" all the mass within the field instantaneously a few hundred meters away (actual distance depends on the technology and efficiency of the drive - a hundred meters is about average). This effect is cycled at hundreds of thousands of times per second. The ship is in essence getting from point to point faster than light would make the same distance, but the ship is not physically moving in excess of C. A stutterwarp ship has a pseudo-velocity which is greater than that of light, hereinafter referred to as "velocity." Individuals crewing stutterwarp craft feel no loss of temporal continuity as they exist for mere nanoseconds along a vector determined by their stutterwarp's alignment. In a sense, it's like viewing a film, only with hundreds of thousands of frames per second - it all seems quite natural and continuous. In fact, as far as the effects of time are concerned, the stutterwarp does not suffer the effects of time dilation that would be experienced in craft travelling at relativistic speeds. Another problem avoided by cheating the barrier with stutterwarp is that of red and blue shifting - the compression or expansion of wave motion radialtion as an object approaches or recedes at relativistic speeds - since the ship is not actually in motion.
Of course, to say that ships travelling using stutterwarp are completely motionless is a fallacy. Stutterwarp-equipped craft are usually also fitted with a reaction drive for maneuvering about planets and other large celestial objects, as the efficiency of stutterwarp's "tunnel-distance" decreases by a factor of approximately 10,000 when used in a gravity field of any more than 0.001 G. The fact that objects resist inducement into stutterwarp as the gravitational field increases was the chief stumbling block to the technology's discovery and application on Earth.
When a vessel activates its stutterwarp, any inertial velocity the craft had before the drive's activation is conserved through the stutterwarp transition. Therefore, if a ship is cruising at 1,000 kps using a chemical reaction drive when the stutterwarp is activated, the ship would retain this speed relative to the star system of origin when the stutterwarp is deactivated. The "velocity" of a stutterwarp is determining by controlling the "tunnel distance" rather than the cycle rate (which is only tunable within certain parameters). The true limits of "velocity" are determined by the G-field present.
The field effect which the drives generate is termed "stupid" - it will carry along anything which is in the field as if it were part of the ship. It was for this reason that the AR-I's Bayern overloaded its drive at the start of its mission to the Pleiades. Due to the failure in the ship's systems to recognize that an umbilical had not been released from an orbital depot, Bayern's stutterwarp computers read the depot's mass as part of ship that had to be propelled. This resulted in a drive overload and explosion. Safeguards are now installed in all drives to avoid this kind of accident - computers are designed to recognize foreign objects and will refuse to begin field generation until circumstances are normal. Ships often drag along particles of interstellar dust within their fields, but this is not considered a problem since the quantities are usually negligible.
Stutterwarp drives act upon a linear directional field effect. In order to steer a stutterwarp propelled ship, the ship itself must be turned in physical space. This is accompished by using the ship's reaction thrusters to change the heading, a maneuver which can be executed while the stutterwarp is engaged (and often is). Though it may take only a few seconds to change heading by 30 degrees, the distance travelled to accomplish this feat has been hundreds of thousands of kilometers. An alternative for "tighter" maneuvering is to disengage the stutterwarp (known as "all stop"), change heading, then reactivate the drive. Such considerations can play an important role in starship military activities.
The nature of stutterwarp travel - existing discontinuously along a vector - presents a number of problems, most having to do with the utilization of electromagnetic radiations. Of primary concern is the inability of a ship to navigate with active radar at C+ "velocities." Radar becomes quite useless simply because the ship outruns its radar pulse, arriving at a hazard before the radar pulse has had a chance to warn against it. Before a radio beam can get to a stray asteroid and bounce off, the ship would have already collided with it. It is for this reason that ships usually pull their "velocity" below C when entering or passing through a system's cometary halo, asteroid belt, or other area of high debris concentration. The ship is still using its stutterwarp drive, but will bring its tunneling distance down below C for safety. For this reason, however, space hazards must be reported upon contact to authorities. In explored space, zones of higher than normal densities are marked with radio beacons to warn spacers to skirt the area or lower their drive rates. Unexplored space, however, has no such beacons emplaced and collissions with undetectable objects are a constant threat to the explorer.
By the same token, laser and particle weapons are extremely limited at C+ "velocities" since one could "tunnel" into one's own beam. Even if one were to fire a weapon laterally at "velocities" below C, the weapon's beam would be sliced up very badly by the cycling drive. The resultant beam would pulse and might cause damage, but would have great trouble maintaining a continuous burn on the target.
Micrometeorites cannot be attended to by simply erecting a shield on the front of the ship. A craft could tunnel to a spot where a meteorite was already beyond the shield; it would not necessarily have to pass through the shield. It is possible for micrometeorites to temporarily exists within the confines of the ship, or crew for that matter. However, the precautions taken by starship pilots in avoiding "high" density zones make significantly damaging occurrences of such events astronomically small.
The aspect of stutterwarp which has proven the most annoying is the inherent problem of radio communication. While a drive is activated, any incoming or outgoing radio signal would be chopped to ribbons and distorted beyond the capacity of the ship's crew or computer to decipher it. Two solutions to this problem have been adopted.
The easiest of the two solutions to the communications problem is to simply deactivate the drive system for transmission or reception of messages. This method is foolproof and cheap. However, not all vessels are able to simply stop dead in space for various reasons.
Thus, the second method is a quite complex system which is used commonly on many military vessels. When such a vessel wishes to transmit a message to an object which is relatively stationary, it sends the message along with a pulsed signal which gives the ship's exact cycle rate and velocity vector relative to a standard inertial reference point. The receiver then runs the transmission through a computer which decodes the ship's vector information signal (called a DDB for Dynamic Data Burst) and corrects for any distortions. Now, if the stationary receiver wishes to transmit a signal back, it sends out its response in a chopped form fashioned for the ship to read with no computer assistance; that is, unless they have changed their heading, speed, or cycle rate since their initial transmission. The same mechanics apply to two ships using stutterwarp, except the initial message is just the DDB. The receiver ship reads the DDB and alters its cycle rate slightly to mesh with the transmitting ship's. It then sends a confirmation signal that it is ready to receive and meaningful communication can occur.
The inertial reference point chosen in human space is the brilliant A-class star Sirius. Its brightness makes it an unmistakable beacon from all corners of man's domain.
Another method of communication which is sometimes employed is the stutterwarp message torpedo; a stutterwarp drive drone with a radio transmitter. Though this method is quicker than using strictly radio communication, the cost and availability of tantalum make it a seldom afforded convenience.
The nature of the stutterwarp itself, that of defying the laws of physics effectively and travelling at multi-light speeds, creates many spectacular visual effects. These effects have distinct characteristics and have necessitated a unique terminology for the common spacefarer.
The View from the Ship: As discussed earlier, there is no red or blue shift effect observable by the occupants of a stutterwarp driven spaceship. Remember that the ship is not moving near or faster than light in real space. Therefore, instead of "seeing" all the light waves between the two endpoints of a cycle, the observers only see the waves at the first point and at the second point. Those waves in-between never touch the spacecraft and never can be viewed by occupants.
An observer looking in the direction of motion on a stutterwarp powered starship will see light from all the stars and objects in the foreground, as if he were moving at multi-light speeds toward these objects, only without any kind of relativistic doppler shift. For instance, if the ship is moving fast enough past a star, that star might actually appear to be moving with respect to the ship, which, in fact, it is.
Similarly, an observer looking in the opposite direction, that is, where the ship has been, will see the stars and objects in that direction in the same manner, as if the ship were moving at tremendous speeds. However, should the ship suddenly come out of stutter warp, the aft observer will get a real treat known as a "termination image" or "chaser".
Since the ship has been moving effectively faster than light, all the light from previous positions of the ship will "catch up" to the stopped ship. First, the light of the ship from the last cycle point will catch up, then the light from the point before that. What results is an image of the ship moving away, along the vector the ship originally took, but in the opposite direction. Commonly, a termination image is lost rather quickly, but with telescopic enhancements, the image might be maintained for upwards of a few seconds. This effect also comes on gradually as a ship slowly drops below C+ velocities - this is the effect referred to as a "chaser." A chaser image recedes at a slower rate.
The View from the Ground: Actually, for purposes of this discussion, ground refers to any stationary position. A stationary observer is also treated to some fascinating views of a spacecraft moving with the aid of a stutterwarp.
If a ship moving at C+ velocities comes directly at an observer and stops, the observer will detect the ship, then its receding termination image. As this occurs, both radar and visual observations would detect a ship travelling awat at C+ velocities (see Figure 1).
When an observer views a ship passing close by, he will see the ship appear at its point of closest approach, then see the termination image take off in one direction (the one from where the ship came) while an image of the starship, continuing along its vector, speeds the other way! So, there will be two images of the ship visible from one location; each apparently moving in an opposite direction and neither being an accurate representation of the ship's true location at the time it is observed.
As one observes cases of starship passes at greater distances, it is seen that the divergent images don't start at the same point of closest approach, but at 45 degrees (in the direction of which the ship came, relative to the observer) from the ship's position at closest approach (see Figure 2). Both ship images are valid observations; either could be used, by observations in the electromagnetic spectrum, to identify or track the vessel.
The true limitation on stutterwarp drives is the necessity to discharge the gravimetric charge the drive picks up while in use. A true understanding of the charge has yet to be established. Thus far, the only method known to discharge the drive is to immerse it in a significant gravity well, such as are found only around star systems. The result is that ships must pull into a star system where they must slow down or stop completely as they travel between distant stars.
A typical discharge will take place within the outer reaches of a star system. The length of time required for the discharge is less than two standard days, so there is insufficient time to travel to the inner system before the drives are again ready to run through deep space. Therefore, it is rare that a ship will make planetary calls when it is just passing through to other worlds, unless it is in need of fuel or supplies.
There have been nearly two hundred years of refinements and modifications to space travel in order to accommodate the unique characteristics of man's only means to traverse stellar distances. Only a terrific breakthrough in the theoretical sciences will lead to new methodology. In the meantime, spacefarers will continue to perfect their craft, and the assets and drawbacks of the stutterwarp drive will continue to rule space travel.
--Rob Caswell and Timothy B. Brown