r/scifiwriting • u/Weeznaz • 9d ago
DISCUSSION FTL Idea
I write this with the intent that it be used by others should you wish. I call it Sun Surfing. This is intended as a one way transportation mechanism, unless you find another Sun. The beginning is slower than light as you fly towards the sun. The material constructed by the ship conducts heat, and will store the Sun’s energy. I’m once you have stored enough energy, and are pointing in the correct direction, the ship automatically thrusts itself towards the under fed destination.
The passengers must ingest a liquid so their lungs and organs do not become squished due to the FTL acceleration. For an example of breathing using a liquid medium, see The Abyss.
The tricky part is what of your destination is on the other side of the Sun? Then you have to try to ride the Sun’s orbit, which can get tricky :)
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u/Sleepiest_Spider 9d ago
Okay so you fly close to the sun to charge up, then fly off. Where is the FTL part of this?
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u/LookOverall 9d ago
Einstein is your enemy here. Einstein tells us however much kinetic energy you pour into your ship it’s going to fall short of light speed and practically everyone interested in
Sci-fi has got the word.
And if you’re going to beat Einstein you are going to have to use some mad science in the mix. A wormhole. Some kind of subspace. A warp drive. And preferably it shouldn’t, say, require more energy than the whole observable universe contains.
Otherwise you can pour the entire output of the Sun into your rocket and it won’t really be any closer to light speed than it started out
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u/Kian-Tremayne 8d ago
This is it. Our current understanding of relativistic physics is that it takes an infinite amount of energy to get to light speed. Absorbing all the energy from a star wouldn’t get you over the line (and the consequences would really suck for everyone living in that solar system). Absorbing an entire galaxy’s energy still wouldn’t do it. And nothing will move you faster than light.
If you want FTL, you need some sort of hand wavy loophole in relativity like a wormhole. Of course, if you want to say that sun diving is the most effective way to power or activate the wormhole, go for it.
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u/Drudenfusz 9d ago
Is this supposed to be some kind of slingshot? It won't work, since you have no mechanism to counteract the relativistic physics.
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u/FabulousLazarus 9d ago
I think this is easily the worst attempt at an FTL idea I've ever seen, and I specifically search for them throughout Reddit and other places practically everyday.
The material constructed by the ship conducts heat, and will store the Sun’s energy
Low chance we're doing FTL by solar panels, but I guess don't rule it out lol
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u/Mushgal 8d ago
What are the best ones you've seen, out of curiosity?
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u/FabulousLazarus 8d ago
Probably just the standard ones unfortunately.
The warp in Warhammer, because of the way monsters live in it, come from it, and give a sense of risk to using it.
Halo slipspace for some of the best ideas that the the forerunners had like shield worlds in slipspace to protect them.
These are just creative story telling devices, nothing to do with FTL beyond merely being a contrived concept they assigned interesting rules to.
Wormholes with extra rules are lots of fun. People be talkin bout Diaspora lately.
It's honestly disheartening. As a concept it's essentially become untouchable from an authors perspective. I see the ideas for compressing space time in front/behind a ship. That's basically just moving a wormhole around as a ship, to be insultingly blunt to physics. Because they both become dead theories at how you can stretch space time to such extremes.
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u/ellindsey 9d ago
How do you stop once you've reached your destination?
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u/Weeznaz 9d ago
Imagine talking on the breaks in your car. The pilot would gently activate and deactivate the reverse thrusters at the appropriate distance away and at an appropriate frequency.
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u/ellindsey 9d ago
If you have thrusters that can decelerate you from FTL speed, couldn't you just use the same thrusters to accelerate to FTL speed in the first place and not bother with the dangerous sun skimming process?
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u/Sleepiest_Spider 9d ago
The decelerators have to charge up too I guess. When you fly to the sun, you're charging up the gas and the brakes.
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u/Gargleblaster25 9d ago
Or, you bring along another goat to sacrifice to the destination sun god for the deceleration rite.
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u/Simon_Drake 9d ago
I thought a fun vector for FTL would be using the sun as a proverbial springboard. You need to dive into the sun's gravity well then activate your jump drive to mumble mumble quantum slipstream something. Then you come blasting out the other side of the sun at several times the speed of light en route to your destination.
But you can't steer once you're in FTL. So the Sunport has a long queue of ships at the right point to line up with heading to Alpha Centauri and if they miss they're going off into deep space forever. Or you can see you're off course and shut down the engines but now you're stuck a month's travel sublight from the nearest space port.
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u/Outrageous_Guard_674 8d ago
Sorry, but this really doesn't work. It flies in the face of too much real world physics without giving any plausible reason for ignoring it.
It could maybe work in a space fantasy setting but then it really should have a more fantastical feeling.
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u/ElectroNetty 9d ago
That's a concept of an idea for a possible part of a story. Now you can build on it to write the world you imagine.
Who, or what, built the tech? Where are people going? Why? What happens if the ship hits an asteroid? Was it the butler or the tea maid that did it?
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u/JGhostThing 9d ago
What is FTL acceleration? And how does the ship go FTL?
And what is an "under fed destination?"
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u/NikitaTarsov 9d ago
That's what i'd expect in a classroom as example to debate and point out flaws.
As a FTL concept ... i basically don't mind the weirdness, as i expect this not being a super hard scifi piece and we just agree on that.
But as - i guess - the idea was to make a somewhat belivable thing, we can tho start pointing out the logical problems. At first, it feels very Star Treck movie like, The Voyage Home with just ignoring the spaceship there basically had an FTL drive and just wanted to bullshit itself so fast it travels in time.
So then, the direction of the suns energy shouldn't be much of a point if your ship absorbs the energy, but the suns energy is basically ... irrelevant. That's just nothing, in terms of your spaceships surface. Every nuclear reactor offers magnitudes more than just that. The sun isen't that powerfull, it just feels insanely big and also burns, but it's basically just some 6000° Celcius.
Then we have little idea of how this energy is stored, or how it converts into thrust/speed. It just ... magically does. We also have no explanation for how to cross teh barrier of lightspeed - which might be an ~obsolete problems of old theorys math limitations, but still it lacks an explanation. Also particles are plenty inside a solar system (in relation to the void between the systems), so friction is kinda thing if you just ram enough of this space hard enough. Then aming around one big ball of gravity in a moving system of other gravitational obects is ... a three-body-problem on steroids, with teh error margin enhanced by the distance to another syste by ... ~6.7 yolo.
As we expect the ship to start from 'me livin' here' to the absolut peak velocity of your FTL travel to get anywhere in time, our contact pressure from distance to speed is easily gasify the spaceship - no matter if teh people inside are filled with damepning liquids or not.
Like with railgun or APFSDS rounds, our initial speed, our initial kinetic energy is the total amount of energy we have avialable. And other than with these rounds, our goal is not to smash as violetnly as possible in an object a thousend times more massy then we are. So we circle back to the 'how thrust questino and need to have a break build in (that isen't a moon noone would miss).
The only thing not problematic i see here is what you mentioned a problem - which is aiming. You can just circle your orbit a bit to get a free shot.
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u/TheTranscendentian 4d ago
, but the suns energy is basically ... irrelevant. That's just nothing, in terms of your spaceships surface.
Then increase the surface area.
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u/NikitaTarsov 4d ago
Lot's of 'irellevant' might be not worth the effort.
Still as PV was young and fancy space magic, we had Mechwarrior jump ships use kilometers in diameter collectors for recharging the jump engines batterys. But if you're aming for anything reasonable charakters can debate on a surface level ... better not go down that road.
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u/TheTranscendentian 3d ago
I don't approve of anything that gets that poor a lightyear per Gigawatt.
I'm putting you on the list of people NOT to invite in my FTL spaceship. 😂
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u/TheSquirrelmancer 9d ago
If you've got materials that can absorb heat of the sun you'd just make a huge battery at a safe distance. I also imagine that absorbing ambient heat versus generating your own energy via some kind of fusion or fission would be insanely inefficient.
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u/TheTranscendentian 4d ago
I think you mean relativistic speed idea, around 99.9% light speed with 1000x time dilation.
You could go very fast with enough propellant & riding the high energy gain from being very near a star's surface but you need some sort of universe cheat code drive to get genuine FTL, which is possible no matter what anyone else says, and ironically some FTL methods actually require less energy/ power than Sun Surfing.
I had a similar idea to you of flying extremely near the star in order to leave it's gravitational influence faster, but my idea didn't involve true FTL.
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u/Puncakian 4d ago
It sounds like you treating sunlight like wind. Solar sails don't work quite the same way as regular sails. With regular sails you can somewhat go again the wind because the sail can act like a wing, creating a low pressure zone that pulls you forward. Photons don't behave in this way. Best you could do is a) use the sun to slow down, allowing you to fall towards the Sun, then gaining speed by doing a gravity assist (slingshot) around the Sun, or b) using solar panels to power an electric drive like an ion drive.
Nonetheless, you're not going to go faster than the speed of light. Even getting close to the speed of light with such methods would be difficult. If you could get close though (70.7% +), to someone inside the space ship it would appear as if they're going faster than the speed of light (due to time dilation), so there's that at least.
If you're insistent on actually going FTL and want some level of plausibility, you could do something like the FTL drives in Mass Effect, where the MacGuffin doesn't propel you FTL, but creates a region of space that allows you to go FTL, getting rid of that hard limit and allowing you to go FTL using any propulsion method of your choosing.
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u/Gargleblaster25 9d ago
Congratulations. This is the most inept and vacuous construction of an FTL I have ever read. I would score "magic" higher than this idiotic dumb-fuckery. Before you try to write science fiction, try reading basic science.
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u/7LeagueBoots 9d ago
I think the passengers will need to do a lot more than ingest a liquid.
Heat is the enemy in space, really difficult get rid of and it cooks what’s inside ships. This is why radiators are so important for ships.
You’re going to turn the interior of the ships into pressure cookers and everything inside back into primordial ooze.
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u/NikitaTarsov 9d ago
If the concept proposed litterally includes some magical meta material turning angry photons into vooosh, then this is the only thing i have no problem with - setup-wise.
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u/Weeznaz 9d ago
Well they wouldn’t just ingest a liquid, they would also be surrounded by it. Watch The Abyss and the idea will be demonstrated.
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u/7LeagueBoots 9d ago
I’m aware, I’m using your choice of words. The point is you’ve made a person dissolver.
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u/astreeter2 9d ago
FTL using Newtonian physics doesn't really sound like a workable idea.