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Yet another FTL Theory


Kurkistan

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I apologize in advance for putting you guys through this again. I was going to post this as a reply to Windy's new Q&A thread, but it got a bit long and I didn't want to hijack the topic.

Some background: Don't bother reading this. At the end of the day, I discover (in a very tail-eating, rambling fashion) that frame of reference is very irritating and means that any time bubble "moving" with a ship would not affect it's motion through space. That's what matters now. Windrunner's new thread also gave us some new information on FTL:

 

QUESTION:
With the technology advancing and going faster than light...?

BRANDON:
Yes, the FTL is built into the magic systems and so there will be something where they figure out how to do that with the magic and spaceships will be propelled using that.

QUESTION
Okay, awesome, just wanted to double check that.

JOSH:
Expanding bubbles around the engines and around the ships?

BRANDON:
You will see, you will see.

JOSH:
Someone on the site actually has-

BRANDON:
Actually figured it out?

JOSH:
Has a very convincing theory.

BRANDON:
They’re missing a very big important piece of the puzzle that you won’t get for a few more books.


I have some thoughts on this snippet here, but for now I'll just be posting my current theory of FTL in its entirety on paper. I may have said this before, but it's what's most plausible to me given our current understanding and one or two crucial assumptions (hopefully the "big piece"):

Give our aforementioned frame of reference problems, large-scale "teleporting FTL" is all that I can think of at this moment. This requires a pair of assumptions to be manageable: bubble "anchors" can be set relatively fluidly and nicrosil/duralumin increase the size of at least bendalloy bubbles to some fairly large extent.

Given these requirements, an FTL ship would need at least one bendalloy/nicrosil combo (or a mistborn or Hemalurgist or whatever: it doesn't matter) and one cadmium misting.

How it works:

First, accelerate the ship to as close to light speed as you can manage. There are a variety of ways you can do this--infinite energy from Skimmers, very violent Pushes with Coinshots on anchors, etc. Then do a series of "jumps" until you get near your destination, at which point you start slowing down.

Procedure to "jump":

For each "jump" of the trip proper, have the cadmium misting puts up a bubble that encompasses the entire ship so that the crew and ship's systems don't need to experience any of the "extra" time during transit. Then have the bendalloy misting super-bubble the ship with the aid of duralumin or a nicrosil misting. Hopefully this bubble is several kilometers, if not several hundred, thousand, or million kilometers across.

From the perspective of Scadrial, the ship will traverse this region of space at several times the speed of light: the (cadmium-bubbled) crew has the same perception, after you factor in normal relativity for the ships "real" speed.

To help things along with this absurdly large bubble, empty space could be far easier to bubble (as I suggested here) because there is less stuff to be affected in near-vacuum, so an improved Bendalloy bubble, instead of just being 5 times bigger or something as it would normally be, explodes once it gets beyond the confines of the ship.

This all sounds plausible enough, but the real problem lies in frames of reference of the "bubblers:"

The bendalloy misting needs to set his bubble's frame of reference to the totality of matter in local space: surrounding stars and galaxies, primarily. This will get us a good enough "motionless" for our purposes, and allow the bubble to be "still" in space relative to our near-light-speed ship. We're okay with not having any absolute "rest" frame of reference because the entire point of FTL is to traverse local space. If you want to be a bit more parsimonious, you could just set some local star or other as your frame of reference, and it should probably work too.

The cadmium misting, on the other hand, needs to set her bubble's frame of reference to be motionless relative to the ship itself, and hopefully set to approximately the same (if not an even higher) "compression factor" as compared to the bendalloy misting's bubble. This way, the crew and ship won't experience centuries of travel subjectively. Bubbles cancel each other out (multiplicatively), so this could work, allowing the cadmium-bubbled ship to move through the space contained within a much larger bendalloy bubble.

The crew-saving cadmium bubble won't slow the ship down because bubbles that are "at rest" relative to anything within them do not have any affect on that object's motion through space.

The end result is that you get "teleportation" where the S.S. Vindicator moves through normal space in a series of quick bursts many times faster than the speed of light, like when Wayne uses his speed bubbles to "teleport" in AoL. If you get multiple bendalloy and cadmium mistings together, you can exponentially increase how fast these bursts are without any ill-effects.

Just to reiterate, this makes key assumptions:
1) The ability to not only "decide" where to anchor a time bubble, but to have two adjacent mistings choose different targets.
2) The effects of duralumin/nicrosil on bendalloy mistings being such as to increase the size of their bubbles.
-2.5) The emptiness of space increasing the size of time bubbles as they have fewer objects to affect.

-----

And so that's that. I've said essentially the same thing before, if I recall correctly, but not so completely. Given that Brandon has said we still don't know "a very big important piece of the puzzle", I'm not exactly flush with confidence that my theory is right. There remains the slight chance that assumptions 1, 2, and possibly 2.5 are these pieces of the puzzle, though.

Edited by Kurkistan
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The missing part might be the Southern Continent's technomagic. A lot of these things might be easier if they were all put in a golem of some sort especially if they found another source of power than humans.

 

I would imagine that the use of feruchemy, like aluminium identity magic, might be able to help you visualize the bubbles correctly.

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I'm a little wary of this "technomagic." Brandon said it was "a more mechanical method", but I'm unsure as to how non-living entities are supposed to access the power of Preservation that Leras imbued sentient creatures with. If there is some way to do "super bubbles" with machinery, though, I'm all for it.

 

I think Identity might be a bit more personal than that. I can't really think of a better metal, though.

 

----
 
As an aside, I realize now that I haven't properly considered just how powerful the multiplicative effect of time bubble overlap is. Who needs to accelerate ships to near light speed? If you get a ship up to 1% of c (about 100 times faster than the pioneer probe, and we weren't trying that hard with that one), you can layer on just two bendalloy bubbles with compression factors of 10 (which is a conservative estimate) and get up to c. Saves you a lot of energy and high-energy collisions on the way to your destination for exceptionally little cost.
 
Add on another 2 bubbles and you're going 100 times c. Another 2 and your going 10,000. With just half-a-dozen overlapping bendalloy (and cadmium, for sanity/life's sake) bubbles, you can go a light year in less than an hour with a negligible starting speed. Add on a few more if you want to start slower and/or travel faster. This seems a bit too powerful...

Edited by Kurkistan
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I really like this, though it hinges on how bubbles within bubbles works. Either Brandon goes the way of instant travel between Cosmere planets, or he messes with timewarp interactions and screws everything up yet again.

 

Still, this is similar to something I'd been imagining a few weeks earlier. I really like it.

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"Oh yeah we burn metals in an actual furnace.  What, none of your guys ever tried that?"

 

Heck yes!

 

Um, that makes getting the right percentage of metals really difficult. If you're smelting an impure metal, get ready for a slightlylessgodly metal explosion.

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"Oh yeah we burn metals in an actual furnace.  What, none of your guys ever tried that?"

 

Just for the record, I don't actually believe they get power by just burning the metals, but the quote itself is awesome.  Can I sig it?

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Seems to me that you could just set your ship on the right course get going as fast as possible then compound cadmium as much as possible and you would get a similar affect. You wouldn't travel any faster relative to the outside observers but you would still be traversing long swathes of space in a what felt to you as a short amount of time. 

 

Unless the trip required you arrive quickly relative to outside observers this would be just as feasible and less complicated to perform. though I wouldn't categorize it as FTL.

Edited by Khmauv
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A good point. I agree that that would work, for certain definitions of "work."

 

That aside, I also agree that I wouldn't really call that FTL, and we know that we get FTL somehow. The "stasis" method you describe would really only be useful for one-way colonization-style trips, not anything more robust or interesting.

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So do we know that increase allomantic strength of bendalloy increases the bubble size? I thought it would compress time more.

 

edit: Lets assume that more strength means bigger bubble. could a bendalloy twinborn compound enough to affect whole building, a city, or a continent? That could be an interesting defense mechanism. 

Edited by Khmauv
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That's a good question, which is why I list the bubble growing larger as an assumption. ;)

 

We know that Wayne got a higher compression of time by flaring Bendalloy, so that argues that a d/n (duralumin/nicrosil) powered bubble would simply compress time even more. But it could be that, just as (at least as the somewhat-unreliable on time-bubbles RPG says) time-bubblers have a fair amount of control over the size and compression factor of their bubbles, they can also direct where the extra strength from flaring and "super flaring" metals goes: into size, compression, or a mixture, perhaps.

 

It also seems to me that an d/n flare of bendalloy/chromium really shouldn't increase the compression factor of the bubble. While all other d/n flares burn away their metals in a split second (though not actually instantaneously), a Slider who got d/n flared might have minutes of subjective time where he was inside of a time bubble that should have been flared away in an instant. A time bubble that is no longer being sustained by the burning of metals, it seems, and the duration of which is oddly both too much in- and too much out-of the control of the Slider: he cannot stop burning Bendalloy to cancel the bubble, yet he can still walk to the edge and "pop" it well before the Bendalloy he's already burned has run its course.

 

It seems to me, then, that a d/n burst should reasonably be expected to have an exceptionally short time of effect--similar to a d/n pewter or steel burn lasting a split second, rather than being instantaneous--and more so that this time be short from the perspective of the misting. And so it follows that all the extra energy that is expended by burning your metals in such a short times needs to be directed towards expanding the area of effect of the bubble.

 

Once again, I think I may just be repeating myself with this reasoning, but it's buried in the bowels of some year-old thread and worth repeating. :)

 

EDIT: Several months later:

 

Actually, I've been a bit foolish. Pulsers can certainly be different from Sliders in this case. Where increasing the "compression factor" for a Slider would give them an unreasonable amount of time to be bubbled after the burst, a Pulser could just as easily have a half second on the inside that takes a year on the outside in a normal bubble as have .5s->month in an unnaturally large bubble. So there's still some ambiguity for them. Not for Sliders, though. Their bubbles need to get bigger.

Edited by Kurkistan
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  • 2 months later...

Hey, first time posting and I really like the theory Kurkistan especially the expanding bubble once it touches space part. I had a thought of the slider being in the front of the ship maybe next to pilot or whatever and when he puts a bubble up he is close enough to space that the bubble can leave the ship, and it expands like you said, which causes the rest of the ship to enter the bubble then like everything else to shoots off like crazy. Huge maybe, but perhaps future sliders learn to aim with the crazy aim distortion screw up thing.

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This theory basically states that if you accelerate close to the speed of light and then pop up a slider bubble you would be traveling faster than light from the perspective of those outside the bubble. Simple, straightforward  FTL. Flavor with the possibility of bendalloy compounding, add in a way to prevent undesired aging and you have a shiny new concept with lots of potential. 

 

Some concerns with this theory:

-I expect to have feruchemy involved and it is conspicuously absent. While not required strictly speaking, Brandon's quotes on the subject of FTL strongly hint at an interaction between allomancy and feruchemy. 

-The idea of large bendalloy bubbles is appealing, but based on the effect of flaring I expect duralumin to enhance the time-compression rather than expand the size. Effectively, for the few seconds of a duralumin burst time would appear to stop outside the bubble rather than moving at molasses speed. 

-Time is not dependent on matter being present, and there is just as much time in deep space as there is on earth. Assuming a time altering bubble expands to very large size simply because there is no physical matter in the area seems poorly supported. 

-You have suggested that an allomancer can adjust the reference frame of a time bubble, but Brandon tells us that even on a moving vehicle a bubble remains fixed relative to Scadrial. The bond of a planet to those born there should even persist when in outer space, so how do you account for voluntary frame shifts?

-I would expect a slider bubble inside a pulser bubble to cancel each other out regardless of reference frame. 

 

 

I think your ideas may work to get FTL, but only if you remove the pulsers and allow aging to occur. So far I'm sticking with the Chromium Controlled Slider Bubble theory based on the Infinite Improbability Drive

Edited by Isomere
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I think that soulbending will play a big part in it. It works with our not knowing how something works perfectly, and if you use your stored up investiture you could probably do some awesome stuff with your other things.

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@Radient
 
Thanks, I'm glad you like it. Just a note, though, I think you may be misreading me slightly. I don't think time bubbles instantly grow to mega-size the moment they touch vacuum: instead, I think a bubble that would normally expand, say, 10 feet outside of a ship would instead expand 100 feet if those extra 10 feet were all vacuum. You still need a very large bubble to begin with.
 
As for the "shooting off like crazy effect", that won't be happening. That was what I based my first theory on, and simply doesn't work, so far as I can tell.
 

This theory basically states that if you accelerate close to the speed of light and then pop up a slider bubble you would be traveling faster than light from the perspective of those outside the bubble. Simple, straightforward  FTL. Flavor with the possibility of bendalloy compounding, add in a way to prevent undesired aging and you have a shiny new concept with lots of potential.

 
Thanks!
 

Some concerns with this theory:

 
Wait, that was a trick!  :angry: ( :P)
 

-I expect to have feruchemy involved and it is conspicuously absent. While not required strictly speaking, Brandon's quotes on the subject of FTL strongly hint at an interaction between allomancy and feruchemy.

 
I'm hoping to squeak by on this one by having Feruchemy used for "anchoring" the bubbles, or perhaps using Skimmers to get free energy for accelerating the ship in real time. Or Investiture to boost the time bubbles rather than Nicrosil/Duralumin. I agree that it is a weakness, though.
 
 

-The idea of large bendalloy bubbles is appealing, but based on the effect of flaring I expect duralumin to enhance the time-compression rather than expand the size. Effectively, for the few seconds of a duralumin burst time would appear to stop outside the bubble rather than moving at molasses speed.

 
But then you run into the problems I raise in this post. The whole point of bendalloy is that you get more time on the inside than they get on the outside. But duralumin, it would seem, burns away your metals in an instant, a split second. So a "burst" Slider would only get an eyeblink of time in their bubble before the metals sustaining it were burned away.
 
I realize now that this isn't strictly impossible, as I said in my previous post. It could be the case that an n/d Slider gets 0.5s->0.000001 or some such, but that is infinitely useless by all accounts.
 
At the very least, then, I would probably have to insist that both parties have the ability to "divert power to shields" and increase the size of their bubbles rather than their compression factors. This not being the case would be possible, I suppose, but it rather violates the spirit of the thing for an n/d Slider to get zero benefit at all, essentially.
 

-Time is not dependent on matter being present, and there is just as much time in deep space as there is on earth. Assuming a time altering bubble expands to very large size simply because there is no physical matter in the area seems poorly supported.

 
Yes, not one of my more deeply held beliefs, that. I base it primarily on the fact that Cadmium bubbles are larger than Bendalloy. It makes perfect sense in terms of plot--after all, Cadmium would be even more useless if it were as small as speed bubbles--but not in terms of powers if we work with your assumption. Both sorts of time bubbles mess with the movement and passage through time of objects, to essentially the same degree, but in opposite directions. Yet Cadmium bubbles are much, much larger.
 
I've theorized, then, that Cadmium bubbles co-opt some of the energy of the objects they ensnare and use it to increase the size of the bubble. Not all of it, or we'd have a runaway effect, but some of it.
 
Alternatively--or perhaps in parallel--you can look to Peter saying that kinetic energy is changed by Bendalloy bubbles, at the very least. This means to me that the bubbles care about the objects within them, so it would seem that the fewer objects they have to deal with, the more space they ought to be able to cover.
 

-You have suggested that an allomancer can adjust the reference frame of a time bubble, but Brandon tells us that even on a moving vehicle a bubble remains fixed relative to Scadrial. The bond of a planet to those born there should even persist when in outer space, so how do you account for voluntary frame shifts?

 
That's one of the questions, and maybe Feruchemy (or intense hypnosis) can deal with it.
 
You are drawing a bit too much from that Brandon quote, though. There's no evidence to say that "the bond of a planet to those born there" is the end all be all. Brandon has confirmed that "it’s linked up to the spiritual gravitational bond between the planet [and the allomancer]."

 

So no more planet's gravity, no more gravitational spiritual bond; at least no more than one is attracted to the sun or the (non-existent, on Scadrial) moon. 

 

-I would expect a slider bubble inside a pulser bubble to cancel each other out regardless of reference frame. 

 

Ah yes, I do assume (ala the MAG, and just common sense), that they only "cancel" in overlapping areas, and only in the sense that their effects counteract one another directly: so the edge of a speed bubble touching the edge of a slow (?) bubble doesn't collapse the entirety of both of them or any such weirdness.

 

The beauty of the thing is that the Cadmium bubble is exerting exactly zero influence on the movements of the ship, as it is stationary relative to it. Therefore, the only thing it should conflict with directly is the timey-wimey effect.

 

Think of it this way: what would you expect to happen if two bendalloy bubbles with difference reference frames were to intersect? Should they merge together in harmony and create a super-bubble of awesome that doesn't care who came from where? Ha!!! No, each of their effects should persist, I think, and exert their own unique influence over objects that enter their area of effect, to the point where you might have to start calculating angles as different forces are applied to affected objects.

 

This is supported in that time bubbles are multiplicative rather than additive when they overlap: time bubbles warp spacetime as they encounter it, they don't set it to some pre-determined standard. So they run into an area that is already warped by another bubble and don't particularly care, just applying some more warp.

 

I think your ideas may work to get FTL, but only if you remove the pulsers and allow aging to occur. So far I'm sticking with the Chromium Controlled Slider Bubble theory based on the Infinite Improbability Drive

 

I do like my "not taking centuries subjective" thing, though. I suppose cryochamber's might do the trick, but still...

 

Thanks for taking the time to list out your thoughts, also.

Edited by Kurkistan
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Ok Kurk, you asked me to read it and give my reasons as to why I think there may be problems.  In order to alleviate some of the wet blanketness that this post may be, let me preface by saying that this is very clever.  i like the thought you put into it.  However on a not crazy in-depth study of this, I have 4 initial concerns.

 

1)  As Isomere pointed out above, it seems to me that a duralumin/nicro enhanced bendalloy bubble would also have an increased time compression relative to a standard bubble.  That being the case, there would remain a (substantial?) passage of time for the ship and the crew since the cadmium bubble would then only decrease the time differential between the ship and Scadrial.  Now, if you wanted to account for this, I suppose you could have cadmium burners who are weaker than your bendalloy burners and duralumin/nicro them as well.  Then their bubbles would still be smaller than the bendalloy, but this would decrease the time differential to more negligable amounts.  Might have a problem with bubble bumping though and you cadmium and bendalloy bubbles would overlap inevitably.

 

2)  That is a great big fat assumption to say that the frame of reference for the bubble (i.e., anchored in a fixed location in space or on a moving object).

 

3)  This method seems to be incredibly metal intensive, you would be burning through bendalloy like a madman.  How would you keep your misting supplied.

 

4)  This is somewhat supplementary to reason 3).  You would have to be constantly putting up and popping bubbles in rapid succession and constantly to maintain the effect.  This would require intense coordination between your sliders and the enhancers as well as some means of providing a constant feed of metals to at least your sliders.  There are perhaps some work-arounds. But, Sheesh! the logistics are intense.

 

So there is the initial volley.  You may have thought of these things and have ready answers.  I may have misunderstood some aspects which may nullify these rationale.  But there it is, IMHO.

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*Cracks knuckles*

 

No worries, any theory needs earnest opposition.

 

Ok Kurk, you asked me to read it and give my reasons as to why I think there may be problems.  In order to alleviate some of the wet blanketness that this post may be, let me preface by saying that this is very clever.  i like the thought you put into it.  However on a not crazy in-depth study of this, I have 4 initial concerns.

 

1)  As Isomere pointed out above, it seems to me that a duralumin/nicro enhanced bendalloy bubble would also have an increased time compression relative to a standard bubble.  That being the case, there would remain a (substantial?) passage of time for the ship and the crew since the cadmium bubble would then only decrease the time differential between the ship and Scadrial.  Now, if you wanted to account for this, I suppose you could have cadmium burners who are weaker than your bendalloy burners and duralumin/nicro them as well.  Then their bubbles would still be smaller than the bendalloy, but this would decrease the time differential to more negligable amounts.  Might have a problem with bubble bumping though and you cadmium and bendalloy bubbles would overlap inevitably.

 

I don't think an increase in compression factors will be necessary, but it's manageable even if it does occur. Just stack on some extra Pulsers: Cadmium burns slowly.

 

Heck, why did I even bother trying to even the passage of time out? Who needs to experience the journey in "real" time? Just stick on three times as many Pulsers as you need and pass the journey in a flash.

 

As for overlap, I addressed what I think happens then in my response to Isomere.

 

2)  That is a great big fat assumption to say that the frame of reference for the bubble (i.e., anchored in a fixed location in space or on a moving object).

 

I think you're missing some words here. This might be any of several possible objections: could you please clarify?

 

3)  This method seems to be incredibly metal intensive, you would be burning through bendalloy like a madman.  How would you keep your misting supplied.

 

4)  This is somewhat supplementary to reason 3).  You would have to be constantly putting up and popping bubbles in rapid succession and constantly to maintain the effect.  This would require intense coordination between your sliders and the enhancers as well as some means of providing a constant feed of metals to at least your sliders.  There are perhaps some work-arounds. But, Sheesh! the logistics are intense.

 

Well, fuel and engines--as well as life-supporting supplies, to a certain extent--are all rather unnecessary, so I imagine we could just pack the ship to the gills with Bendalloy and Nicrosil. There's really no limit on the ships' mass: the Bendalloy bubbles need to be indecently large for my FTL to work, so a ship being a klick long wouldn't be a problem.

 

We can remove at least some of the logistical issue by keeping the Pulsers active at all times, so there's that.

 

As for coordination: eh. They could manage it, I think. Actually, if a Nicro can Burst more than one person at the same time, one Nicro could give a great big hug to half a dozen Sliders, all burning Bendalloy for relatively small bubbles, and then Nicroburst them all simultaneously by just triggering his powers.

 

EDIT: Wait, they'll be pulled out of the bubble... Brain blast! Have them be encompassed by some number of ship-anchored speed bubbles so that they have time to act/react when making mega-bubbles. That'll cost more bendalloy, though...

 

We might have to go with Technomagic to get the timing right and/or make this practical, but I still think you could do it with people if you had sufficient dedication.

 

So there is the initial volley.  You may have thought of these things and have ready answers.  I may have misunderstood some aspects which may nullify these rationale.  But there it is, IMHO.

 

I don't think you've misunderstood anything in particular. Let me know if my answers are unsatisfactory.

Edited by Kurkistan
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I don't think an increase in compression factors will be necessary, but it's manageable even if it does occur. Just stack on some extra Pulsers: Cadmium burns slowly.

 

Heck, why did I even bother trying to even the passage of time out? Who needs to experience the journey in "real" time? Just stick on three times as many Pulsers as you need and pass the journey in a flash.

 

As for coordination: eh. They could manage it, I think. Actually, if a Nicro can Burst more than one person at the same time, one Nicro could give a great big hug to half a dozen Sliders, all burning Bendalloy for relatively small bubbles, and then Nicroburst them all simultaneously by just triggering his powers.

 

EDIT: Wait, they'll be pulled out of the bubble... Brain blast! Have them be encompassed by some number of ship-anchored speed bubbles so that they have time to act/react when making mega-bubbles. That'll cost more bendalloy, though...

 

We might have to go with Technomagic to get the timing right and/or make this practical, but I still think you could do it with people if you had sufficient dedication.

 

 

Ok, adding cadmium bubbles factors strongly into item 4).  I'm not sure I made it clear what I was saying.  Ok, for starters lets look at velocity.  Just as a bit of flavor I note that the space shuttle in orbit over Earth travels at approximately 50 miles per second.  Now, we are talking about bringing our ship to a greater velocity than that, neh? I believe you said "First, accelerate the ship to as close to light speed as you can manage". 

 

So, we are moving through space at a nightmarishly quick pace.  This means when a bendalloy bubble is put up, this is the velocity of the ship as it travels through the space contained the bendalloy bubble which is anchored at a fixed point in space.  This means that, even with a freakishly enormous sized bubble, the ship will traverse this space in an eye-blink.  You may protest, "But the ship will be in a cadmium bubble so the time passes slower in the ship".  Yes, this is true.  However, the cadmium bubble is anchored to the ship.  So, while time is meandering in the ship, the cadmium bubble containing the ship is still traversing the space within the bendalloy bubble as freakishly fast as the ship would be without the cadmium bubble.  This means that multiple bendalloy bubbles would have to successively created within each second.  Now, to compound that, we have the cadmium bubble(s) surrounding the ship.  This means that 1 second of time withing the ship is now 100, 1000, 1,000,000 seconds, or whatever multiplier, outside the cadmium bubble.  This means that you now need to apply that same multiplier to the number of bubbles which must be successively created each sec.  This is, in my opinion, the key and biggest problem with this theory.

 

As a distant second place, that is a staggeringly massive amount of metal to be gathered for a single trip.  Consider that it has been estimated the entire amount of gold ever mined on the Earth would fit into a cube 60 feet on a side.  I don't know how prevalent cadmium is on Scadrial.  But, gathering that much of an any alloy, except perhaps steel, would be an enormously extravagant undertaking.

 

The overlap thing is negligible since we don't know what the effect would be.  We can surmise, but we don't know.  Assumptions are assumptions and theories rise and fall on assumptions.  So for our purposes, let's take it as read that you can choose the anchor for your bubble.

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Ok, adding cadmium bubbles factors strongly into item 4).  I'm not sure I made it clear what I was saying.  Ok, for starters lets look at velocity.  Just as a bit of flavor I note that the space shuttle in orbit over Earth travels at approximately 50 miles per second.  Now, we are talking about bringing our ship to a greater velocity than that, neh? I believe you said "First, accelerate the ship to as close to light speed as you can manage". 

 

So, we are moving through space at a nightmarishly quick pace.  This means when a bendalloy bubble is put up, this is the velocity of the ship as it travels through the space contained the bendalloy bubble which is anchored at a fixed point in space.  This means that, even with a freakishly enormous sized bubble, the ship will traverse this space in an eye-blink.  You may protest, "But the ship will be in a cadmium bubble so the time passes slower in the ship".  Yes, this is true.  However, the cadmium bubble is anchored to the ship.

 

Actually no, I don't protest this, specifically because the cadmium bubble is anchored to the ship. That's kind of one of the backbones of the theory. Even if the ship wasn't in a speed bubble, being enveloped within an anchored cadmium bubble would make it seem like they were going ~20 times faster than normal, from their perspective.

 

So, while time is meandering in the ship, the cadmium bubble containing the ship is still traversing the space within the bendalloy bubble as freakishly fast as the ship would be without the cadmium bubble.  This means that multiple bendalloy bubbles would have to successively created within each second.  Now, to compound that, we have the cadmium bubble(s) surrounding the ship.  This means that 1 second of time withing the ship is now 100, 1000, 1,000,000 seconds, or whatever multiplier, outside the cadmium bubble.  This means that you now need to apply that same multiplier to the number of bubbles which must be successively created each sec.  This is, in my opinion, the key and biggest problem with this theory.

 

I see what you're getting at here, and it does throw a bit of a monkey wrench into things, at least so far as efficiency goes. But there's no requirement that the ship be going FTL all the time: it could hop every 30 seconds or something and would still be gaining a lot of ground. Not as much as I'd like it to--and perhaps this is what restrains us from using 30 overlapping bendalloy bubbles--but still enough to be significant.

 

As a distant second place, that is a staggeringly massive amount of metal to be gathered for a single trip.  Consider that it has been estimated the entire amount of gold ever mined on the Earth would fit into a cube 60 feet on a side.  I don't know how prevalent cadmium is on Scadrial.  But, gathering that much of an any alloy, except perhaps steel, would be an enormously extravagant undertaking.

 

A legitimate concern. I think Cadmium is a tad more abundant than gold, though, and there's always space mining or the like, given that this will occur in a SciFi setting.

 

The overlap thing is negligible since we don't know what the effect would be.  We can surmise, but we don't know.  Assumptions are assumptions and theories rise and fall on assumptions.  So for our purposes, let's take it as read that you can choose the anchor for your bubble.

 

Yeah, I acknowledge that that's the biggest "eh, you're really just going to assume that?" by far. I can't think of any other options, though.  -_-

Edited by Kurkistan
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Your theory has a lot of merit to it and I suspect that the basic idea of it will prove close to accurate.  I think that the "big piece" that Brandon referred to is going to involve the Southern continent use of the systems.  I think  will enable the rapid on/off mechanism as well as address some of the metal intensive aspects.  It is a good theory though.  It just has a substantial weakness given the information (or lack thereof) that we have now.

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I would say that any faster-than-light theory which doesn't address why things change direction when they leave/enter time bubbles is guaranteed incomplete.  No, I don't know how to use it to do anything, but that's the one obvious missing piece that I think would need to be filled by any sensible theory.

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There are no objects encountering the interface of the bubbles in this theory.  The bendalloy bubbles are successively raised and dropped to maintain the ship inside a bubble, but to prevent the ship from hitting a bubble wall.  The question I have is what happens when bubble edges interface or overlap?  Do you get a combination of effect in the overlap space or does the bubble-to-bubble contact cause a more significant effect?

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 would say that any faster-than-light theory which doesn't address why things change direction when they leave/enter time bubbles is guaranteed incomplete.  No, I don't know how to use it to do anything, but that's the one obvious missing piece that I think would need to be filled by any sensible theory.

 

So, like, a stationary large bendalloy bubble (say, radiating from a space station) with a smaller, moving bendalloy bubble (anchored to a space ship leaving said station) exiting it?  So the crazy exit energy gets doubled and insanity ensues?  Best of (tapped) luck! 

 

Just an idea of how to incorporate the edges.  If you could interlace stationary and ship-anchored bubbles somehow, and direct the energy where you wanted (perhaps the act of being enveloped in your own bubble would be enough to put you an an "average" trajectory, which would be the vector you were already on), it could cut down very heavily on logistics -- though we reintroduce the age old assumption of being able to anchor the bubble to a ship in the first place.

Edited by Pechvarry
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