The Route To Sirius revisited

[ffutures]

After my embarrassing mistake the other night I was worried that it would turn out that Neptune was on the wrong side of the solar system from Sirius at the time that the story is set, in 2236, which would complicate my explanation of interstellar travel. After playing around with Celestia and Stellarium it looks like Neptune is more or less in the right direction; not precisely on a direct route from Earth to Sirius, but along roughly the same line out if you needed to stick to the plane of the ecliptic until you reached the outer solar system. None of the other outer planets are anything near as close to that line. It makes a certain amount of sense to go there if you need to resupply before striking out for deep space. I suspect that this is an example of the author accidentally getting it right, not a deliberate choice, but I could be wrong. It's convenient anyway.

The travel times mentioned, about a month from Earth to Neptune, give average acceleration/deceleration of about 0.25g, though if I'm reading it right ships start very slowly and decelerate faster than they accelerate. From Neptune onwards acceleration must be a lot faster, since it's only a few months to Sirius. Since this a universe that has Æther and several other mysterious forces it shouldn't be too hard to find a way to justify it.

Meanwhile, I have names for some mysterious forces - can anyone suggest derivations, or a theory of circa 1900 they might have fitted:

The nature of the attraction of gravitation, and of the ether which was supposed to pervade all space, was found out, as well as the constitution of matter, and the nature of cohesion and of the force which was known to the scientists of the nineteenth century as electricity.

The nature of these forces being known, numerous properties belonging to them that had been previously unknown were deduced, and found to be of considerable practical importance. The most wonderful of all was the discovery that the attraction of gravitation could be prevented from acting on a body by surrounding it with wires, through which peculiarly constituted currents of electricity were flowing, or, in other words, it was possible to take away a body's weight altogether. The result was that flying machines were made practicable, and these soon became almost the sole means of locomotion. Ordinary vehicles could also have their weights reduced to nothing, and consequently required less force to propel them. About the same time a new light was discovered, which was so powerful and so easy to produce that it immediately superseded the old electric light.

Great as these discoveries were, still more astonishing ones were in store. The ether-motions were still further investigated, and the result was that three new and extremely powerful forces were discovered. These were Dynogen, Pralion, and Ednogen, and practically illimitable supplies of them could be obtained from the regions of space. They could be used either separately or in combination, according to the nature of the effect desired. When all three were set in action together, an amount of energy equal to many thousands of horse-power could be obtained from an engine of very small compass. It was then that the crowning application of all these discoveries was made, and this was the navigation of space. Gravity could be annihilated at will, and there was an enormous force at the disposal of the engineers, so cigar-shaped vessels were made perfectly air-tight, and fitted with engines for acting on the ether of space, and with the anti-gravitation apparatus. After several failures, successful trips were performed to the moon and the nearer planets. The interstellar ships were gradually improved, and an ingenious steering apparatus was added, together with instruments that registered the speed of the vessel, its distance from its destination, and the existence and exact position of any obstacles that might be in the way.

So... any thoughts on Dynogen, Pralion, or Ednogen?

Comments

[dsample.livejournal.com]

A few comments:

1) Why ships can decelerate faster than they accelerate: If the fuel load is an appreciable fraction of the ship's mass, the decelerating ship will be considerably lighter than the accelerating ship. With engines operating at their maximum efficiency, the longer they run, the more fuel they've burned off, and the faster the ship will accelerate.

2) The direction of Neptune is pretty much irrelevant to the duration of the trip, since Sirius is about 20,000 times farther away. Even if Neptune were in exactly the wrong direction, going to Neptune first would only add .01 % to the time it takes to make the trip. (or about 25 minutes to a 6 month long trip.) From your comments about going to Neptune and then resupplying there, I assume that Earth has got some sort of base already set up there, at which ships making any sort of interstellar trip can stop first, before setting out again into the interstellar space where FTL travel is possible.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

1: Don't think it's a fuel thing - they're powered by Dynogen etc. which they pick up in space.

2: The book gives an impression that Neptune is a strategic location - The Sirians attack Neptune first. Neptune is habitable and heavily colonised, as are Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. I don't think Cole quite grasped the idea of worlds with different atmospheres etc. It's going to be a pig to explain. This would indeed make sense if it were close to some sort of boundary permitting FTL travel, but I'm not entirely happy with the idea.

I'm pretty sure that Cole didn't think of interstellar travel in terms of FTL at all - he never mentions effects such as light not keeping up with the ships, and telescopes work throughout the flight. I'm going to have to work around that, e.g. by saying that the speed of light increases the further away you are from a star, so that you can still travel interstellar distances without going FTL as such. There's nothing in the book to indicate this is a sudden change (or happens at all for that matter) so it's going to have to be a gradual thing.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

Since Cole was writing in 1900, well before Einstein's Theory of Relativity, the idea that there is a speed limit to the universe probably wouldn't have occurred to him.

Maybe the gravitational influence of the sun limits the amounts of Dynogen, Pralion and Ednogen close to stars. They get more common, the farther out you go, so the farther you get from the sun, the higher your acceleration can be. Also kinda explains why you can cross interstellar space, in the same sort of time it takes to get out of the solar system, though you're going to need some sort of inertial damper field, to go along with the gravity shielding to let them accelerate that quickly. Even with no speed limit, you're looking at over 5 years for a trip from Earth to Sirius, at 1g of acceleration. To do it in 6 months would require accelerating at over 100gs.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, they control gravity etc. inside the ships. I like this idea - maybe the stuff drifts away from stars due to light pressure or something...