Space travel methods and Galactic Empires.

The ability for ships and possibly fleets to travel vast distances is vital. Still up for decision is the method by which the various inhabitants of the galaxy travel and whether or not the method is universal. I don’t believe the method needs to be universal and the idea of some species possessing technology not accessible to others is an interesting concept and certainly plausible concept after all that would be a difficult secret to share. Also FTL will be used for the remainder of the conversation as any method of traveling a great distance in and insignificant amount of time comparatively.

Now as for methods of travel

Gates, Relays, & Warp Fields

The idea here is that most individual ships don’t possess the ability on their own to travel vast distances very quickly on their own. The power isn’t available or the technology requires a massive size. Possible ideas include relays similar to mass effect, where the ship enters a certain proximity and it’s sent to the location of the receiving relay.

Another idea is the idea of physical gates, I imagine the rings from Halo generating some form of field that must be passed through. The idea here is that space stations become relatively speaking immobile. Any vessel larger than the “Gate” must possess it’s on method of FTL. This gives some variability some gates could be “more valuable” than others due to their size or range.

The last idea of the teleportation like method of travel is Warp fields. I’m not familiar with any story that uses this model but my idea is only exceptionally large ships are large enough to possess the drives/reactor/projectors/containment necessary to generate a stable warp field. These capital ships would generate a field, where anything within the field goes when the capital ship goes. I suppose it’s similar to a portable mass relay. With this model the focus is placed on capital ships. Having a large fleet of frigates is only useful for systemic defense you need capital ships to move your fleet. This could be a offshoot technology for some faction.

I will continue my thoughts another time. (This was kind of where we left off)

Backing off from our last conversation, I want to focus on the scale of Galactic empires for a little bit. I think that will help us reign in on the method, scale and cost of travel. So first things first, what does the galaxy look like. Personally I like the idea of using the Milky Way as a base. Personally I think its cool to think of the system as an actual possible reality in the vastly far future. There are a lot of galaxies out there so if you have a reason to believe one would suit our abilities better, open to suggestions.

Here is the milky way: http://tzontonel.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/national-geographic-milky-way-reference-map1.jpg?w=6000&h=3887

As you can see in the graphic above, we are in an interesting position. Our sun is between a “miniature” arm the Orion arm and the Sagittarius arm. Not being in the arm puts us in a relatively stable place. Not a lot of catastrophic things happen there. On the other hand being between an arm means that the distance that needs to be traversed to get from one system to another is rather large. If you were, in the arm, you would have a lot less far to travel to get to where your going.

Now I personally believe that once a species has technologically developed, the “arms” are the likely places to invest in colonizing. More systems in a local area means more resources to exploit and your civilization will thrive more than being out in the boonies. The advanced technology would help fend off, rouge asteroids and comets. Perhaps part of the defense fleets duty is to patrol for free roaming objects and either capture or destroy them. In addition the ability to manipulate/generate fields would protect from a lot of the radiation emanating from so many stars so close to each other.

So if we agree that the open areas are great for a developing species, meaning its safer for life develop, but eventually you’ll want to get into the clusters for more resources and rapid growth, we can continue on to the subject of empire size.

First up my most recent favorite, mass effect. Mass effect is interesting because it operates very much on the Imperial English “no flag no country, so here’s mine” philosophy. The entire galaxy is colonized, and here are areas of major influence. But it seems that everybody has a least a little presence everywhere … except the humans who were late to the party and have no direct colonies in “inner counsel space.” So here is a picture of the map.

As you can see the galactic center is a mess, too much is going on there for it to be colonized. Stars and systems crashing into each other. Then you have various zones of influence keeping in mind that all factions have some level of colonization in all zones. The council space is majority the council species. Earth Alliance space is majority earth. The Attican Traverse is pretty much fair game. And the Terminus systems are composed of factions not necessarily aligned in anyway other than they oppose the council directly. In the mass effect universe a lot of the mixing of species is dependent on as you pointed out cooperation. Without cooperation mixed systems would have difficulty existing unless…..

If any ship can warp any distance, then all ships would use that method of travel. If you can literally go anywhere (that you have navigational knowledge of) every system essentially becomes an island without an ocean. Travel from one island to another is instantaneous and nothing happens in between. Not that there were really many battles out on the open Atlantic or Pacific but it was a possibility. I guess where I’m going with this line of though is, if there aren’t serious fuel costs, limited availability of the resource, limited availability of the technology, or more interestingly limited availability of navigational knowledge. Each system literally is on its own, when it comes to immediate defense. Which is what you see in mass effects world map, the colonized planets are the highly sought after ones and everybody is everywhere, the “zones” are purely majority influence markers.

I don’t know why, but I feel like I like the idea of regions of “controlled space” or “influence zones.”

Above is one of many, there are a lot of fan boys, compiled maps of the star trek galaxy. Note many distinct territories that don’t necessarily overlap. I don’t like this, without overlapping/shared borders, there is no conflict zones unless we go back to the previous idea of every system is an island with no ocean viewpoint. Which honestly may be what we end up doing. All worlds will need to beef up system defenses and have their own fleets, it would be a very “turtlely” galaxy.

So looking at these maps and back at the map of our galaxy, I think this is how we should set it up. Traveling across the galaxy takes an immense amount of power and technology, and only the largest of ships or a relay/dedicated gate type technology should be able to traverse such a distance. And moving a ship of such magnitude would really be considered an act of war unless there was a precedence for the migratory nature of the vessel.

I think even crossing the vast gaps of nothing between the galactic arms would require a ship with a very large drive, perhaps even limited to the largest of merchant type ships, military battle cruisers & destroyers (most political personnel would travel via military escort anyway), capitol ships, and frigates designed specifically for that type of travel.

This allows for several things

With super long distance travel limited to large vessels, there is still the threat of a surprise military attack, but not everywhere simultaneously, and certainly not on an overwhelming scale. Light cruisers armed with planet destroying weapons of mass destruction cant just pop up everywhere and wipe a faction off the map instantaneously.

With limited travel there will be factions with regions of influence, if everyone is acquiring navigational knowledge via exploration obviously everyone will have their distinct regions which will eventually rub up against eachother.

This allows for 2 kinds of conflict, one being direct conflict at the edge of the territories (either in an arm, or in between arms), and the other is again the possibility colonies on the outside of influence zones being raided or if there is a conflict fleets could at great expense traverse a surmountable distance.