LaGrange Points as Jump Gates

[p.opus]

Okay, I know I'm gonna get slammed for this because it's not canon, but bear with me.

From a scientific and just overall coolness factor, would it be game breaking to require all jumps begin and end in a system "LaGrange" point or "Jump Point". The idea being that the Frame Relay drive is very sensitive to gravity wells, and an actual extrasystem jump can't be performed unless the gravity in that system is cancelled out.

Independence War and Independence War 2 did this brilliantly. You could still navigate to any system that you had fuel for but you had to initiate and terminate your jumps at specific LaGrange points. Also there was an Entrance and Exit to the point. It wasn't something super cheesey like a "star gate" or any of that nonsense, but was simply a specific point of space that was representated by two adjoining wireframe funnels side by side in your HUD to signify the entrance and exit...A hud item you could turn off if you wanted to. If you entered the jump point from the correct side and in the correct direction you jumped. If you were on the wrong side, people might jump into you and instantly kill you.

Now in Elite as it stands, we all have basically an "exit" jump point. We always exit really close to the sun (which I don't fully understand except that's how it was done in the original game). From a a physics stand point, it appears that it would be easier to perform wormhole creation and navigation away from other gravity wells, hence using a LaGrange point).

I just am not a big fan of being able to basically warp, or hyperspace, or open a wormhole, or whatever fiction you choose so close to a system station or a planetary system, I would think that would cause massive space time and gravity fluxuations close to large celestial bodies. (yes I just saw Interstellar, so bear with me).

If you read The Dark Wheel, every one had to navigate to the Farway jump point to enter "witchspace" or to perform a system jump. This is how Alex's dad notices the Cobra behind him before the jump. So in theory the original game's novella also mentioned the need for a specific jump point and not being able to simply jump out of a system willy nilly after you clear mass lock.

I had always assumed the lack of a true jump point a limitation of the original game. (Just one more object to plot). Elite Dangerous does not have this limitation.

I would love to have everyone have to supercruise to a jump point and then jump. Yes, it's a great place for pirates and murderers to pick their targets. But IW2 fixed this by putting patrol craft around the LaGrange point. It was like station space. If you wanted to start a fight at a jump point, you had to be able to take on the cops as well. However, you could pick your target at the jump point, follow them into supercruise and interdict them out later.

I know that Elite is not Iwar2, and I can always boot up Iwar 2 if I want to, but I was just wondering if anyone else likes the idea of jump points or is that just too far out of the original game design to be considered?

Thanks for your time.

 

[iofhua]

I like having the freedom to activate my FSD wherever. Having jump points in each system would just create camping spots for PvPers a la EVE Online. Having to hunt down targets with frame shift wake scanners and then tackle them with an interdictor is a good idea in my opinion.

I'm not saying PvP is bad, but it's irritating when you can expect it at every jump in and jump out point and there's little you can do to avoid it.

 

[p.opus]

I like having the freedom to activate my FSD wherever. Having jump points in each system would just create camping spots for PvPers a la EVE Online. Having to hunt down targets with frame shift wake scanners and then tackle them with an interdictor is a good idea in my opinion.

I'm not saying PvP is bad, but it's irritating when you can expect it at every jump in and jump out point and there's little you can do to avoid it.

I totally understand, and sometimes the only method of escape from someone is to system jump out and hope he doesn't have a high energy wake scanner. I get it, and I guess in the multiplayer realm it's even more important to prevent the whole wilderbeast at the watering hole syndrome. Although Nav Beacons are already a favorite camping site since all jumps to a system arrive relatively close to the navpoint/dominant star of the system.

I guess I'll just have to use up my imagination a little more to see why I can engage jump and open a worm hole a mere 5km from an enourmous space station, but I have to arrive to point hundreds if not thousands of LS from my desired space station. For me specific jump points and LaGrange points made perfect sense, and it required navigation to and from the point, not just to the point.

 

[Argyris]

I imagine the system jumps to work something like this: The FSD doesn't create a wormhole but rather works like a slingshot which builds up energy to instantly shoot your ship over those vast distances into another star system. The gravity of the destination star works like an energy sink to help reduce any excess energy on arrival and at the same time it's a navigational beacon for your ships computer so it can calculate the amount of energy needed for the jump.

Could this explanation work for you, too?

 

[p.opus]

That's a great explantion except nothing except a wormhole negates relativity.

I-War had the LDS drive which was the Linear Displacement System. It was based that you could instantly move a mass a couple of millimeters without travelling in the space between them. Thus the LDS simply was a drive that oscillated really quickly to allow multiple instantaneous jumps. This allowed for extremely high speeds, but since we were actually teleporting, not travelling through the space, then relativty did not apply. Then for interstellar distances they used a "capsule" drive at LaGrange points which sounds like a wormhole in Interstellar.

I-War had the most plausible explanation for interstellar speeds while still being rooted in a sort of reality.

I should just stop thinking about it.

 

[iofhua]

I think that the frame shift drive sounds sort of like the Alcubierre Drive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

The alcubierre drive is a relativistic drive which doesn't break the speed of light, but would allow a ship to travel to another star faster than light would reach it. It does so by warping space so there is expanding space behind the ship and contracting space in front of it. There are some interesting (or maybe strange) ideas about how it might work according to some physicists:

1. The "warp field" around the ship would have such extreme gravity that anything passing through it would be torn apart by tidal forces.

2. The contracting space in front of the ship would accumulate energetic particles while the ship travels, and once it releases the warp field to stop moving they would explode, potentially destroying the ship, and most definitely anything in front of it, with the potential force of many atomic bombs.

3. While the ship is in flight, the occupants are in free fall, falling towards the contracting space in front of the ship.

4. The expanding space behind the ship could only be created with anti-gravity, requiring some type of as yet unknown exotic matter that possesses anti-gravity. Antimatter has been suggested for this, as well as any number of as yet unknown particles including dark matter, to things that could be discovered by the Large Hadron Collider.

5. The amount of energy required to power the craft has been scaled down several times as physicists have looked at the idea. Originally it was thought that the energy required would be greater than that contained in the mass of the entire universe. Then it was scaled down the the energy contained in 3 solar masses. Then it was scaled down to the amount of energy contained in the planet Jupiter. It is now believed that if the warp bubble is oscillated that the energy requirement could be reduced even more. Or if the field is shaped like a torus instead of a perfect sphere.

6. Several physicists have wondered if it would be possible to survive inside a ship using this type of drive. Some have questioned the ability to control, steer, or stop a ship using this drive, while others have questioned whether or not hawking radiation would kill the occupants during travel.

7. In 2012 NASA took a serious look at it, and tried to build an interferometer that could detect space time distortions that could be given off by an alcubierre drive. Unfortunately results have been inconclusive so far.

What's amazing to me, is that they can keep working on and improving an idea like this without ever actually having built it physically. It's purely conceptual, but they just keep hammering out new ideas and new ways to bring it closer to reality step by step, while trying to keep everything within our currently known laws of physics. I would say that the biggest hitch is how to create the expanding space in the warp field, but to be honest there are a lot of particles out there that we have yet to discover so it's not a lost cause as of yet. You can't say it's impossible until we understand all of physics and can definitively say that there is no such thing as anti-gravity.

 

[jpaulwilson1982]

I also have to say I like being able to warp from anywhere, I just wish I could choose where I dropped out of warp in each system, like maybe having nav points at stations.

My knowledge of astro-physics is pretty limited compared to what's been discussed here. One thing that always raised a red flag with me concerning artificial gravity on ships and warping the hell out of space-time constantly is that such activity would seem (to me) to be potentially disastrous in that a ship generating 1G for humans or generating a warp in space-time that can punch a hole in space-time or slingshot a ship to another star would upset the orbits of astronomical objects. Imagine a ship that can generate the same gravity as the Earth, and imagine it flies through the solar system, particularly by the Earth. That gravity would pull the Earth and even a small change in our planet's orbit could mean the difference between being habitable and being too cold or too hot. The Enterprise would be a menace to every system it visits or passes closely.

The only way I can envision such a large gravity field being safe is if a way is found to contain that gravitational force. If space and time is indeed like a fabric, then there's a mostly uniform tension throughout much of space. To contain a ship's warping of gravity you'd need a device that works like a crochet ring on the fabric of space time, maintaining the tension on the gravity field meant to only affect the ship and its occupants while allowing space-time outside of that containment field to rest and warp as its naturally doing.

Does any of this make sense or am I too dumbed-down by pop science? I'll attempt to explain again if anyone is interested lol Us amateurs can dream big, but those dreams aren't always (or usually) practical.