We Don't Know Jacques

AnchorWriter

AnchorWriter
From one of the other discussions, something came up: when we scoop stars, we're able to do so during low wake; what if a means existed of scooping hydrogen from stars while jumping between systems?

When Jacques made his jaunt to Beagle Point in 3302, it was believed that a cargo of "Unknown" (Thargoid) Sensors whisked him tens of thousands of light-years across the galaxy, while almost cleanly threading through part of the Neutron Highway to what is now Colonia. Current knowledge of Thargoid Sensors reveal that they are a type of navigational reference, as well as a component for plotting an image of a galaxy (ours?) inside Thargoid motherships.

Astronomy has shown us in real life that bands of hydrogen are expelled through solar winds and coronal ejection. Could Jacques (and any aliens before the Old Worlds of the Bubble were settled by the Federation, Empire, and Alliance) have figured a means of using a ship in high-wake frame-shift as a crude dredger? Another thought that comes to mind, as mentioned by many, is tritium can be synthesized by mixing hydrogen with lithium...might that explain how Jacques could've had engouh fuel additive to get about as he had? Maybe the Sensors were tossed into the reactor, or were used as a convertor?

Final point: The RAXXLA logo shows 8 C or U shaped segments huddled around an eye, or sphere [if not 8 Galifreyan Timelords operating a Type-60 Transport Console].The symbol for hydrogen is a sphere, sometimes shown as being orbited by another sphere. Tritium, (H3), could explain the trio of bands surrounding the sphere in the RAXXLA sign, as 8 atoms of lithium are needed for 1 atom of tritium. With his military experience, Jacques would've known how capital ships for the Federation would've moved about, which would've been of great interest to the Imperials, reconaissance-wise, in the old days. Having a large vessel for travelling about, Jacques could've demonstrated his inside knowledge of how the big ships moved and refuelled, with the sensors maybe pointing to potential refuelling (ringed) systems, if the ejected star matter wasn't enough for multi-hundred year movement in one shot.
 

varonica

varonica
AnchorWriter said:
From one of the other discussions, something came up: when we scoop stars, we're able to do so during low wake; what if a means existed of scooping hydrogen from stars while jumping between systems?

When Jacques made his jaunt to Beagle Point in 3302, it was believed that a cargo of "Unknown" (Thargoid) Sensors whisked him tens of thousands of light-years across the galaxy, while almost cleanly threading through part of the Neutron Highway to what is now Colonia.
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Couldn't have been the several hundred thousand tons of Hydrogen we spent a couple of weeks shipping to him while he was parked in the bubble I suppose. Should also point out that Neutron star jumping didn't exist back then in any conception, and the station Jaques traveled in used the old style drive so it wouldn't have been able to do that anyway, he would have been in witch space all the way. What caused him to crash out of witch space where he did is another question still not answered.

AnchorWriter said:
have figured a means of using a ship in high-wake frame-shift as a crude dredger?
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You mean like the ram scoop drive of popular scifi convention, not a concept that has been shown to be workable even theoretically, but at many, many thousands of times the speed of light that the station was traveling to get where it did as fast as it did, I would expect you would light up like a pulsar for a fraction of a second before being scattered across the heavens in a spray of fundamental particles!
 

Kira Goto

Kira Goto
Jaques was using an FSD strapped to a station to perform the jump(presumably one of according size). Meaning he woukd have had more than sufficient fuel to commit to it.

The sensors likely only caused the malfunctions forcing him to drop… and the idea of the ‘neutron highway’ only came into being when he got stranded in what is now known as Colonia, as far as I know, precisely because he got stuck there.
 

IstvaanDCIV

IstvaanDCIV
Jacques Station ended up dropping out of Witchspace several thousand light years short of its intended destination, didn't it? So it's not like it would have needed to gather any extra fuel in order to end up where it actually arrived.
 

Markov Chaney

M
AnchorWriter said:

have figured a means of using a ship in high-wake frame-shift as a crude dredger?
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varonica said:
You mean like the ram scoop drive of popular scifi convention, not a concept that has been shown to be workable even theoretically, but at many, many thousands of times the speed of light that the station was traveling to get where it did as fast as it did, I would expect you would light up like a pulsar for a fraction of a second before being scattered across the heavens in a spray of fundamental particles!
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Yeah I thought of those as two different frames as well.

In high-wake, the ship can't interact with conventional spacetime except in very limited ways; for instance you can enter it anywhere but you can only exit it at certain points per the FSD (and per Niven's Alderson Point and per George Lucas's "12 parsecs" retcon). The best you can do for navigation is to nudge energy levels in the right way so that you exit it at the intended exit point, and if you're off that navigation by a gnat's wavepacket, that's it, you're binned somewhere random.

So if you're in high-wake, scooping aeon ion flux from the conventional universe simply ain't happening; your high-bubble simply can't interact with 4d conventional matter in that way. Hence, no fuel scoops, and as Varonica says, no Bussard ramjets either.

Now in low wake there's nothing to stop you turning the magnets up to 11 and scooping more stuffs, and indeed some of the engineering available for fuel scoops does exactly that. So the question becomes: if you can do that on full thrust in a dense field at a few c, why can't you do it at 2001c at which point the speed you are travelling into new areas of sparse material likely compensates for the sparsity of the interplanetary medium, and you get the same amount of fuel by gathering lots of sparse H2 quickly instead of some denser H2 slowly.

The answer is likely that the energy gradients between inside-Alcubierre and outside-Alcubierre enter a runaway condition if you try and push particles through them too quickly. Once the ship is superluminal it's impossible for star system observers to infer where the ship is or any information about the state of the ship, so every time that ship removes a proton from the conventional universe, you are destroying information. If you then apply Hawking's thinking about a black hole with the mass of an Anaconda, you can see that ship is gonna go pop in microseconds. Varonica's spray of particles is not just any spray, it is the ultimate demonstration of Hawking radiation.

If you want to know what would happen with a Bussard ramjet, an indestructible hull, and hypersleep that could deal with the 70,000 years of relativistic time you'd need for someone to go at look at Sag A* for kicks... well, go read Protector or World Out Of Time.
 

varonica

varonica
Kira Goto said:
Jaques was using an FSD strapped to a station to perform the jump(presumably one of according size). Meaning he woukd have had more than sufficient fuel to commit to it.

The sensors likely only caused the malfunctions forcing him to drop… and the idea of the ‘neutron highway’ only came into being when he got stranded in what is now known as Colonia, as far as I know, precisely because he got stuck there.
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Jaques station always had its own FSD type drive installed, that's clear from the current lore. It's also not the same as the one used by Megaships and Fleet Carriers because they use Tritium as fuel and Jaques used Hydrogen as fuel;

While it is not made clear if it is the case for all Hyperspace capable Star Ports, Jacques station's Frame Shift Drive is powered by Hydrogen fuel instead of Tritium. Millions of tonnes needed to be gathered during a community goal in order to fuel its attempted jump to Beagle Point.
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The problem with FSD's is the fuel usage is exponential while distance is linear, I personally doubt he could have stored enough fuel to do the jump to Beagle Point, but curiously some of the lore that now exists has been retconed to better fit the events of the time so it's pointless going over it now. At the time it wasn't an FSD drive but one of the older models, but now it is according to the lore, so no point arguing over the fact, I'll just have to accept it was an FSD drive because the lore now says it was an FSD drive. It wasn't sensors that caused him to drop where he did , I clearly remember the emergency calls he sent out because I was one of the first to arrive at the station on the rescue mission, that was some weird stuff going on out there, I don't know if text of the emergency calls are still available, but subsequent events didn't go as FDEV intended and the story appears to have been retconed to fit player actions at the time. For instance when I arrived there Jaques Station wasn't even called Jaques Station on the station name, it was some sort of placeholder code, we were never meant to find the station as quickly as we did so they didn't have time to progress the story and assets as they wanted to.

Anyway, fun times had by all back then doing the run to Jaques in ships that could barely jump 30ly at a time and no Neutron Star jumping available.
 

Kira Goto

Kira Goto
varonica said:
It wasn't sensors that caused him to drop where he did
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I know the history of when I searched for some GalNets to prove a point about Jaques - it said he could have carried on but due to malfunctions chose not to. Other pieces of information related to it said it was goid sensor interference, but I guess that… whatever they were called. Those weird guys that apparently infiltrated the station and tried to sabotage it? (Something that is rarely discussed.)
 

varonica

varonica
Markov Chaney said:
If you want to know what would happen with a Bussard ramjet, an indestructible hull, and hypersleep that could deal with the 70,000 years of relativistic time you'd need for someone to go at look at Sag A* for kicks... well, go read Protector or World Out Of Time.
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I've read more than you could possibly imagine of soft and hard scifi, heck I've written some it, the point still being there's still not even a theoretical basis in which a Bussard Ramjet can work!
 

varonica

varonica
Kira Goto said:
I know the history of when I searched for some GalNets to prove a point about Jaques - it said he could have carried on but due to malfunctions chose not to. Other pieces of information related to it said it was goid sensor interference, but I guess that… whatever they were called. Those weird guys that apparently infiltrated the station and tried to sabotage it? (Something that is rarely discussed.)
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And as I said, some of that has been retconed to fit subsequent events, it's not the same history that happened originally, which is annoying but something we have to live with sometimes.
 

Nadreck

N
It is rather curious that Jacques did something (with older tech) that no current player can do: jump from the Bubble to Colonia in one go (and theoretically from the Bubble to Beagle Point if something hadn't malfunctioned). We can only manage 500ly (though some megaships can go further than that).
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
AnchorWriter said:
while almost cleanly threading through part of the Neutron Highway
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Given how (relatively) common neutron stars are in the galaxy that's not really a distinguishing feature of the direction taken. You could pick pretty much any random point 22,000 LY coreward of Sol and somewhat off-plane and find a decent chain of neutron stars along the way.

Nadreck said:
It is rather curious that Jacques did something (with older tech) that no current player can do: jump from the Bubble to Colonia in one go (and theoretically from the Bubble to Beagle Point if something hadn't malfunctioned). We can only manage 500ly (though some megaships can go further than that).
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I suspect the likely explanation - which doesn't strictly cover the megaships but I'm happy to treat that as a game limitation of it only being convenient to move them weekly, rather than have them arrive on Fridays instead - is that it wasn't a single jump but a set of rapidly-chained ones.

The "in one go" was in that explanation talking about there not being intermediate rest stops where the station could be interacted with on its route (as you got, for example, when the Gnosis was on a long-range trip to somewhere) rather than it necessarily being a literal single hyperspace jump. At FC speeds that would have been sufficient to reach Eol Prou in about 15 hours, and - even allowing for the slightly indirect route - Beagle in a few days.
 

IstvaanDCIV

IstvaanDCIV
Has any canon information been provided on the design and construction of the FSD used by Jacques Station, beyond the fact that it was fuelled by hydrogen and was powerful enough to move a station? Because otherwise my first thought would be that the FSD was a custom-built thing and, being attached to a station, didn't need to be compact enough to fit comfortably into a factory-standard spacecraft hull.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
IstvaanDCIV said:
Has any canon information been provided on the design and construction of the FSD used by Jacques Station, beyond the fact that it was fuelled by hydrogen and was powerful enough to move a station? Because otherwise my first thought would be that the FSD was a custom-built thing and, being attached to a station, didn't need to be compact enough to fit comfortably into a factory-standard spacecraft hull.
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No, not really. There's the occasional comment about the Orbis (and Ocellus) designs in general being designed to have drive units attached for transport and removed once in position. The engine cluster on Jaques Station is substantial in terms of size so there's plenty of room for a really big FSD in there too.


The "fuelled by hydrogen" bit might not exactly be accurate - Tritium wasn't in-game at the time, Fleet Carriers were years away from being implemented, other existing megaships and capital ships probably didn't switch from hydrogen drives to Tritium drives overnight when 3.7 came out. Could be handwaved as "Jaques was saving money" - 7 megatonnes of hydrogen fuel is a lot of raw material to synthesise Tritium with.
 

Broken_One

B
Markov Chaney said:
... can't interact with 4d conventional matter in that way....
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just pointing out that space is more then 4 dimensions. Time and distance are not constant. The only constant is the spacetime interval. Our minds only perceive the 3 space and 1 time because this is what we have evolved to experience based on survival need. In reality we already live in a multiverse.(yes this is all a part of relativity not quantum mechanics)

In game this is experienced as instancing but this is just our CMDRs resolving the violation of causality. All the grounders just think we are space crazy.
 

Broken_One

B

Darrack

Darrack
Nadreck said:
It is rather curious that Jacques did something (with older tech) that no current player can do: jump from the Bubble to Colonia in one go (and theoretically from the Bubble to Beagle Point if something hadn't malfunctioned). We can only manage 500ly (though some megaships can go further than that).
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This is intentional and how it should be, we don't want space travel trivialised.

O7
 

varonica

varonica
Ian Doncaster said:
No, not really. There's the occasional comment about the Orbis (and Ocellus) designs in general being designed to have drive units attached for transport and removed once in position. The engine cluster on Jaques Station is substantial in terms of size so there's plenty of room for a really big FSD in there too.


The "fuelled by hydrogen" bit might not exactly be accurate - Tritium wasn't in-game at the time, Fleet Carriers were years away from being implemented, other existing megaships and capital ships probably didn't switch from hydrogen drives to Tritium drives overnight when 3.7 came out. Could be handwaved as "Jaques was saving money" - 7 megatonnes of hydrogen fuel is a lot of raw material to synthesise Tritium with.
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Yeah it's all a bit vague on the details. Hydrogen fuel scaling makes long jumps prohibitive in fuel costs but Tritium scales linearly with the distance unlike hydrogen, I suppose we can argue Tritium is more energy dense than Hydrogen so that makes a difference there, but it's been so many years now since we fueled him up and it was fairly clear at the time it was going to be one jump which is why everyone called him the mad cyborg.
 

AnchorWriter

AnchorWriter
Crazy question - as Frontier worked with actual scientists in developing Elite Dangerous, what if they opted to have Jacques fashion Hydrogen-6 as a medium for his drive? At worst, there'd be an explosion, or, more banally, the H6 would decay into tritium or basic hydrogen. Jumping with H6 would void the warranty on the drive engine, but not necessarily endanger Jacques...enter the Neutron Highway.

As disruptive mass in low wake can affect initiation or effective operation of a craft's frame shift drive, the dense matter of collapsed stars might play on a vessel's reaction-to-drive ratio while the craft is holding course as it moves. (If you think in terms of Stargate SG-1, any error in calculation could mean the difference between a lively stroll and being bounced head over heels into your destination!) That might've been something Jacques may've considered and gambled against nonetheless, until he ended up in Eol Prou RS-T d3-94, battered and bruised. Funny how he didn't seem to want to move off on another jaunt, as he would nonetheless have the neutron fields of Dryooe Prou Sector, the Festival Grounds and the Eastern-Western fields of the Far 3kpc Arm blocking his path. There would still be the y-axis to traverse, but maybe chagrin offeres the faster path to wisdom...

Either way, it looks like he's stuck, unless he opts for a fleet carrier or...wait, who owns the "Brewer Corporation" anyway?
 
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