Below is my personal TAS entry for the use of stargates in Traveller. Excuse the html tags, as I have ripped them out of my web page. If you would like to see the associated pictures, goto HERE
This is an attempt to reconcile FTL with our current knowledge of the Universe in general, and then try and fit the result into Traveller with a minimum of black box concepts. Hopefully this pseudo scientific explaination will be helpful for GM's in some way, even if it is just a curiosity.
After actually sitting down and hashing out on paper how this whole Jump gate system will work, and how I would mesh it as much as possible with the current system, I have come to the conclusion that wormhole's as we know them would affect Traveller way to much. If some die hard GM's really like the idea and want to use it they will have to work pretty hard to maintain consistency with the current build of Traveller.
A wormhole is a shortcut for travel between distant points in the Universe. An artificial Wormhole has two entrances called "mouths". The mouths are connected to each other via a tunnel through hyperspace.
By traveling the distance between the mouths, a space vessel can travel immense distance in a FTL fashion in the time it takes to travel the tunnel's length in normal space.
Time to travel any distance through the wormhole is relatively invariant, being 168 hours +/- 10%. A ship entering the wormhole is acted upon by a constant "acceleration" to the midpoint of the trip and a constant "decceleration" of the same magnitude from the midpoint to the destination. The "acceleration" varies from wormhole to wormhole, but has never been found to cause a greater than 10% variation in travel time.
As an analogy, imagine a trip through a frictionless tunnel connecting two points on Terra. A trip of any distance would take the same amount of time.
The mouth can be of any shape, commonly it's a circle/sphere. The wormhole is a two-way connection, vessels can travel back and fourth between each mouth to different points in the Universe. The naturally occurring wormhole is a peculiar creature indeed. It blinks into existence, opens up briefly, then pinches off and ceases to exist. A natural Wormhole does not remain open long enough to allow anything to get through the tunnel before the tunnel collapses, nor is it of sufficient size to allow anything of any usefull size to get through.
A way was eventually discovered to locate and manipulate wormholes. During the initial stages of research, the tiny wormhole's life was prolonged by protecting it from radiation bombardment, which accelerated the collapse of the wormhole. Eventually the wormhole was completely stabilised and methods were found to enlarge the wormhole for intersteller travel.
This was done by threading the wormhole with a material commonly refered to as exotic material. Using gravitational forces the wormhole could be enlarged to any desired size, and kept open indefinitely. Through the use of this technique societys were finally able to leave the confines of their respective solar system's and expand across the Galaxy.
The creation of a wormhole is a difficult task. The calculations associated with the plotting of the wormhole through space beyond 6 parsecs have been found impossible to solve. Though it has not yet been proven insoluble, mathematicians made it their "holy grail" ever since Fermat's Last Theorem was proven. Evidence also exists that implies that the Ancient's were able to travel much further distances than 6 parsecs, adding fuel to the continued search to break the 6 parsec barrier.
The method of manipulating natural wormholes is effective due to the tha fact natural wormholes are common. This can still present researchers with problems, as wormholes can sometimes not appear in a given area for months or even years. Sometimes suitable natural wormholes have been found many hundreds of kilometers away from a planet or starbase, forcing space farers to spend many hours getting from the wormhole to their destination. far off stargates are also much more expensive to maintain, and difficult to defend.
High Tech Level societys (TL15+) have solved this problem. They are able to create artificial wormholes where ever needed. Using a method that allows them to locate wormholes in the quantum foam, they then can pull the wormhole out of the foam and mannipulate it to any size they wish. At this point a stargate can be built around the newly stablised wormhole.
Also see Exotic Material, Quantum Foam and Star Gate.
[part's of the definition borrowed from Babylon 5]
A Jump Gate is an artifact that can manipulate wormhole's. The Gate maintains the wormhole and keeps it stable. When the gate is not in use it reduces the wormhole to its almost normal, tiny state. When activated, the Jump Gate expands the wormhole to any desired size. Thus the affect of a "blossoming flower" can be observed.
Most jumpgates are designed with three or four fourteen-kilometer long generators. The "brackets" are free floating with a central computer controlling the positional thrusters; these allow the brackets to re-position for larger than average ships and maintain a relative stationary position. After activation, a jumpgate usually takes five minutes to recharge itself, relying on a Zero Point Field for it's primary source of power, with a Solar or Fusion plant as a backup. As a consequence of such a power output, it takes a long time to shut one down and even longer to start it back up.
Jumpgates can be used by any ship (though the control codes can, and usually are, changed in times of war). The jumpgate automatically bills the ship that uses it. The money goes to the government who installed the extremely expensive gate. Shipping companies buy access to the jumpgates in bulk, assign routes to their ships and then sell the surplus on the open market.
Unfortunetly jumpgates are a paired creation, one jumpgate links to another jumpgate, and that is the only gate that can be travelled to. This is the jumpgates only known drawback
Jumpgates broadcast a homing signal that can be picked up a little over ten-thousand kilometers away. This signal gives a three dimensional location for the gate and is a small safety precaution to aide ships that may have become lost in space.
Due to accidents during the initial deployment of Gates only one vessel or one group of vessel's flying in formation may travel through a gate at any one time. High tech society's can build vessels that can create wormholes themselves, without having to rely on a gate, see Jump Drive for more information.
During the initial deployment of Gate's, special construction crews were sent to destination star systems traveling in exceptionally fast vessels (not FTL). They would arrive at a particular system, construct a Gate, activate it, then, if all went well, be able to return via the gate to their home system. These trip's would sometimes take hundreds of Earth years, but generally averaged around the 26 year mark. Construction time various between a few months to a few years depending on the technology level of the society. Eventually, human construction crews were replaced with slightly more expendable robot crews.
A foam like structure of space that makes up the cores of singularities (singularities lie at the heart of Black Holes and cause the creation of natural wormholes). The foam occurs in normal space on minisucle scales, in the vicinity of 1.62x10^33 and smaller. This is what "space" looks like, the space in your room, your car, your head and in the Universe.
Material that has a negative average energy density, as measured by someone moving through it at nearly the speed of light. Commonly used for Stargate construction, it can be naturally found around the horizion of a Black Hole.
[Bonehead Maneuver inspired by Babylon 5]
Hyperspace is a semi-fictitious area between normal space. It is the area a wormhole's tunnel exists in. It is a convenient name for any space that exists outside of our normal Universe.
Sometimes a wormhole fails. This can be due to the rare, but possible, collapse of the wormhole or the slightly more likely failure of the Jump Gate. Catastrophic failures like these are called misjumps. They can destroy the ship and its crew. Other failures can destroy a drive or send a ship in the wrong direction. Some misjumps spit the vessel out into normal space immediately, sometimes only part of the way, sometimes many hundreds or even thousands of light years away.
Misjump's can be enginered. The opening of a wormhole within a wormhole can cause a misjump, but normally it causes the complete destruction of the ship and both wormhole's. Some military experimentation in this area has found it to be a semi-effective tactic. Unfortunetly, the ship or device creating the wormhole is also destroyed. After the first such experiment, the process was named the "Bonehead Maneuver".
By Michael Mifsud
The combination of equipment required to allow the creation of
adhoc wormholes. Due to the massive power requirement's to "punch a hole"
into hyperspace, then burrow through to a required destination point, only
large or small hyper advanced ships have Jump Drives.
High tech society's can begin building vessels that can create wormholes themselves, without having to rely on a gate at TL15. Vessels of TL15 are experimental, becoming common at TL16. The ship effectively carry's it's own gate along with it. The wormhole is created and maintained by a computer known as the Jump Governor. The governor locates a useable wormhole in the quantum foam then creates a worm hole of the required size.
As you might have noticed I have completely ignored the 100t requirement for Jump Drives. I dont think thats important as Jump Drives will be much rarer now and probably only in the hands of the military or megacorps.
The requirement for a Jump Drive to be fited I have not yet worked out, so I did not bother including any such reference for now.
I have also dispensed with the 10AU jump distance requirement for the gates. The restriction still applies for Jump Drive equipped vessels.
The other major impact for Traveller is the increase of free space on most starships, as the need for Jump Drives has disappeared. The other is the restriction of movement between systems - jump paths are excatly that now. They are iron bound restrictions for all except the most advanced civilisations.
FTL:
I think Einstein was right, and that there is no way to go faster than the speed of light. To get around this problem I use the concept of 'effectively' travelling faster than light.
I define FTL as being able to 'effectively' travel faster than light. For example, I have point (A) and point (B). A vessel leaves point (A) and heads towards point (B), at the same time the vessel leaves a light beam is set off heading for point (B). If the vessel arrives at point (B), by whatever method, before the light beam then we can say that the vessel has *effectively* traveled faster than the speed of light.
Hyperspace is a fictious but useful term for the area that the wormhole 'burrows' through. Most often used in two dimensional models of the Universe.
Wormholes have been mathmatically proven to exist as far back as 1916. No observational data exists.
Quantum Foam is an accepted model of what 'space' looks like under an exceptional, yet hypothetical, microscope. No observational data exists.
Exotic Material has been indirectly found to naturaly occur around the horizons of black hole. No first hand observational data exists.
Dr.Kip Thorne "Black Holes and Time Warps" (book)
Dr.Kip Thorne + Dr.Morris and Dr.Yurtsever "Wormholes, Time Machines and the Weak Energy Condition" (paper)
Dr.Igor Novikov "Wormholes" (paper)
For compatibility with Traveller I have added the following to my Stargate FTL travel system:
To be honest I dont like these ideas at all, as they dont mesh with the whole wormhole concept, but for Traveller its fine. If I was creating my own Universe from scratch, I would defintely not have the above two.
Wormholes are of whatever length, and do not exist in hyperspace per se, they just tunnel through it. Which means that the 'space' in the tunnel still has to abide by our laws. So the travel time through the tunnel would be equal to the entering ships velocity and affected by the tunnels length.
If I had my way, I would probably make all the wormholes one length. Also, using this concept of wormhole's Xboats would become much less important, as messges could be transmitted through the wormhole via the gate.
Critiques welcome, but as I said this system is porbably *not* compatable with Traveller as it would change to many things.