They did an asteroid. Maybe next a large moon? Then could an entire planet have jump capability?
They did an asteroid. Maybe next a large moon? Then could an entire planet have jump capability?
A moon maybe. A planet, that would muck up the weather massively.
Now, building an O'Neal colony and making it jump capable; that would be possible too. There is a tech that I can't find on line now where you shine a light in the end of a long glass tube. On the other end is a mirror. On the first end is a two way mirror. Surrounding the tube are thousands of prisms. The light bounces back and forth. If they hit the glass at an angle more then 30° from perpendicular, it bounces back in. Result is the entire tube lights up. So you could take ten million people in one of these to a star and do what ever you want. As for how you build them, you drill a hole in an asteroid, fill it with water, plug the hole, spin it, then heat it up. It will expand when the water boils. Then you put dirt, water, etc in it and move in.
Maybe your could jump a planet out to a habitable zone, Venus for example. Or you could go big and jump a planet around a far star and back or to another system and drop it in the habitable zone. Lots of energy and a massive array but if you built it all in orbit you could remove the array and use it on other planets so after the initial build cost........
And by array I mean a group of ships all set to synchronize and link fields....
First off, AWESOME.
Pro's
Move the planet to a more habitable part of the star system.
Move the planet to a strategic location between stars to covertly facilitate fleet operations.
Move the planet to protect it from threats (either from attack or Solar event) in its own system as a last resort.
Reusable orbital arrays could have a duel purpose (weapon platforms/comm stations/planetary shields)
Orbital Array with redundancy could redistribute to cover areas with groups of missing satellites.
The Orbital Arrays could be functional ships in they're own right, being used in clusters to do many other jobs first and the World mover as a last resort.
Groupings of them could be used to move fleets of captured Jung ships to shipyards to be retrofitted with Alliance tech.
With this in mind it would be much easier to get Alliance worlds to sign up to the project (ie do not tell members that the end game is world moving, tell them that its for moving captured Jung ships/asteroids/damaged alliance ships/etc home.
With an established fabrication infrastructure the time to construct such an array would be pretty small. It should be possible to use shuttles and ships as interim points in the net. (but the entire net would probably consist of a millions of jump arrays)
With a planet as a base of operations the power requirements for the Array could be beamed up to the array to power large jumps (of up to a light year. Lets not get ahead of ourselves)
If you are moving a planet into the habitable zone then chances are that people were not on it already, so no need to worry about the massive instability in the short term.
If you are moving a planet full of people, its probably because if you don't they will all die if you don't.
Cons
Time to construct.
Resource drain.
Power and distribution requirements.
Computational and coordination requirements.
Fixed array installations on a planet surface may result in the loss of a planets atmosphere.
Orbital arrays could capture the entire planet with its atmosphere and possibly satellite systems intact but with a much higher power and control requirement.
If the net is not complete at the moment of the jump it could spread a planet across a light year of space.
Moving a planet in orbit to an area where there are no/different gravitational forces will cause Tidal/Weather/Seasonal anomalies and could result in massive tectonic effects too.
Moving through deep space may have different radiation or lack of radiation effects on life forms on such a planet.
It could be a world killer weapon. Jumping half of a hostile world just one light second would leave two half planets to crumble into moons, then collide back together over the next few years. I do not foresee many survivors.
Suggestions for the use of this technology adaptation.
Limit use of this Jump array concept to:
worlds with little to no tectonic activity.
worlds without atmospheres (underground/domed society's)
worlds with significant populations and a strong agri & industrial base (they can afford it/in case something goes wrong they should be able to survive until they can be evacuated or fix it)
Use the array concept for jumping asteroids from distant systems to local system to orbit for ease of mining operations.
I just hate to think of the many many projects stored in the Data Ark on how to move planets or make them more habitable, with asteroid collisions or massive solar sails or gravitational wave machines or Genetic manipulation of certain algi or fusion core projectors, when about 60 years after Earth gets back in space they have a device that can move planets easy and it had be labeled a glitch.
Ehhh... I am not a fan of this idea. I mean, it sounds cool, but since the direction of a jump follows the path of travel before the jump, that means the only place a planet can go is away from it's sun. Never towards, only away. That means you can turn habitable planets into ice balls, or lava rocks into (possibly) habitable worlds.
The practical use of this would seem fairly small.
I suppose you could jump a planet to another star system, where it might be placed into the Goldilocks band. The problem with ANY orbit shift, though is that it would impact all the other planets in the areas (both at where you left and where you are going to). You could very well de-stabilize another planet into shifting and dropping into the slot you just put your jump planet into... That would be a very bad day.
The planning involved in moving a planet will cater for the other astral bodies being effected. And again, it should be used only as a last resort, like if your son was going to go nova, but you wanted to keep your planet/s. You could always swap out two planets of similar mass. (and leave the swappee on the edge of the system where it can be mined for resources or what ever)
Yes the direction of travel for any planet jump would be out of system, but in most systems there are gas giants that it is possible to loop around and then jump back in. (yes that messes up the orbit of gas giants and moons of same, we can jump them somewhere nice too)
If other orbits are effected inward, jump those planets forward just enough that the orbit is stabilized. if planets are being de-orbited by the insertion of your planet, wait until they line up with a gas giant and jump them out for a gravity assist back into a stable orbit. Take as long as you need to stabilize the system, the jump drive allows for minor changes as well as big ones. and the star will keep changing the direction of travel for each planet so as to allow multiple minor tweaks to stabilize orbits. It also allows for complex systems like counter balanced planets (ie 2+ planets in the same orbit) now isn't that a cool idea.
Think what alien species will think when they find human star systems with de-orbited planets dancing around their stars with the occasional jump flash of necessity. It might be how we are introduced to alien species! how better to say hello the planet sized jump flashes all across the galaxy!!!
The use of Mobile/Orbital Jump Arrays would allow for all of this. I'm not recommending it be used wholesale. But for those carefully planned nudges to turn an uninhabitable system into an inhabitable system? future proof the human species everyone! How many worlds can really be made habitable? how many systems will we have to ignore as we spread out into space? When our sun does die in billions of year, do we have to loose our homeworld too? Why can we not (partially) save it *cough*
I love the idea, and in practice it could work, but all of the things that could kill millions of people if the slightest thing went wrong make it the stupidest idea I think we as a community have come up with in the search for cool new uses for the jump drive. Even if it works exactly right, millions of people could easily die due to the orbital shift.
Moving a planet with Jump drives I think would be a slow process of a Maximum of 1 Ly jumps. (More likely light month jumps).
But the really big question is this: Does everyone get a free set of Jump Goggles that automatically block out the jump flash for they're first aid kits. You know so no one burns out they're retina when the planet flashes in they're eyes.
Actually, will the exposure to the raw Jump field that encompasses a world be fatal/dangerous? Someone wearing Goggles standing outside looking at the spectacle dropping dead from a Jump field over dose would be a PR nightmare for the Alliance...
Jumping planets would be disastrous!
1) Unless you can continue to heat the atmosphere, any layovers to get to your destination would gradually freeze the planet surface. It would be really dark and cold.
2) Our moon provides the cycles that help our oceans and weather recycle and cleanse the planet and that would be removed.
3) Interaction with a new compatible solar system would be unlikely, like sized sun, same color (photosynthesis) distance for orbit (radiation levels) distance with other orbiting planets - this would affect orbital balance as the planet has no propulsion, makeup of other planets etc. Most solar systems have binary suns and circular orbits would be impossible
4)effect to the atmosphere as some would most likely be sheared away during the jump.
5) Gravitational stresses to our planet
and so on....
I'm with Four Islands on this one.
Although, Four island missed the the way jump tech works. You'd need to be able to make significant changes to the planet's orbit. Otherwise, it's probably impossible for any system to line on the orbit of a planet. IE: Take a planets orbit and then extend the radius to say 1000 light years, does the resulting circle actually pass through any stars (the actual star not the star system, as it needs to orbit around the star if the planet being jumped is to maintain it's temperature).
Then again, that could solve global warming. Make a massive satellite formation that covers both the earth and the moon, and jump both it a bit farther away from the sun. While they're at it, might as well jump the moon closer to the earth too. It's been moving away from the earth for a while not and it would be nice if the moon was larger in the sky.
Yeah jumping the moon closer to the earth has the added effect of freaking out the entire population of the planet. Yes finding an other system to jump too would be a problem, but it should be possible to slingshot/gravity assisted turning of the planet onto a better course by micro jumping to Jupiter or other gas giants.
I'm also in favor of looking up black hole tech in the data arch to add gravity points to the course being set for the planet between jump points, to help stare the planet on course.
But definitely if anyone tried to do this with a planet the planet would be completely uninhabitable for years (during and after)
Again, Jump Tech as laid out here makes an object travel along its previous path. That would mean you could make a planet jump further away from its sun, but not closer. Actually, because of the orbital speed, you'd drop it into an orbit that is less circular and more oblong, creating massive instability in the weather patterns.
So planet jumping would mess things up, and make it colder on average. Not pleasant.
Fair point Eric, looks like it's back to needing a way to change the orbital speed/velocity.
Four Island, that works if that planet is in just the right place for an orbital slingshot, which isn't likely to be the case at least not in any reasonable time frame. Though this is quite possible if again, you can change the jumping planet's velocity, probably even something like 1-10% might be sufficient.
So if you were jumping a rocky planet like Mars or Venus, with the addition of a singularity generator for changing velocity and direction, an amazingly difficult jump plot & you have a snowballs chance in a star of coming out of it with a successful star skipping planet?
I have always pointed out that moving an earth like planet this way is a bad idea... but still better then the Jung glassing it and taking it over, (relatively, as you know, at least some people might maybe survive the move)
Singularity generator for the win!
I think jumping a planet would be awesome! Like others pointed out, it would be utterly useless to an already inhabited or potentially inhabited planet but it has other practical uses. Using a rocky planet like Mercury or Venus, you could establish a mining base or shipyard without an atmosphere way out of a solar system where it's almost impossible to find. Atmosphere wouldn't survive without a sun to heat the surface but you may not need or want one. This could also potentially destabilize a planet to the point that it flies apart making mining potentially easier. Or as the ultimate WMD. Jump a jupiter sized gas giant into an inhabited system and watch as it plows through everything in its path to the sun, planets and all.
