The Artemis Trap
Page 16
When researching for this and my other books, I took a good look around at science fiction in general and how they saw light travel. In general I found the whole thing to be very confusing, and also much in the way of science fiction TV shows and movies present super luminal travel (travelling beyond the speed of light) as if it were an instant go anywhere button. But the reality is that to get anywhere quick you need to be travelling not just past the speed of light, which is boringly slow, but literally hundreds or thousands of times beyond the speed of light and even so it would still take years to cross the galaxy!
To keep things simple I created a system of listing warp speed according to thousands of times faster than light speed. So warp level four for instance, is four thousand times faster than the speed of light. One light year been three hundred thousand kilometers per second for a year!
Okay crazy fast, impossible!...yeah sure but it is set in the thirty fifth century so why not, and if you think about it if mankind is ever to get around the galaxy, then we will have to find a way to travel at crazy speeds.
Battles
There is a nice juicy space battle in the beginning of the book and once again I thought it worth a mention. A lot of science fiction is based on the traditional ship battles which each ship a kilometer or two away from each other. Just look at an episode of Star Trek and you shall see this in work. But here is a couple of things. First off there is no way you would fight a space battle at warp speeds, as your weapons, which would be moving at sub luminal speeds, would never hit their target, as the other ship would be moving hundreds or thousands of times faster than the speed of light. So space ships will have to come out of warp drive to engage in a battle!
Secondly weapons will move at light speed, in the case of lasers, and way slower in the case of plasma type guns. Also they will lose power over millions of kilometers. So how far away would be the maximum range to engage in a space battle? Well probably no more than twenty seconds at light speed, which is six million kilometers, for anything more than twenty seconds would give the opposing ship a chance to manoeuvre out of the way.
How far would be the closest you would be to engage with the enemy?
Probably a few hundred thousand kilometers. In one second a laser could cover three hundred thousand kilometers in one second! There would of course be an advantage of firing closely, because both plasma weapons, lasers and other weapons would lose power over distance. So the ideal would be to fire from a few hundred thousand kilometers away, but firing from a far greater distance, would be safer from the point of view of trying to not getting hit by the enemy. While firing at three hundred thousand kilometers away, the risk of getting hit would be very high, although your weapons would be very powerful at that distance, as too would be the other guys, who are trying to hit you.
So realistically these space battles would be fought somewhere between a few million kilometers and a few hundred thousand kilometers, a long way away from the traditional Star Trek image, where the ships are on top of each other!
Tactical Battles
Another feature of the space battle in this book is that several ships join together and share their shield power whilst an algorithm runs the battle initially. The reason for this is because chances are that computers would be heavily relied upon, because the distances are huge and the weapons are very quick. There probably would not be much time to make a one hundred thousand metric ton space ship to move quickly in space, so setting up a pre-set algorithm could possibly be far more efficient than relying upon human judgement, although I throw in some human interaction once the algorithm has run its course, in order to make the fight scenes more exciting.
But just to round up this section, space battles will involve ships at great distance but moving at sub luminal speeds. It would be an interesting thing to see as each ship would look like a tiny marble in the distance, rather than the beautiful mosaics which we tend to see in sci-fi TV and movies.
Why am I writing all this?
Well my inner nerd needs to come out from time to time. I know that the future will be radically different from anything that any sci-fi writer can come up with, but at least it’s worth our while to try and think about how this tech might work. In reality it will probably all be boringly technical, which as a writer would suck because we like to create exciting drama, as readers want to be entertained, but then again at least we can try to flesh it out a bit, which actually in my opinion makes for a more interesting sci-fi future. Anyway if you want more nerdy details just check out this article on my website: https://dnfarrell.com/2017/10/21/introducing-the-trellonverse/
About the Author
Hi
My name is Dermot Farrell (DN Farrell) and I hail from Dublin, the capital city of the Irish Republic. I have a somewhat eclectic background, having worked in just about every job imaginable and also I have a varied educational background, which has covered such diverse subjects as Psychoanalysis, Hypnosis and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Presently I am living in India with my wife and son and I have set up this website as a reference point to my science fiction writings.
www.dnfarrell.com
Also I am always eager to get feedback from my readers, in order to improve on my writing and my overall publishing process. I’m an INDY author, so I have to do everything for myself, from writing to editing, formatting,uploading my books and cover art.
So if you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to email me at admin@dnfarrell.com and if you wish to leave a review, they are always welcome and you can do so by clicking on my authors page, by typing in DN Farrell into the Amazon search bar.
Why military science fiction?
Well I was raised on the original Star Trek TV show and on the "Next Generation". Also living in Ireland I was exposed to popular British Sci-Fi shows, such as Doctor Who (in particular Jon Pertwee, Tom baker (my personal favorite) and Peter Davison). Another great influence, at that time, was the political dissident sci-fi show, "Blake's Seven", which was a wonderfully despotic show by sci-fi standards.
Another great influence was 2000AD comic, which I picked up on with the release of the fourth edition back in 1977 and I kept on buying them weekly over the next ten years. Such great characters as "Judge Dredd", "Mack Man", "Strontium Dog" and "Sam Slade" AKA "Robo Hunter" sucked me into the sci-fi world. The comic strips had a long lasting effect on me and my writing style, once again like "Blake's Seven", being British sci-fi, the tone was always somewhat dark and despotic, but I always loved the characters and how iconic they were in their own ways!
And of course I was fortunate enough to see "Star Wars" in the cinema and of course "Superman", back in the day when these were the first large scale sci-fi movies ever released, so there's no comparison as to the effect of such movies on young children like myself at that time!
So militaristic sci-fi feels like a pretty relevant genre for me to write in. I have put a lot of work into creating what I like to call the Trellonverse, regarding the books which serialize the adventures of Commander Jack Trellon and other members of the Galactic Federation of Autonomous Species (GFAS) and their efforts to contain a three hundred year old war between two empires (The Analusian Alliance and the Galbraggian Empire), within a quadrant of space known as the Kolatian quadrant.
The Kolatian Quadrant is based in an actual part of our Galaxy, which is known as the Scutum Centaurus spiral arm of our galaxy, which is about ten thousand light years from here! The stories are set in the thirty fifth century and in my writings I focus upon the members of the GFAS having to maintain the peace treaty of San Orora and the difficulties which they have, in being a peace keeping force, in a part of space which is overrun by rebel forces, which are being manipulated by both the Analusians and the Galbraggians.
It all sounds complicated, but it's all good fun and at the same time I try to write from the perspective of the difficulties faced by the GFAS peace keeping force, in difficult circumstances, as are all
peace keeping forces on earth at this present time.
So I've been happy putting the Trellonverse together and hope you will enjoy the journey along with me.