Zonetrooper

Just one note: I don't know what the nature of your thesis is, but you might get more nuanced results by something like assigning each book in a pair a 1-5 score. Right now, an answer of "I like #1 better than #2" could mean a few things:

• #2 is just awful and I hate it.
• Both are really good, but #1 is just slightly better.
• #1 just slaps and nothing could compare to it.

Looks reasonable enough! A couple thoughts:

• I assume you need to fire the main thrusters as landing brakes in order to set the craft down softly. It might be necessary to have some kind of lighter-weight discardable heat shielding around the craft to protect against rebounding thruster gas as it sets down. This could be recovered and recycled into habitation material if it isn't too badly damaged.
• You may also wish to consider what goods could be stored in external pods anchored around the outside of the craft. These might be removed by crane once the whole thing has been set up.
• Once landed, which do you imagine having the better quarters - people living in buildings on the surface within the wall, or inside the actual lander itself?

Disclaimer, I am not a physicist, just a guy with interest in sci-fi, science, and too much free time.

is their any theory centered around our frame of reference having a past but not a future?

So, the answer is, yes, this is actually kind of a common theory on how time actually works. Maybe.

This has to do with physics, and the fact that no two observers have the same perfect frame of reference. For most of us humans, our frames of reference are close enough to be identical on a day-to-day basis. It's even close enough for (most) science. But it's not true on a perfect level. For instance, special relativity says that time passes differently for objects in motion; GPS satellites have to correct for the fact that their onboard clocks are experience "slower" time than us observers on Earth. Even astronauts "lose" about ~1/100th of a second for every year spent on the ISS.

What's this got to do with the future not existing, though?

So we know no two observers have a perfectly identical frame of reference - there is no objective "truth" of when something occurred. Cool. Now what? Well, what we can talk about is historic light cones. Because the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, we can determine how far from you a photon departing your actions would travel. Places that photon would reach at any given point in time following your action are said to be within your historic light cone, and in common parlance, the past. The boundary of how far that photon is reaching at any given moment is, from your frame of reference, "the present". But since nothing can exceed the speed of light, it is impossible for an observer to view beyond the present, into the future.

The catch, of course, is reference frames. You used a plural - "our frame of reference", "we're blazing a trail forward" - but the reality is that each of us has a minutely different reference frame and is blazing a minutely different trail. Again, for almost any day-to-day purposes this is irrelevant... but there are certain scientific experiments which exploit or even rely on this absence of reference frame.

Cool, what about time travel again?

In my first comment above, I mentioned something called closed timelike curves. Those are an actual thing: By severely bending spacetime, you can theoretically cause a photon to "curve" around and end up at the same point in time it was produced, now in its subjective past, while mathematically not violating quantum physics.

This is where things get kind of freaky and headachy; if a photon can be sent into its subjective past, doesn't that imply a future now existing, in which that photon will be generated? The answer is, not in the frame of reference of that particular photon. A historic light cone of that photon being generated, now in that photon's future, still exists; but that photon is now generating a new, detached lightcone...

Like I said, headachy. I also have to emphasize that while the math holds up, there's ample reason to believe CTCs don't exist, chief among them that our mathematical understanding of quantum physics may still be imperfect.

tl;dr: Yes, absence of reference frames means that each distinct observer is blazing their own trail, which spreads into the "past" at the speed of light. The future, exceeding the speed of light, is unobservable. This framework does provide a mathematical concept of how you could send something into your subjective past, but such a means is still theoretical at best.

This is fundamentally a variation on the question of a Temporal Paradox, also known as a Grandfather Paradox ("You go back in time and kill your grandfather. What happens?"). Although no killing happens in this variation, the basic idea is the same: Information is transmitted to the past from the future, but results in a situation where it cannot be transmitted in the first place.

Accordingly, there are several hypotheses to cover this. This isn't even all of them:

• The closed loop theory: To maintain the loop, you will in the future build a time machine which will allow you to activate the machine in the past, maintaining the loop. Past you may even be unaware it was activated from the future.
• The Parallel Universe theory: When future-you sent information into the past, they did not send it into their own past but rather into a universe in which you do not send the information back in the first place.
• The Timelike Curve theory: Because there is no common reference frame for "time", each quanta of "you" is experiencing a different reference frame. The historic light cone of your future self sending the information back exists, and if you could follow those photons backwards you would find him doing this. But future you, in your frame of reference, will never see the machine activate.
• The Emergent Time theory: Time is not a linear path, but a function of entropy. By inverting entropy, you have caused a reconfiguration of the universe into a version in which the machine is inactive.

Right? I try to stay away from it so a few unread pages can build up and I can devour them all at once, but I never manage to stay away for long...

Been following Jay for a few years now - he used to lurk the Worldbuilding community over on Reddit, so I ran into him a few times back before I migrated to Lemmy. Runaway is some really fantastic stuff, and the sheer effort of depth put into minor details of the world make it stand out. (Seriously, check for the small details of how the characters emote - it's fascinating.)

At this point I only wish more of it would come out faster, but again given the sheer attention to detail and quality of art, I'm just delighted to have it at all!

Not to be that guy, but it’s tailstone.

Oooooh. Whoops. I totally misread that.

But, since the gesture is a rough equivalent to a dismissive wave of the hand, the word can be translated “handwavium”.

Hah! I do like that.

Ah, well. It was a good idea!

What constitutes "misuse"?

The big fears are trying to use one as a weapon is the big fear - slamming a barge at FTL into a colony-station or planet would ruin either - or theft by a foreign power. But since any misjump could be catastrophically deadly, any jump which does not match a planned and expected course is treated as potentially dangerous.

There have been attempts at using them for smuggling, quick business opportunities, petty theft, and - in one infamous incident - a crewmember attempting to evacuate his family.

Notes on tallstone production and implications of cybersecurity

Interesting. There's no way to "ping" the "network" and - by physics or other means - determine how many other cards are on that "network"?

Also, depending on how difficult it is to create Tallstone, this creates the possibility that there would be "certified secure" tallstone from well-regarded manufacturers, and riskier-but-cheaper options if you don't care. It also raises the possibility that beyond individual bad actors, governments or criminal groups could set up entire fabs producing batches with access for them.

Refreshing that the defining system characteristic ... seems to be that it isn't a system.

Exactly. One of the themes I'm aiming for in this world is that magic is something intrinsically of the heart and soul; it's not something which can be objectively studied. You can still try and loosely categorize it and observe similarities, but magic can't be completely separated from the person.

fast travel being inherently scary

Really, I just wanted to cut down on the 'easy fast travel' trope and make the world seem bigger... but it's also a cool idea to play with thematically! I like what you're doing with the social angle as well.

Has anybody looked at using automated transport and power-up ships to set up the gates? Or is it a process that is sufficiently complex that it can't be carried out by an automated system?

...conversely, if your explorer ship is bringing a gate with it, can you turn on the gate mid-trip and rotate crews in and out by passing them back through the gate?

Haha, holy shit. Somehow I had never connected that Piratesoftware was Maldavius. Yeah, that explains so, so very much of this entire SKG debacle.

From the sci-fi setting, it's your pretty standard "bend space until both destination and departure points are actually nominally close to each other" kind of drive.

• Time between jumps usually bottoms out at around 15-20 minutes for most drives, but increases exponentially as a function of distance traveled and desired accuracy of your destination point.

• This is because the pre-calculation to compute a successful bend in space-time grows massively more complex the more gravity fields are involved. Extremely long-distance jumps can take hours or days to calculate, but inter-system jumps can be carried out rapidly.

• Intersecting the event horizon of a fold in progress is bad. "You're reduced to a fine relativistic spray" bad. So far accidents have been "minor", as in they didn't kill thousands.

• The exotic matter required for drives is stupendously expensive. As a result, almost no ships have internal drives, but require a "drive barge" or "FTL barge" to exploit FTL. Despite this, barges are common enough that most families can afford to take an FTL trip if needed.

• In UNHA operations, all drives are legally owned by the government and crewed by a detachment of naval personnel, with explicit orders to scuttle a drive rather than allow it to be misused.

In the fantasy setting, it's a little bit different. For one thing, no two fast travel castings work entirely alike. This is because it is a key tenet that magic is a deeply and intrinsically personal thing, and while casters than study concepts to gain inspiration, there's no such thing as a "standardized" casting which can be moved between casters.

For instance, some casters port you through an alternate dimension, and some bend space. Some open a gateway, some transmute you into photons then back, and some encapsulate you in a bubble which moves rapidly.

Even within a broad category, there are subsets: For instance, if they use an alternate dimension, is it one in which points are simply "closer together", or where time flows differently?

It's important to know these things, because different species or other casters being brought along can have... unexpected reactions to different methods.