Bear Ribs
Well-known member
An inventor uses a script that signs up for thousands of message boards across the internet simultaneously to distribute his new invention. and ensure that the information can't be contained. He is not interested in his invention being forgotten or hidden by the powers that be and includes his permission to reuse, modify, and alter his plans as you please. He has filed for a patent in multiple nations simultaneously but only to keep said patent from being filed from a squatter and stolen from the public, and has placed his work into the public domain. His message ends with "You are free."
It's an FTL drive, that can be built out of parts from any Radio Shack or even scavenged from common household electronics. An old 8088 processor is hideous overkill for the amount of processing power it actually takes, if you want to go that way and build your own, but he's written a phone app that can bluetooth or wire connect to the FTL drive if you want to include that kind of capability, as well as a windows and linux option. It's inputs are simple enough to run off a set of LED readouts and just plugging in your destination in direction and distance from starting point if you want to go ultra-simple, though that requires a significant amount of math on the user's end first, most people will prefer the phone app. Power requirements are remarkably small as well, a golf-cart sized spaceship could travel to another star system and back (once) powered by an actual golf cart battery. Bigger objects need significantly more power with the requirements scaling to mass, not volume.
The drive can be attached to just about any object that's completely airtight, so any random storage tank, airplane, submarine, asteroid, or even a heavy-duty balloon could become a spaceship. The drive itself provides effectively teleportation so liftoff isn't a problem, you simply teleport into space. It will come out of space at an effective 0 speed relative to the largest gravity well the drive is being affected by, so if you teleport into a star system you wind up at relative zero to the sun, if you teleport near a planet it's relative zero to said planet. The drive program includes a "landing mode" so that you can make FTL micro-jumps of a meter or so repeatedly, resetting your velocity to 0 relative to the planet on the way down so that you don't build up dangerous velocity and burn up.
Essentially, anybody who can put as little as a hundred dollars together can go explore space if they want. Granted, a higher budget is significantly safer if you put that money into a better quality ship and training to understand how orbits actually work, as well as safety training to deal with space. The drive makes space travel cheap but it doesn't do anything to protect you from vacuum, micro-meteorites, or radiation.
The Inventor has further taken it on himself to get into the history books even further by exploring the closest few hundred star systems or so already and checked them out while testing his drive's operability. There's twenty-two planets suitable for human life marked in easy travel range, though he hasn't explored them beyond scanning for the basics like oxygen, temperature, and liquid water on the surface.
What happens next? How will the Powers that Be respond to extremely cheap space travel? Will you go explore?
It's an FTL drive, that can be built out of parts from any Radio Shack or even scavenged from common household electronics. An old 8088 processor is hideous overkill for the amount of processing power it actually takes, if you want to go that way and build your own, but he's written a phone app that can bluetooth or wire connect to the FTL drive if you want to include that kind of capability, as well as a windows and linux option. It's inputs are simple enough to run off a set of LED readouts and just plugging in your destination in direction and distance from starting point if you want to go ultra-simple, though that requires a significant amount of math on the user's end first, most people will prefer the phone app. Power requirements are remarkably small as well, a golf-cart sized spaceship could travel to another star system and back (once) powered by an actual golf cart battery. Bigger objects need significantly more power with the requirements scaling to mass, not volume.
The drive can be attached to just about any object that's completely airtight, so any random storage tank, airplane, submarine, asteroid, or even a heavy-duty balloon could become a spaceship. The drive itself provides effectively teleportation so liftoff isn't a problem, you simply teleport into space. It will come out of space at an effective 0 speed relative to the largest gravity well the drive is being affected by, so if you teleport into a star system you wind up at relative zero to the sun, if you teleport near a planet it's relative zero to said planet. The drive program includes a "landing mode" so that you can make FTL micro-jumps of a meter or so repeatedly, resetting your velocity to 0 relative to the planet on the way down so that you don't build up dangerous velocity and burn up.
Essentially, anybody who can put as little as a hundred dollars together can go explore space if they want. Granted, a higher budget is significantly safer if you put that money into a better quality ship and training to understand how orbits actually work, as well as safety training to deal with space. The drive makes space travel cheap but it doesn't do anything to protect you from vacuum, micro-meteorites, or radiation.
The Inventor has further taken it on himself to get into the history books even further by exploring the closest few hundred star systems or so already and checked them out while testing his drive's operability. There's twenty-two planets suitable for human life marked in easy travel range, though he hasn't explored them beyond scanning for the basics like oxygen, temperature, and liquid water on the surface.
What happens next? How will the Powers that Be respond to extremely cheap space travel? Will you go explore?
