I've been thinking about alternatives to ftl, jds and wormholes.
Current sci-fi depicts long distance space travel as through a jump drive or wormhole, either something that instantaneously accelerates you to beyond the speed of light or some kind of shortcut in which you go at normal speeds but the travel time is greatly reduced.
On earth where drag exists, we think of a vehicle's range in terms of distance. So when we say a car or an aircraft has 100 minutes of fuel, we mean it can travel 100 minutes at a constant speed and cover a linearly proportionate amount of distance.
In terms of space travel where drag is pretty much nil and therefore a non issue, we think of a vehicle's range in terms of acceleration. So when we say a rocket has 100 minutes of fuel, we mean it can keep gaining or reducing speed for 100 minutes exponentially and increase its speed enough to perform all the necessary maneuvers for travel.
But to go beyond our immediate space and even if we had an engine with practically unlimited fuel, it would still take it a long time of running it before it even scraped getting near the speed of light, much less get to the nearest star system before the human lifespan.
So here's a sci-fi method of propulsion I propose: The spool drive. Not a jump drive that needs a "spooling up" charge time like in battlestar galactica, but an engine that increases its thrust output exponentially over time - something that keeps on spooling up to dramatically increase its speed, because it is acceleration of acceleration, ie. ms-3.
With this rate of thrust, it is a much faster method of travel than conventional deltaV or delta D. Of course, the G-forces you get with such a thing would be crazy, although "easily" solved with a spooling gravity generator spooling up at the same rate as the spool drive.
A journey would consist of the spool drive spooling up for the first quarter of the journey, spooling down Q2, then in Q3 spooling up again in the opposite direction for the "deceleration" burn, finally spooling back down at Q4 to complete the "deceleration". A spool drive's jump range would be defined by the limits of the acceleration of acceleration it could provide.
How is this better than a hyperdrive? You ask.
In terms of functionaility, nothing beats being able to instantly move from 0 ms-1 to beyond the speed of light. However I personally find it to be a slightly more believable solution, and in the long run a spool drive would reach much higher speeds than the speed of light. (how much ms-3 does it take to reach c? nobody knows. but way less than the ms-2 it takes as demonstrated by scott manley.)
A this point I realise that I'm just probably spewing crazy technobabble for the less scifi-minded and probably plain unscientific nonsense for those who got more marks than a D in physics class, so I'll just conclude with this: If anyone can model, make or point me towards a spool drive (which as I state is a propulsion method that exponentially increases the acceleration of a ship), it would be awesome.
