Saturday, July 28, 2012

What is a young hyperdrive made of?

That's what you are
What you will always be
Made of my dreams
Close as my heart to me
Bright as a star
Of love's sweet mystery
Here in my arms
Where you should always be
(Egregious Beach Boys lyrics brought to you by this page)

The question is what a hyperdrive is made of and how it works. I'm speaking from within the Star Wars world and its physics, incidentally, assuming it's like ours only more convenient from a narrative perspective. There are two main scenes I can think of dealing with hyperdrives within the canonical SW. The first is in Empire Strikes Back when R2D2 was repairing the Falcon's and there were wires everywhere. The other is in Zahn ("Heir to the Empire," chapters 16-17) when Luke's X-wing gets caught by a tractor beam, jumps free by backfiring the accelerator compensator, but the maneuver fries his hyperdrive and breaks down half a lightyear out.  Luke discovers that the hyperdrive motivators superconducting shields are each full of hairline fractures, and the parts inside are worthless without a shield.

What do we know about hyperdrives? They carry ships from point to point in space and the trips have duration relative to the distance, so it's not like L'Engle's tessering. They have a motivator with a shield and parts inside. Apparently it does not have miles of superconducting wire - R2 has to scavenge wire from the sensor jammer. And above all, hyperdrives don't work in gravity wells.

One of the few things we know about gravity is that (as far as we can tell) it extends everywhere at the same time, which is faster than the speed of light. This bears a striking resemblance to that other phenomenon, hyperdrives which move ships faster than the speed of light. So assume, for the sake of discussion, that gravity occupies a half-way dimension, partly in realspace and partly in hyperspace. And assume that there exist exotic particles which resonate with gravity and the gravitic dimension and can be harnessed to "jump" matter such as, oh, spaceships, between hyperspace and realspace. It's not a question of making your boat engine go fast enough. It's a question of getting into the right river.

Imagine a fluorescent light. It's a tube full of particles. When you excite the particles, they change states from off (off) to on (glowing). Suppose a hyperdrive is like that. You've got a superconductor, and inside is a tube full of exotic gravity-friendly particles which shift states. The motivator must be the thing that energizes the particles. There would be other parts that tune its frequencies and organize the emissions into a go-that-way stream vs. a random stream. Those are technical terms.

Gravity jams, or dampens, or messes with the vibrations of the exotic particles. It doesn't matter what the gravity's source is, whether it comes from a black hole, a planet, or a tractor beam. And, theoretically, there could be a whole nebula of similar exotic particles which you don't want to jump through in hyperspace because they might start resonating with your hyperdrive and change your vector, or stop you cold, or perhaps send half the nebula with you to your final destination. Or your very final destination, depending.

What do you think of the theory?

1 comment:

Jonathan said...

Tangentially related (perhaps): you need to read Eifelheim if you haven't read. As does Jonathan.

I can't really evaluate your theory, but I am pleased and amused to find a random long scientific discussion of the mechanism of Star Wars hyperdrives on a friend's blog. ;-)