Hyperspace Lanes

[l33telboi]

I read something regarding hyperspace lanes on Starwars.com today that got me thinking a bit. Apparently in the upcoming Clone Wars cartoon the CIS is going to severly cripple the GAR by mining hyperspace lanes, cutting off the GAR from a lot of their resources and restricting their movement by what seems to be quite a bit. In turn the GAR has to petition the Hutts for permission to move through their space.

This not only demonstrates that mining hyperspace lanes (like in the novel I read not long ago) is a real problem in Starwars, but it also shows that hyperspace lanes are relied heavily upon even by the military. To the point where they absolutely need them to conduct large scale warfare.

I can't link to the specific part on the site where this is said, due to the heavy usage of flash on the main site. But click the "The Movie" tab at the top and then read through the "What are the Clone Wars?" part.

Thoughts?

[Mr. Oragahn]

It's like protecting roads and bridges for tanks and other convoys, at a larger scale.

It clearly shows that they can't really enter point A and B and get the most direct and fastest route.
It's actually nice, because even if it's going to piss some people off, it brings a lot of strategy, similar to the control of jump points.

Now, mining hyperspace lanes much take a lot ressources, no? I mean, is it done in real space, or in hyperspace? What's the range of a mine? Does it have that mass shadow? Is it some kind of interdiction mine?
How wide does that mine field need to be?

I didn't know the Hutts controled lanes which were of massive important to the core worlds and their affairs. It's probably just a case of being the only other available routes. You're still making a hook, but that's better than nothing.

[l33telboi]

Now, mining hyperspace lanes much take a lot ressources, no? I mean, is it done in real space, or in hyperspace? What's the range of a mine? Does it have that mass shadow? Is it some kind of interdiction mine? How wide does that mine field need to be?

I have no idea on how they're about to execute this in the series, but in the novel I read not long ago, the hyperspace lanes seem very very narrow. A cargo ship runs over a mine and the pirates are waiting so close by that all they have to do is open fire at the ship as soon as it drops out of hyperspace. We're talking visual range close by. And when talking about space, that's close indeed.

How exactly the mine worked I don't know. But there was the sound of an explosion and a shudder, which would indicate it was a normal explosive mine, rather then something like a mass shadow generator. It was also said to have destroyed the hyperdrive, not just force the ship out of hyperspace.

[Jedi Master Spock]

I knew the whole lane thing had been mentioned before by somebody before you posted the book review that brought up hyperspace lanes. See this thread. Bit of an off-topic wander, but Watchdog linked to this thread on hyperspace navigation hazards on SB.com, which has some relevant quotes, and we talked a little about it. (Also this older thread on SB.)

I'm going to add that having hyperspace lanes narrow enough to mine or blockade does boggle my mind somewhat. Being that sensitive is ridiculous.

Mapping hyperspace lanes becomes a major strategic issue to consider in any cross-universe VS debate, since we're talking a very big difference in effective FTL mobility when you go off the good lanes, and then another huge drop when you go from minor mapped lanes to having to map out/clear out lanes.

The upshot of this is that as has often been maintained here, there's a real trade-off between hyperdrive and warp drive. Mostly I was just talking about gas mileage before, but if they've used hyperspace lane-mining in a novel and a cartoon, the hyperspace lane thing is going to be repeated a lot in the EU for at least the next few years.

The downshot is that if they're careful enough in explaining it, they might actually turn hyperdrive in the EU into something that's actually consistent. This is a bad thing if you're attached to some of the arguments I've laid out in the past about hyperdrive in the EU.

[2046]

Wow . . . just wow. It's like the Vaadwuar underspace corridors or VOY-era Borg transwarp conduits.

I was wondering how this was going to turn out. You see, usually when you're writing sci-fi, you show ubertech but limit the heck out of it . . . for instance, jump drives on the new Battlestar Galactica are basically instant, (mostly-)untrackable translocation devices. That is to say, you can effectively beam a ship elsewhere.

It's easy to see how this could be dramatic death for a show, as every time something bad popped up the whole hero fleet could be gone in the amount of time it took them to press a button. Perfect tech, by nature, won't generally be seen in such a show.

And so there are weaknesses that have been added . . . making it take time to 'spin up the FTL drive' (long enough for an attack to occur), making it so fighters don't have them (so you'd have to stick around to retrieve the fighter craft), occasionally causing misjumps, et cetera.

Now you have drama again, because instead of perfect instant ship teleportation, you have opened up story angles and options. As a bonus, they are based solely on the universe of the story you're telling.

Now, if you're only doing a trilogy or two, this is usually no problem. But a weekly series? Eventually you must start adding complexities and breaking things you made up for it.

Good to see that on its way.

[Who is like God arbour]

There was an interesting debate on SDN:

• Suppose we have an ISD on a regular patrol. It is transversing space along a hyperlane. Someone uses a long-range subspace transporter to beam a field of cloaked mines in the path of the ISD.
  
  The minefield is beamed in place after the ISD uses the navicomp to plot a course and jumped to lightspeed.
  
  Is this a viable tactic?

  • Do the math. Let's say the initation sequence takes one nanosecond: if the ship is traveling at (for example) 100 ly/hr, that's roughly 2.6E14 m/s. This, in turn, means that from the moment of impact with the nose of the ship to the moment it passes the rear of the ship, only 6E-12 seconds would pass. I don't see any reason why the ship wouldn't just fly right through it without injury even if it goes off.
    
    Particle interactions are limited at very high relative velocities: at a high fraction of c, you can pass antimatter through solid matter and almost none of it will even react.
    
    Of course, all of this is assuming they can actually make this happen in the first place: a highly questionable premise.

    
    

    Hyperspace routes aren't going to be like modern roads. It's a well-travelled and "known safe" route between two areas, but it doesn't have defined edges. You're not going to be able to mine something that's thousands or tens of thousands of kilometres wide with any realistic expectation of hitting anything, unless you use a truly gigantic number of mines.
    
    Also, I notice no one acknowledged my previous post. What's the matter, you people don't understand math?

    
    

    I wasn't talking about modeling the physical interaction between the tachyonic ship and a sublight object: I was talking about the fact that the thing isn't even going to detonate quickly enough to hit the ship before it's long gone, so whatever interaction occurs is likely to be no more serious than hitting some random piece of space garbage: something you'd think they're set up to handle.

    
    

    You're kidding, right? A better question is: how the fuck could you possibly make a weapon which can actually use up its reactants in less than 1 ns, considering the fact that even light can only travel 0.3 metres in that time? If you drop the containment on a bunch of antimatter, the particles still have to physically travel until they intermingle with matter particles; just how hot are these particles that they would be moving at a considerable fraction of c yet still be contained in the magnetic confinement field?

    
    

    "Gravitic mass shadow" is an idiotic term. It has no physical meaning whatsoever. If there is a gravitational field interaction, that's what it should be called: a gravity field.

    
    

    It's a term made up by SW EU writers who were too stupid to realize that it didn't mean anything. It would be like me telling you that you fall when you step off a cliff not because of the gravity of the Earth, but because of the gravity of the Earth's "mass shadow". That's not "slang", that's stupidity.

    
    

    It doesn't make any sense even without that explanation. If it [hyperspace] is truly a different "dimension", then the planet must interact with that dimension in order to affect anything in it. What the fuck is a "shadow" into another dimension, and why would that "shadow" interact independently of the host object? As I said, it makes no sense. Moreover, it never made any sense. It was always stupid.

    
    

    Don't be a retard. Laypeople would never discuss the physics of superluminal travel anyway, even in Star Wars. For a layperson, it's good enough to say "don't run into anything". That's exactly how Han Solo would have put it, and pretty much how he DID put it in ANH. This "mass shadow" bullshit is pseudoscientific nonsense; why the fuck would a layperson make that up instead of simply saying "don't run into things"? Why would he say "You have to be careful you don't interact with a mass shadow which is projected into hyperspace" rather than saying "You have to avoid hitting things"?
    
    The EU uses this idiotic "mass shadow" bullshit not to describe some sort of incompetent slang but because the authors actually thought it made sense. All of your attempts to make excuses for this worthless garbage are merely handwaving.

    
    

    Imagine that you and three friends are each holding one corner of a bedsheet, and pulling it taut, and there's a large weight in the middle. Obviously, the bedsheet will slope down toward the middle. If you put another object on that bedsheet, no matter where that object is, it will roll toward the weight in the middle. If you put two objects on the bedsheet, the first one will most certainly not shield the second one from this effect; it will only exacerbate it.
    
    The analogy is not perfect, but it might help illustrate. The bedsheet is spacetime, which distorts when a massive object is placed in it.

    
    

    How do you figure that the name "Big Bang" is worse than inventing a completely erroneous physics concept for no reason? A misnomer and a complete fabrication are two different things, and the latter is worse.

    
    

    That's nonsense. Laypeople don't even try to grasp how gravity works at all. It's enough for them to know what goes up comes down. The minute someone tries to concoct analogies for how gravity works on a conceptual level, he's obviously enough of an enthusiast that he should be learning something meaningful, not retarded nonsense like "mass shadow".

    
    

    And how many people do you know who invented some completely imaginary "mass shadow" concept in real-life in order to explain gravity to themselves?
    
    PS. I don't even know why I'm humouring this "it's just a colloquialism" idiocy of yours anyway. The moron EU writers put it into narrative tech descriptions, which are NOT excused by this tortured rationalization.

    
    

    Then why do you think it makes sense in the SW world? Special pleading fallacy?
    
    Why do you think it makes sense for those people to invent "slang" terms for meaningless and completely unnecessary pseudoscience in order to explain things that are intuitively obvious, like "don't ram into anything"? You have never been able to answer this, except to repeatedly bleat that you think it makes sense anyway. I've repeatedly pointed out that nobody would feel any need to create this "colloquialism" because "don't ram into anything" works just fine.

    
    

    Big Bang is a name which evokes the concept, regardless of whether your hyper-literal interpretation is accurate. "Mass shadow" is not.
    
    
    Since when is "mass shadow" simpler than "gravity", which everyone already knows and understands at least as well as this made-up concept?

    
    

    If you intend to "win" by simply continuing to post your bullshit until I get bored and give up, I suspect you will "win" this one. However, I expect most readers to be intelligent enough to realize that you're full of shit, and that you don't need some silly-ass made-up concept like "mass shadow" to realize that if there's a big object ahead of you, you have a problem.

    
    

    In other words, that "mass shadow" idiocy was intended from day one as an actual technical reference. So much for the "colloquialism" excuse. I wonder what other foul bullshit the EU apologists will cook up for the brain-dead garbage which passes for literature in their world.

As you can see, that topic was thoroughly debated. And it is not possible to mine hyperspace lanes. End of the story.

[Jedi Master Spock]

As is usual, Wong's argument has a couple large flaws.

The first is that although he doesn't *like* the idea of pulling ships out of hyperspace, it clearly happens in the EU, and with multiple incidents in the EU, this is not an accident. If he is to be consistent in accepting EU material "unless directly contradicted" by the movies, he as an EU completist is obliged to come up with an explanation for hyperspace mines, which isn't actually very hard. It's a lot easier to justify hyperspace mines than to justify the ICS.

Side note: Regarding the interdictor field, an image from Wanted by Cracken - see here - suggests that the Interdictor's interdiction fields are fairly small, which also supports narrow lanes. In any case, even if the field were planetary in size, the use of Interdictors along hyperspace lanes would suggest fairly narrow lanes on the galactic scale.

Second, I seem to recall Wong condoning FTL sensors that can detect ships in hyperspace from normal space a long way off. His concerns about reaction time are accordingly inconsistent with his prior claims regarding SW sensors.

Third, if we accept the issue of dust concentrations etc reducing the maximum safe hyperdrive speed, we have precedent for matter and the ship interacting in some fashion. He's working from the assumption that matter essentially doesn't react with ships going through hyperspace except through gravitation. Not much support for this, especially if we have hyperspace lanes in the first place.

What happens when you run into a thick dust concentration too fast? Does it force you to slow down through increased resistance, or does that mean your ship starts getting damaged by the dust? Does it overstrain the hyperdrive, causing it to burn out?

In any of these cases, mining hyperspace lanes can work. You simply need to put enough matter in the area. If peak in-lane speed for a normal freighter is 10,000 LY/hour, and lanes only have thin interstellar hydrogen at about an atom per cubic centimeter, and has a 500 meter radius, then they ordinarily pass through 2x10^28 hydrogen atoms per second (800,000 sq meters * 2.6e16 m/s * 1e6 cm^3/m^3). This is, in other words, 34 kg of matter per second deflected, filtered, or causing a torque to be applied to the hyperdrive's thingamabob unit.

If hyperspace lanes are that narrow, and the matter is deflected away, the density will drop noticeably, and I picked a high speed, so this is a high figure. What happens if you suddenly need to bounce or pass through 3000 kg in the span of a single nanosecond from a mine, or a string of mines? Does the hyperdrive motivator become kaputt, or does the ship take damage? Do they even need to be explosive mines to work?

For these reasons, it's very easy to come up with a plausible explanation for hyperspace mines working.

[Mr. Oragahn]

The trouble is where the mine sits, and how it projects its effects.
They say it's a mine, but is there any proof that it's a regular explosion that forces a ship out?
Couldn't it be an explosion of... I don't know, some truly bizarre?
That's pretty much what we're left with, no?

The older EU references say that a large amount of matter will generate a gravity field.
Others say that many debris and gas clouds or else can slow down hyperspace speed dramatically.
That was for Endor, though, with a superweapon firing beams which boosts matter into hyperspace, so you don't really know what technobabble plot particles were attached as a nerf area effect to the debris and gases.


Now, Wong seems to have a problem to accept a term which just means having the gravity field of a planet without having the planet's matter in hyperspace.
It's just the way it goes. It has no basis in known physics, one has to move beyond that otherwise you're just stuck in looped rants.

As for the interdictor fields, I think it's a bit more complicated than that.
It's a plan that would only work as long as you can predict the path of a ship.
Besides, it's a schematic. I don't know how large interdiction fields can be.
It's obviously much easier to prevent a jump than to force a ship out of hyperspace.
That said I remember Luke's X-wing was pulled out of HS in Thrawn Trilogy.
I can't remember the conditions.

[l33telboi]

Here's a thought. We know that having the mine be a simple explosive device would be rather strange. The argument on SDN that an explosion would be too slow in relation to a ship travelling many times the speed of light is a sound one.

So what if this is simply a solid mass of some sort, not explosive at all. The ship runs over it and takes damage. Thus its forced out of hyperspace. Or what if it is an explosive that is first run over so that the explosive is lodge inside the ship, and first then explodes?

Both of those possobilites are rather problemtic though, seeing as how it would mean hyperspace lanes wouldn't even be a kilometer in diameter.

In any case, it'll be interesting to see how Clone Wars handles this.

[Mr. Oragahn]

In Last Starfighter, they had a huge mine field which encompassed a whole stellar system, if not a whole sector, can't remember. :)

[Flectarn]

Seems to me if you wanted to mine hyperspace and force ships out of it, you'd just use the same technology the interdiction cruisers use. Then once it's out of hyperspace you can have normal bunches of explosives laying about.

[Cocytus]

I remember the original (and often wrong) Vehicles and Vessels guide mentioning "pulse mass mines" for Hapan battle dragons that were supposed to do just that: project an artificial interdiction field. Can anyone with more EU familiarity than myself elaborate on this?

[Mike DiCenso]

I think this is what you're refering to.

Unfortunately there is no entry in Wookiepedia for the pulse mass mines.
-Mike

[SailorSaturn13]

A similar concept exists in Trek: ajou can move fastectories on which you can move faster.

On the other hand soe travels (like coruscant - dubrillion in "Vector Prime" DO last more than a week at peacetime, meaning that the fast lanes are VERY RARE and most planets nnowhere near them - indeed only few important worlds are connected by such lanes (and therefore are rich and important).

[Who is like God arbour]

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