Hey guys, I've been looking through the rpg books starting to write down ideas for a campaign that I may be running in the near future. But I wanted to ask, is there anywhere in the fiction that better describes how interstellar/interplanetary travel works? So we have the jumps through wormholes, but is there any idea how things work getting from planet to planet? Or are we still talking weeks to months to get between planets. I ask because this does sort of have an influence on the timescale of the setting.
Ships have fairly conventional (fusion?) drives for intrasystem travel, so it can be a decent journey. Probably not the years modern space flight requires, given 175 years worth of propulsion and aerospace research, but certainly weeks and probably months. At least, I believe that's the case.
I was under the impression that Vila Boosters significantly cut down transit time for common routes, so closer to days between systems than weeks. Getting there under your own power (and without everyone knowing where you're going) would take much longer.
The Vila Boosters work like the Mass Relays (closer to the rings in Cowboy Bebop, IMO). They effectively speed up what you can get out of a stardrive. Based on what specific engines have been mentioned, we're talking continuous accelerations on the order of half a gee using the Vila boosters. It's the continuous acceleration (or nearly so) that is what makes the Vila Boosters so valuable (you continuously accelerate for half the trip and then flip end-over-end to continuously decelerate) This isn't bad. Earth to Mars at half a gee is 5 days. Even if you could only get 1m/s/s, a little over 1/10 gee, that's Earth to Mars in 11 days. If you could get 1 gee, it wouldn't speed things up much, only down to 3.5 days (84 hours and a bit). (the math is simple enough that a spreadsheet can do it) With what we know about orbital elevators, it's just as long to get up the beanstalk into orbit in the first place! Earth's orbital Elevator will be 36,000km long from surface to geostationary orbit, and the trains going up can only do about 300kph before vibrations get resonant and break things, so it's 120 hours up the beanstalk to GEO Station, another 120-140 hours to the counterweight where you leave. I forget where the Stargates wormholes are now, IIRC the first one to Ariadna was detected by the changes to Saturn's Rings. Assuming that they are still about that distance out, that's only 300 hours at half a gee once you leave Earth's orbit. Crossing from one gate to another at Saturn's distance on the opposite side of the system is ~18 days at half a gee. Get to orbit and you're halfway to anywhere!
