Teleportation

A space fantasy / space opera setting
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Joshua
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Teleportation

Post by Joshua »

There are two types of teleporters in game.

Gates are large starbase sized rings for interstellar travel. They create a wormhole network between them. So, an actual space-time bridge. Transportation takes a huge amount of energy, and actually moves whole objects be merging two points in space. This is safe for vehicles and people. If the bridge breaks mid-travel, objects are spit out on one side or the other.

Humans discovered the Sol gate (located in the asteroid belt) and extrapolated the technology into smaller teleporters.

Human Teleport Pads are pad-to-pad transportation. The initial pad tears an object into it's molecular parts, and beams them at light speed to the receiving pad. The receiving pad puts them back together again. Note that this is not instantaneous. Teleporting to Mars takes 15 minutes, even if the disassembly and reassembly is near-instant (measured in nanoseconds).
  • Human scientist barely understand the technology. It was cobbled together as a necessity of war. The first use of which was basically D-day in the recent Human-Panther War.
  • Teleportation Cloning/Manufacture is still recent, about 10 years in use. They're considered a bad omen. See below.
  • Yes, this kills you. They have proof.
  • Well, unless you got a Friar with you. And you trust him to keep your soul safe.
  • And if that's not enough fridge horror for you, Sliders and anyone protected by a Friar is aware during their time of non-existence. During the initial deployment to Titan, that meant that 10% of the troops experienced 70 minutes of terrifying "I have no mouth and I must scream". Most people can handle a few seconds without too much issue (teleporting to the moon or around the earth, for example.) but, interplanetary jumps need to be trained for.
  • Anyone magically active treats teleporter pads like fragmentation grenades.
A teleporter pad will not attempt to send a person to another pad if the second pad is destroyed or malfunctioning, AT THE TIME OF TRANSFER. If the receiving pad is destroyed before the teleportation completes, the cargo is annihilated. A mass of inert elemental matter will appear at the receiving end. (So, the person or item gets there, it's just not reassembled.)
Mort has been able to animate a destroyed teleporter pad before a person arrived. Unfortunately, the inert matter that appears is destroyed beyond a necromancer's ability to reconstitute. Even scarabs can't do that.
Last edited by Joshua on Wed Feb 06, 2019 2:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Joshua
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Re: Teleportation

Post by Joshua »

Teleportation Cloning

Because teleporters are still so new, and are centuries beyond normal human technology, there's a lot of uncertainty as to what can and cannot be done with one.

The default teleportation does a quantum scan of the location of every atom in a person, with a strange checksum to represent optimal placement for electrons. This giant (and raw) stream of data is sent embedded in the atoms shoved through the wormhole between the two teleporter pads. The scanning system is not well understood, so compression, duplication and anything else are still very experimental.

Teleportation Clones can be created by duplicating the stream. At the moment this can only happen as the object is being teleported, and the duplicate needs an equal amount of matter to be queued at the base pad. (Because the data is encoded into the matter-stream, the originating pad must send out two matter streams as well as two data streams.) See Soul effects below.

Storing items as data is possible. However, it's currently resource intensive, and generating the item requires a mass of appropriate elements. Experiments with data compression and editing the data have been fairly spectacular failures. Although, there's currently a compressed MRE that's theoretically edible in an emergency.

Speaking of data transfer, teleporters make amazing data transfer devices. While not the most efficient use of the teleporter, neutral carbon can be sent, and read upon receipt. This allows for the transmission of data at light speed between human colonies.
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