Matter Transmitter

Energize!

Introduction

Larry Niven defined "teleportation" as any method of moving from point to
point in negligible time.

This used to be a mind-boggling cutting-edge science fiction
concept back in the late 1800's, e.g., "Professor Vehr's Electrical
Experiment" (24 January 1885 The Argonaut) by Robert Duncan Milne. But in 1965
Gene Roddenberry was developing a new TV series called "Star Trek" and found
that landing the crew on an alien planet in some kind of shuttle would blow
their entire special effect budget. So he invented the Transporter.
One cheap optical effect to "beam" the crew down and they were well into the
story by script page two.

So nowadays everybody knows what a transporter is, and the phrase "beam
me up Scotty, there is no intelligent life forms here" is part of the
popular lexicon. This may or may not be the reason why the concept has become
passé in science fiction. Which is a pity because it allows
science fiction authors to explore all sorts of deep philosophical
questions.

The popular term for matter transmitter back in the day was "transmat". But
the word really never caught on. George O. Smith said that if audio is for
sonics; radio is for electronics; video is for television signals then
transmitting matter is "mateo." That word never caught on either. In Poul
Anderson's The Enemy
Stars they were called "mattercasters." In Piers Anthony's Cluster
series they were called "mattermitters."

But are they possible? Maybe. They are certainly unobtanium,
verging on handwavium.

Limitations

As with all fringe science fiction speculations, if you are going to go
beyond physics as we know it, a wise SF author will try to limit
the damage. Break one law of physic, not five or six. Try to keep the rest
intact.

Conservation Of
Energy

Assume that matter transmission obeys the law
of conservation of energy. So if you use a transmat to teleport uphill, the
transmat will need a way of using extra electricity to compensate for the gravitational
potential energy difference or your body will suffer a sudden drop in
temperature or other energy loss. Moving uphill creates a gain in potential
energy, the law of conservation of energy says that energy has to come from
somewhere.

Teleporting downhill means you will lose potential energy. If the transmat
does not compensate for it, your body temperature will rise. The energy
has to go somewhere.

The equations below were derived by me from Larry Niven's The Theory and
Practice of Teleportation. They may be incorrect.

How much energy will be required to be added or removed in order to
compensate for altitude change teleports?

ΔU = -(m * g * Δh)

where:

ΔU = ± change in energy (Joules) plus for energy added to
object, minus for energy removed
m = mass of object teleported
(kg) man=68 kg
g = acceleration due to gravity (m/s) Terra=9.81
m/s
Δh = ± change in altitude (m) plus for traveling upwards,
minus for traveling downwards

What will be the temperature effect of uncompensated altitude change
teleports?

ΔT = -((m * g * Δh) / (m * C))

where:

ΔT = ± change in temperature (°C or K) plus for heating,
minus for cooling
m = mass of object teleported (kg) man=68
kg
g = acceleration due to gravity (m/s) Terra=9.81
m/s
Δh = ± change in altitude (m) plus for traveling upwards,
minus for traveling downwards
C = specific heat capacity of object
(J/kg-K) man≈4,184 J/kg-K (water)

Example: idiot PFC Floyd steps into a transmat and neglects to turn
on the altitude compensator. He set the transmat's destination dials to the top
of Mount Krumpet, which is exactly one kilometer higher than Floyd's current
location. How much is his body temperature going to drop?

ΔT = -((m * g * Δh) / (m * C))
ΔT = -((68 * 98.1 *
1,000) / (68 * 4,184))
ΔT = -(667,080 / 284,512)
ΔT =
-2.4°C

A drop of 2.4 degrees is not enough to kill, but Floyd's teeth might chatter
momentarily.

If you used an uncompensated transmat to teleport from the International
Space Station to Terra's surface (-400 km), your body temperature would rise
from it's normal 37°C to about 997°C. Hot enough to melt silver, and certainly
hot enough to kill you instantly. A compensated transmat would suck 266,832,000
joules out of your body in order to spare you from that cruel fate.

Actually, according to the Boom
Table it only takes 1.42×108 joules to totally vaporize a body,
leaving only a skeleton. Energy compensation is important.

Teleporting up to the ISS will make your body temperature fall from 37°C to
about -923°C. Which is pretty frigid, since the coldest spot on Terra is about
-50°C. This will also kill you instantly.

A reader named Yoel points out that -923°C is about six hundred and fifty
degrees below absolute zero, which is impossible. Niven's equation was sort of
assuming that the energy needed to make up for the potential energy loss would
come from heat. This observation would mean that either the energy would come
from somewhere else, or Floyd would materialize at an altitude corresponding to
a temperature drop to absolute zero (−273.15°C). The result would depend upon
the details of the teleporation method.

Conservation
Of Momentum

Assume that matter transmission obeys the law
of conservation of momentum. If you are in an automobile speeding along at
80 kilometers per hour, and use a transmat to teleport to a nearby truck stop,
you will arrive at the truck stop. Still moving at 80 kph. It will be
more or less the same as if you just jumped out of the moving car.

Conservation of momentum will affect you if you are standing on the ground
(of a rotating planet).

Imagine you are above the North Pole of Terra looking down. Terra is spinning
counter clock wise. You can see that person Alfa standing on the equator in
South America is moving in a direction almost ninety degrees away from person
Bravo standing on the equator in Africa (due East). If person Alfa teleported to
Africa, the vector sum between their personal vector and the vector of the
grounds of Africa will be such that they will be thrown up into the air. If they
teleport in a Western direction they will be thrown into the ground. Ouch.

Terra spins "faster" at the equator than it does at, say 45° latitude. This
means if you teleport north you'll be jerked to the left, and teleporting south
will jerk you to the right.

The equations below were derived by me from Larry Niven's The Theory and
Practice of Teleportation. They may be incorrect.

Teleporting East or West, how fast will our teleporter be thrown up in the
air or slammed into the ground?

upVel = sinRad(deltaEW / (radiusPlanet * cos(latitude))) * (rotVel *
cos(latitude))

where:

upVel = ± velocity teleporter is thrown (m/s) plus for
up, minus for down
sinRad(x) = sine of x, where x is in
Radians
deltaEW = distance teleported East or West
(m)
radiusPlanet = radius of the planet (m) Terra=6,371,000
m
cos(x) = cosine of x, where x is in degrees
latitude
= geographical latitude of teleporter (degrees)
rotVel =
rotational velocity of the planet at the equator (m/s) Terra=464
m/s

Teleporting North or South, how fast will our teleporter be thrown left or
right?

leftVel = (rotVel * cos(startLatitude)) - (rotVel *
cos(destLatitude))

where:

leftVel = ± velocity teleporter is thrown (m/s) plus for
left, minus for right
rotVel = rotational velocity of the planet
at the equator (m/s) Terra=464 m/s
startLatitude = geographical
latitude of starting position (degrees)
destLatitude =
geographical latitude of destination position (degrees)

Transmitter
And Receiver

In The Theory and Practice of Teleportation, Larry Niven noted some
implications about a transmat's requirements for a transmitter or receiver.

If the transmat does not require a transmitter, it can reach out to anything
in range and teleport it to the transmat's receiving stage (e.g., Skylark Duquesne by E. E.
"Doc" Smith). This turns out to be unreasonably powerful. A kleptomaniac's
dream. Whoever owns a transmitterless transmat can steal anything they want. Not
just gold, also things like top-secret government documents. If one person has
one they are the king of the world, until somebody assassinates them and becomes
the new king. If there are several people who have transmitterless transmats,
the economy of the world collapses, technological infrastructure decays, and
eventually the transmat cannot be repaired. Civilization has to start over from
scratch.

If the transmat does not require a receiver, it can send objects out to
anywhere it wants. Objects like bombs (e.g., The
Person from Porlock by Raymond F. Jones). This also turns out to be
unreasonably powerful. You could find the current location of the leader of a
nation you disliked and teleport a nuclear warhead on to their lap. Again if
there is only one the owner is the king of the world. Until they are
assassinated. If there are two the owning nations will bomb each other and the
rest of the world into the stone age (or at least into a level of technological
decay where the transmats cannot be repaired).

The main way to reduce the effect these two disasters is to postulate some
way of protecting certain areas from teleportation. For example, if they cannot
operate on a location that is deep enough underground, or surrounded by a
magnetic field, or something.

The easiest way to keep transmats from destroying civilization is to mandate
that they require both transmitters and receivers. Most science fiction does for
that reason. Except for Star Trek, they stop reckless use of transporters by
stopping them with deflector shields and magnetic fields to prevent beaming.

Interpenetration

From Malphite
Cosplay

The old science fiction writers assumed that two bodies cannot occupy the
same place at the same time. So they figured if you used a transmat to transmit
yourself to point Charlie, and there was a large rock occupying point Charlie,
both you and the rock would be transformed into a huge explosion. Actually
material objects are mostly empty space so you'd probably just become an instant
fossil inside the rock (or mostly inside the rock). You'd still be
dead, either instantly or eventually.

Transmitting into a mass of air will kill you too. Embolisms, the bends,
other nasty effects.

If you have proper transmats needing both transmitter and receiver, you'd
want the business ends to have enclosed booths. The idea is as you (and the air
around you) are being transmatted from transmat Delta to transmat Foxtrot, the
volume of air in the booth on transmat Foxtrox is simultaneously being
transmatted to transmat Delta. This way both you and the mass of air will be
sent into an empty booth full of vacuum. No boom.

Or you could save power by just pumping all the air out of the destination
transmat booth.

Other Limits

The main variables an author can play with are the maximum range between the
origin and destination, and the energy cost per use. This mostly impact what
conventional forms of transportation are rendered obsolete by transmats. If the
cost per use is fixed regardless of distance, and expensive, automobiles and
buses will remain but airplanes will vanish. If cost is cheap but range is
limited, people will travel by a series of jumps. But eventually you will reach
a point where it is cheaper to use an airplane. So automobiles and buss es will
vanish.

For other limits, recognize that matter transmission is very much like Discontinuous
("teleport-like") faster-than-light drives. So many of the limits of the
numerous times of discontinuous drives can be appropriated by the author and
applied to their transmats.

Web and
Starship

In the wargame Web
and Starship (keep in mind this is a paper-and cardboard tabletop game,
not a computer game) game designer (the legendary Greg
Costikyan) had a clever limitation on matter transmission, used as a method
of FTL travel.

The situation starts with two alien races: the Gwynhyfarr (hereafter referred
to as "Birds") and the Pereen (hereafter referred to as "Moles"). Each has a
totally different type of FTL transport system.

The Birds have FTL starships that can travel anywhere in the universe at
will. No special launch or landing sites are required. The trouble is that the
starships are expensive to build (i.e., there are not many of them),
and each has a limited cargo capacity.

The Moles have FTL matter transmission. It requires both a
transmitter and a receiver. Transmission is instantaneous.
Unfortunately in order to transmit to a new planet, a receiver unit must
by shipped to the planet by a Slower-than-light robot ship. This of course takes
years. The advantage of matter transmission is that they have huge cargo
capacities. The Moles can move entire armies through a matter transmitter in a
matter of hours.

When the Bird Empire and the Mole Empire expanded to the point where their
borders contacted each other, war was inevitable, but futile. Both empires
wanted to destroy the other and take over the enemy's habitable planets.
Unfortunately, due to the limitations of their respective FTL, war was
impossible.

Say the Birds want to invade a Mole planet. The Bird starships can go
anywhere, so the Birds load up their limited number of starships with the few
numbers of solders each ship can carry, and invade the Mole planet.
Whereupon the Moles use their matter transmitters to instantly transport
in the planetary armies of all the other Mole planets, and the combined Mole
armies turn the pathetically small Bird invasion force into a smoking
crater.

Say the Moles want to invade a Bird planet. The Moles load a matter
transmitter unit into a STL robot ship, aim it at the Bird planet to invade, and
wait a few years for it to arrive. Years later, as it approaches the
Bird planet, it is noticed by Bird space patrols, who promptly shoot it to
pieces.

Stalemate

Until one fine day both the Birds and the Moles notice radio waves being
emitted by a small planet set right in between the two empires. A planet called
Earth.

Two great civilizations faced each other across the arm. The Gwynhyfarr,
proud descendants of an aerial race, roamed the stars in mighty quantum-leap
vessels. The Pereen, the children of burrowing animals, linked their worlds
together with the Web. The two found each other incomprehensible. Their
mathematics were incompatible, their languages based on different principles,
their psychologies entirely at variance. They could not live with each other,
and yet they must. Neither was sufficiently mighty to conquer its foe.

But more than this: technologies have military
implications. The Gwynhyfarr ships could travel light-years in weeks,
could dart from star to star and drive deep into enemy territory. They could
also carry only small numbers of troops. Transporting even an infantry
division required huge ships in large numbers. In a space battle, the
Gwynhyfarr had no match. But the Pereen did not travel space.

The Pereen knew how to conquer intervening distance. Two points could be
"gated" together, linked so that one object could pass from one point to
another without travelling through the intervening space. Once a gate was
constructed on a new world, it was linked via other gates to every world in
the Pereen hegemony. The Web permitted instantaneous transmission of huge
quantities of materiel from one world to another. The Gwynhyfarr might land a
division on a Pereen world—but the Web would immediately transmit an army to
that world to defeat its enemies.

But to open a gate, the Pereen must transport the necessary machinery to a
new world to make the link to the Web. And the Pereen do not understand
Gwynhyfarr faster-than-light travel, and have no such system of their own.
Instead, sublight Pereen probes must drone their weary way across space-time
toward their targets. When a target is reached, a new world can be added to
the Web.

But sublight probes are small and defenseless; they cannot be otherwise,
because moving anything at sublight speeds from one star to another requires a
tremendous investment in energy and time. Only small objects can affordably
make the trip. If a Pereen probe enters a Gwynhyfarr world, its fusion flare
will almost certainly be identified.by enemy starships, and the probe
destroyed.

And so, for decades, the two races bided their time in armed hostility,
watching each other across the Carina arm. Limited by their technologies and
systems of war, neither could defeat the other.

Then came the radio signals from Terra...

From
Web and Starship game manual, Greg Costikyan
(1984)

The
Warbots

The Second Alakar (Warbot) was used in several conflicts, among them the
most noticeable being the Haak Wars of 14696.

The Haak, centipedean creatures from some obscure place in the galactic
center, had stretched their empire out in a most curious fashion. Most
races preferred to expand in a globe, the center being their planet of origin.
The Haak expanded in a straight line thirty light-years across. They had a
science of teleportation, which could get a Haak on the outside border of his
empire, twenty thousand light-years to the center, in two years. They did not
do very much work with spaceships, beyond sending robot probes to land
colonization reception booths.

When the first booths of Haak began landing on human planets in the distant
Lace pattern, the alarm went out. The Lace Pattern was occupied by a large
number of little human and non-human empires, none very large, and because it
was four years of travel from the Palaric States, the nearest really organized
culture, it never heard much from the main body of civilization, except for
wandering ships of Alakars.

In fact, it was not generally known that all those marvelous myths of
Antares, and TOSS, and Pale, and so on, were not fairy tales. Few of the
Alakars who wandered through the region had ever been anywhere near the
Civilization. The entire war, though it dragged on for ten years, was hardly
eighth-page news back in Antares.

From The Warbots by Larry
Todd (1968)

The
Time Mercenaries

(ed note: the Human/Revain alliance is fighting an
interstellar war with the Nerne. The latter species has a breeding rate which
makes rabbits and cockroaches look like pikers. They use soldier-wave tactics,
Nerne life is less than worthless, they store millions of their newborn
offspring in vats under suspended
animation.)
His (the
Nerne commander) thoughts drifted away from his own problem to the
larger one of interstellar conflict. Centuries ago his own species (the Nerne) had evolved a technique of stellar conquest
which was well suited to their prodigious powers of reproduction: send
in a ship, establish a base and hold it against attack for long enough to get
the matter-transmitters in operation. After that it was simple: pour in troops
and weapons powerful enough to hold off a space-borne attack. Once you had
done that, the planet was yours and troops could keep pouring in until it was
literally flooded.
Understandably,
the Revain, with their vastly slower reproductive capacities and limited
numbers, could not match this technique. They could not afford the
eighty percent casualty rate of interstellar matter-transmission so
they had stuck stubbornly to their growing space fleet. The Nerne had only
constructed to keep ahead, not to gain a vast lead in ships, but now, with the
humans adding their weight, the Nerne would be compelled to increase their own
production. The Commodore felt a twinge of unease. How? Where? They would need
at least sixty more production sites to meet the allied construction threat
and where would they put them? With every vacant space filled with vats, just
how and where would they do it? There was no room in orbit; his home worlds
had already lost sixty-five percent of their light from the vast
conglomeration of orbiting repair shops, construction vessels and
factories.
His thoughts returned to his own
position with some bitterness. These human worlds, all twenty-five of them,
could have been taken and occupied in a matter of days with the flooding
technique.

On the three habitable planets of system
eighteen, the Nerne took routine defensive measures. Target-seeking missiles
were boosted into orbit in increasing numbers, ready to leap outward as soon
as the presence of enemy vessels triggered their recognition tapes. On
mountaintops and other suitable sites repeller weapons and other massive,
long-range armaments bared their black snouts in readiness to meet the
invader.
Beyond the range of all these
weapons, however, something happened on the Revain flagship. A
peculiar device protruded from its surface which for long seconds flickered
oddly, then the fleet changed
course.
For the next three days it
traversed the entire length of enemy-held worlds and, at carefully timed
intervals, the peculiar device flickered.

The (Human/Revain)
fleet did move and let loose with a reply of their own, a carefully timed
avalanche of robotically constructed missiles, most of which were no bigger
than the human thumb.
The acutely sensitive
instruments of the Nerne perceived their coming and succeeded in accounting
for forty percent of them. Force bubbles sprang into existence over cities,
vital installations and the inevitable vats, but the missiles were not aimed
at these. One by one, and often in twos and threes, the heavy planet-based
weapons were knocked out.
The local (Nerne) command was not unduly concerned since,
protected by the bubbles, they could easily send for more. It was, of course,
regrettable that a hundred and eighty thousand troops had been left outside,
together with a large number of technicians and construction people, but
these, too, could be replaced.
The (Nerne) technicians switched on the reception cubicles
in the huge gasometer-like buildings and made ready to receive. The disposal
chutes were open, ready for the removal of loss. The technicians were not
entirely without feeling, merely hardened by experience. The first twenty or
thirty loads would be a mess; they always
were.
Lights came on, indicating contact with
the transmitting beams, and then a piping noise announced the transmission of
the first loads.
Transfer was almost
instantaneous but this time there was no crackle of reassembly. Instead, smoke
crawled out of power boxes and here plastic or metal turned liquid and circuit
breakers fused.
Alarms piped, acrid blue
smoke swirled down corridors, and emergency extinguishers went into
action.
Frantic calls went out. "Reception
failure. Halt transmission!"
Transmission was
halted but a considerable number of troops and equipment had already been
dispatched. Unless repairs could be effected in a very short period, the
projected atoms would lose their cohesion and their reassembly would become an
impossibility.
At the reception cubicles,
Nerne technicians blinked their orange eyes helplessly. Whole circuits,
printed and atomically suggested, had been wiped out of existence—repair would
take days.
It did not take the
experts long to discover that the enemy had found some method of distorting
the transmission beams (the peculiar device that
flickers oddly).
By this
time, however, leaving four heavy ships in orbit over the planet, the (Human/Revain) fleet had moved on to the next Nerne
stronghold, where the same process was repeated. This time, however, no
attempt was made to transmit or receive. The Nerne took refuge in their force
bubbles.
The pattern of attack was now
alarmingly clear to the Nerne High Command. The enemy were virtually
immobilizing their bases one by one—bases which they were unable to reinforce
by transmission and, worst of all, expansion bases in the process of
development.

From The Time Mercenaries by
Philip E. High (1968)

Tunnel
in the Sky

An auxiliary gate had been set up on the floor, facing gate five and almost
under the balcony. Two high steel fences joined the two gates, forming with
them an alley as wide as the gates and as long as the space between, about
fifteen meters by seventy-five. This pen was packed with humanity moving from
the temporary gate toward and through gate five and onto some planet light
years away. They poured out of nowhere, for the floor back of the auxiliary
gate was bare, hurried like cattle between the two fences, spilled through
gate five and were gone. A squad of brawny Mongol policemen, each armed with a
staff as tall as himself, was spread out along each fence. They were using
their staves to hurry the emigrants and they were not being gentle. Almost
underneath Rod one of them prodded an old coolie so hard that he stumbled and
fell. The man had been carrying his belongings, his equipment for a new world,
in two bundles supported from a pole balanced on his right shoulder.

The old coolie fell to his skinny knees, tried to get up, fell flat. Rod
thought sure he would be trampled, but somehow he was on his feet again minus
his baggage. He tried to hold his place in the torrent and recover his
possessions, but the guard prodded him again and he was forced to move on
barehanded. Rod lost sight of him before he had moved five meters.

There were local police outside the fence but they did not interfere.
This narrow stretch between the two gates was, for the time,
extra-territory; the local police had no jurisdiction. But one of
them did seem annoyed at the brutality shown the old man; he put his face to
the steel mesh and called out something in lingua terra. The Mongol
cop answered savagely in the same simple language, telling the North American
what he could do about it, then went back to shoving and shouting and prodding
still more briskly.

"If you will turn your attention again to gate five, we will repeat what we
said earlier: gate five is on forty-eight hour loan to the Australasian
Republic. The temporary gate you see erected below is hyper-folded to a point
in central Australia in the Arunta Desert, where this emigration has been
mounting in a great encampment for the past several weeks. His Serene Majesty
Chairman Fung Chee Mu of the Australasian Republic has informed the
Corporation that his government intends to move in excess of two
million people in forty-eight hours, a truly impressive figure, more
than forty thousand each hour. The target figure for this year for all
planetary emigration gates taken together, Emigrants' Gap, Peter the Great,
and Witwaters and Gates is only seventy million emigrants or an average of
eight thousand per hour. This movement proposes a rate five times as great
using only one gate!"

The commentator continued: "Yet when we watch the speed, efficiency and
the, uh forthrightness with which they are carrying out this
evolution it seems likely that they will achieve their goal. Our own figures
show them to be slightly ahead of quota for the first nine hours. During those
same nine hours there have been one hundred seven births and eighty-two deaths
among the emigrants, the high death rate, of course, being incident to the
temporary hazards of the emigration.

"The planet of destination, GO8703IV, to be called henceforth 'Heavenly
Mountains' according to Chairman Fung, is classed as a bounty planet and no
attempt had been made to colonize it. The Corporation has been assured that
the colonists are volunteers." It seemed to Rod that the announcer's tone was
ironical. This is understandable when one considers the phenomenal population
pressure of the Australasian Republic.

Gate four had been occupied by a moving cargo belt when he had come in; now
the belt had crawled away and lost itself in the bowels of the terminal and an
emigration party was lining up to go through.

This was no poverty stricken band of refugees chivvied along by police;
here each family had its own wagon, long, sweeping, boat-tight Conestogas
drawn by three pair teams and housed in sturdy glass canvas square and
businesslike Studebakers with steel bodies, high mud-cutter wheels, and pulled
by one or two pair teams. The draft animals were Morgans and lordly
Clydesdales and jug-headed Missouri mules with strong shoulders and shrewd,
suspicious eyes. Dogs trotted between wheels, wagons were piled high with
household goods and implements and children, poultry protested the indignities
of fate in cages tied on behind, and a little Shetland pony, riderless but
carrying his saddle and just a bit too tall to run underneath with the dogs,
stayed close to the tailgate of one family's rig.

It occurred to Rod that there probably was no coffee where they were going
and might not be for years, since Terra never exported food, on the contrary,
food and fissionable metals were almost the only permissible imports; until an
Outland colony produced a surplus of one or the other it could expect precious
little help from Terra.

It was extremely expensive in terms of uranium to keep an
interstellar gate open and the people in this wagon train could
expect to be out of commercial touch with Earth until such a time as they had
developed surpluses valuable enough in trade to warrant reopening the gate at
regular intervals. Until that time they were on their own and must make do
with what they could take with them...which made horses more practical than
helicopters, picks and shovels more useful than bulldozers. Machinery gets out
of order and requires a complex technology to keep it going but good old
"hay-burners" keep right on breeding, cropping grass, and pulling loads.

He scrunched down in his seat, trying to see through the gate to guess the
cause of the hold up. He could not see well, as the arching canvas of a
prairie schooner blocked his view, but it did seem that the gate
operator had a phase error; it looked as if the sky was where the ground ought
to be. The extra-dimensional distortions necessary to match places on two
planets many light years apart were not simply a matter of expenditure of
enormous quantities of energy; they were precision problems fussy beyond
belief, involving high mathematics and high art—the math was done by machine
but the gate operator always had to adjust the last couple of decimal places
by prayer and intuition.

In addition to the dozen-odd proper motions of each of the planets
involved, motions which could usually be added and canceled out, there was
also the rotation of each planet. The problem was to make the last hyper-fold
so that the two planets were internally tangent at the points selected as
gates, with their axes parallel and their rotations in the same
direction.

Theoretically it was possible to match two points in contra-rotation,
twisting the insubstantial fabric of space-time in exact step with 'real'
motions; practically such a solution was not only terribly wasteful of energy
but almost unworkable the ground surface beyond the gate tended to skid away
like a slidewalk and tilt at odd angles.

This gate, being merely for Terra surface commuting, was permanently
dilated and required no operator, since the two points brought into
coincidence were joined by a rigid frame, the solid Earth. Rod showed his
commuter's ticket to the electronic monitor and stepped through to Arizona, in
company with a crowd of neighbors. The almost solid Earth. The gate
robot took into account tidal distortions but could not anticipate minor
seismic variables. As Rod stepped through he felt his feet quiver as if to a
small earthquake, then the terra was again firma. But he was still in
an airlock at sea level pressure. The radiation from massed bodies triggered
the mechanism, the lock closed and air pressure dropped. Rod yawned heavily to
adjust to the pressure of Grand Canyon plateau, North Rim, less than three
quarters that of New Jersey. But despite the fact that he made the
change twice a day he found himself rubbing his right ear to get rid of an ear
ache.

Rocket ships did not conquer space; they merely challenged it. A rocket
leaving Earth at seven miles per second is terribly slow for the vast reaches
beyond. Only the Moon is reasonably near, four days, more or less. Mars is
thirty-seven weeks away, Saturn a dreary six years, Pluto an impossible half
century, by the elliptical orbits possible to rockets.

Ortega's torch ships brought the Solar System within reach. Based on mass
conversion, Einstein's deathless e=mc2, they could boost
for the entire trip at any acceleration the pilot could stand. At an easy one
gravity the inner planets were only hours from Earth, far Pluto only eighteen
days. It was a change like that from horseback to jet plane. The shortcoming
of this brave new toy was that there was not much anywhere to go. The Solar
system, from a human standpoint, is made up of remarkably unattractive real
estate—save for lovely Terra herself, lush and green and beautiful. The
steel-limbed Jovians enjoy gravity 2.5 times ours and their poisonous air at
inhuman pressure keeps them in health. Martians prosper in near vacuum, the
rock lizards of Luna do not breathe at all. But these planets are not for men.
Men prosper on an oxygen planet close enough to a G-type star for the weather
to cycle around the freezing point of water... that is to say, on Earth.

When you are already there why go anywhere? The reason was babies, too many
babies. Malthus
pointed it out long ago; food increases by arithmetical
progression, people increase by geometrical
progression. By World War I half the world lived on the edge of
starvation; by World War II Earth's population was increasing by 55,000 people
every day; before World War III, as early as 1954, the increase had jumped to
100,000 mouths and stomachs per day, 35,000,000 additional
people each year...and the population of Terra had climbed well beyond that
which its farm lands could support.

The hydrogen, germ, and nerve gas horrors that followed were not truly
political. The true meaning was more that of beggars fighting over a crust of
bread. The author of Gulliver's Travels sardonically proposed that Irish
babies be fattened for English tables; other students urged less drastic ways
of curbing population none of which made the slightest difference. Life, all
life, has the twin drives to survive and to reproduce. Intelligence is an
aimless by-product except as it serves these basic drives. But intelligence
can be made to serve the mindless demands of life. Our Galaxy contains in
excess of one hundred thousand Earth-type planets, each as warm and motherly
to men as sweet Terra. Ortega's torch ships could reach the stars. Mankind
could colonize, even as the hungry millions of Europe had crossed the Atlantic
and raised more babies in the New World.

Some did...hundreds of thousands. But the entire race, working as a
team, cannot build and launch a hundred ships a day, each fit for a thousand
colonists, and keep it up day after day, year after year, time without
end. Even with the hands and the will (which the race never had)
there is not that much steel, aluminum, and uranium in Earth's crust.
There is not one hundredth of the necessary amount.

But intelligence can find solutions where there are none. Psychologists
once locked an ape in a room, for which they had arranged only four ways of
escaping. Then they spied on him to see which of the four he would find.

The ape escaped a fifth way.

Dr. Jesse Evelyn Ramsbotham had not been trying to solve the baby problem;
he had been trying to build a time machine.

Progress in physics is achieved by denying the obvious and accepting the
impossible. Any nineteenth century physicist could have given unassailable
reasons why atom bombs were impossible if his reason were not affronted at the
question; any twentieth century physicist could explain why time travel was
incompatible with the real world of spacetime. But Ramsbotham began fiddling
with the three greatest Einsteinian equations, the two relativity equations
for distance and duration and the mass-conversion equation; each contained the
velocity of light. "Velocity" is first derivative, the differential of
distance with respect to time; he converted those equations into differential
equations, then played games with them. He would feed the results to the
Rakitiac computer, remote successor to Univac,
Eniac and Maniac

But he did not give up. He made a larger model and tried to arrange a
dilation, or anomaly (he did not call it a "Gate") which would let him get in
and out of the field himself.

When he threw on power, the space between the curving magnetodes of his rig
no longer showed the wall beyond, but a steaming jungle. He jumped to the
conclusion that this must be a forest of the Carboniferous Period. It had
often occurred to him that the difference between space and time might simply
be human prejudice, but this was not one of the times; he believed what he
wanted to believe. He hurriedly got a pistol and with much bravery and no
sense crawled between the magnetodes.

Ten minutes later he was arrested for waving firearms around in Rio de
Janeiro's civic botanical gardens. A lack of the Portuguese language increased
both his difficulties and the length of time he spent in a tropical pokey, but
three days later through the help of the North American consul he was on his
way home. He thought and filled notebooks with equations and question marks on
the whole trip.

The short cut to the stars had been found.

Ramsbotham's discoveries eliminated the basic cause of war and solved the
problem of what to do with all those dimpled babies. A hundred thousand
planets were no farther away than the other side of the
street.

From Tunnel
in the Sky by Robert Heinlein ()

Operating Principle

Now the question arises how the heck does the blasted transmat actually work?
The operating principle generally creates some major unintended
consequences.

Ironically, when Gene Roddenberry invented
the the Star Trek transporter in order to save some money on his special
effects budget, it turned around and bit him on the derrière with an unintended
consequence. Not because of the transporter's operating principle. Instead the
problem was the fact it worked at all.

You see, Mr. Roddenberry invented the transporter to make it easy to get the
characters from the Starship Enterprise down to the planet du
jour. Unfortunately it also made it easy to get the characters back to the
Enterprise. As David Gerrolds explains: it is very hard to create
dramatic tension if, at the first sign of a danger, Captain Kirk whips out his
communicator and says "Scotty, save my ass!"

The Klingon ambush team/hideous alien space creature/whatever looks sadly at
the Enterprise crew beaming to safety, taking the dramatic tension with
them.

The Star Trek writers were forced to invent some new contrived reason to
render the transporter unavailable for each script in order to rescue dramatic
tension. Which got really old after happening five episodes in a row.

Tunnel
Diode

A tunnel diode is a
common electronic component. But its operating
principle contains that magic word "Quantum", beloved of writers of technobabble
everywhere. Teachers explain how the things work by using a description that is
almost, but not quite, 100% totally wrong. They say that electrons enter in one
side and come out the other but do not pass through the space
between.

Which was close enough to teleportation for science fiction authors.

I only mention this because it was popular in 1970's science fiction and you
might run across it (e.g., "The
External Triangle" by George O. Smith). Just be aware that it is technobabble.

We Can
Rebuild You

With this method, you somehow convert the atoms of the intrepid explorer's
body into radio waves (or tachyon beams, or something), beam them to the
destination, then somehow convert the radio waves back into matter.

In a variation on this method, a scanner records each atom's type, position,
and energy state. The record is sent to the destination. There an assembler uses
the record to reconstruct the traveler's body using a stockpile of various
chemical elements. In some science fiction stories, the scanning process
vaporizes the traveler's body (e.g., Poul Anderson's The
Enemy Stars). In others, the scanning process is harmless, so the traveler
is actually sending a duplicate while they stay at home (e.g.,
Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson's Farthest
Star).

All of these methods open up jumbo-sized cans of screaming worms. They have
some serious legal, ethical, and philosophical questions.

First off is the interference problem. What if the signal becomes filled with
static? What arrives at the destination will probably be quite dead.

Video clip from Star Trek: The Motion
Picture

Captain Kirk: "Starfleet, do you have them?"

Starfleet: "Enterprise, what we got back didn't live long,
fortunately".

From Star
Trek: The Motion Picture (1979 )

Soon, troops, vessels, weapons and equipment were pouring through the
matter-transmitters in a flood. Not all of it arrived. Transmission of matter
was only one hundred percent assured of arrival intact up to ten thousand
miles. It diminished by one percent per twenty thousand miles beyond that
distance. As the Nerne were transmitting in terms of light-years, their
losses were considerable. More often than not, soldiers, ships and weapons
were reassembled in the reception chambers in a gruesome conglomeration of
plastic, metal and Nerne flesh.

The species took these losses without comment or concern. They were getting
twenty percent through and the invasion force was growing hourly.

The technicians switched on the reception cubicles in the huge
gasometer-like buildings and made ready to receive. The disposal chutes were
open, ready for the removal of loss. The technicians were not entirely
without feeling, merely hardened by experience. The first twenty or thirty
loads would be a mess; they always were.

From The Time Mercenaries by
Philip E. High (1968)

From The Fly (1958)

The Dixie Chicks after a teleporter accident. From
Futurama: Bender's Game

Things can be much worse, as anybody who saw one of The
Fly movies knows. If a fly shares the transmat booth with you, what arrives
at the destination can be a man with a fly head and a fly with a human head. Or
a gruesome melding of the two.

Next problem, if it cannot be recorded, it cannot be recreated. I don't mean
to go all metaphysical on you, but if you have something like a soul it probably
ain't gonna be 3D printed at the destination. Which means you will be dead, even
though there will be a remarkably realistic soulless replica of you walking out
of the transmat booth.

"What worries me," McCoy said, "is whether I'm myself any more. I have a
horrible suspicion that I'm a ghost. And that I've been one for maybe as long
as twenty years."

The question caught Captain Kirk's ear as he was crossing the rec room of
the Enterprise with a handful of coffee. It was not addressed to
him, however; turning, he saw that the starship's surgeon was sitting at a
table with Scott, who was listening with apparently deep attention. Scotty
listening to personal confidences? Or Doc offering them? Ordinarily Scotty had
about as much interest in people as his engines might have taken; and McCoy
was reticent to the point of cynicism.

"May I join this symposium?" Kirk said. "Or is it private?"

"It's nae private, it's just nonsense, I think," the engineering officer
said. "Doc here is developing a notion that the transporter is a sort of
electric chair. Thus far, I canna follow him, but I'm trying, I'll do myself
that credit."

"Oh," Kirk said, for want of anything else to say. He sat down. His first
impression, that McCoy had been obliquely referring to his divorce, was now
out the porthole, which both restored his faith in his understanding of
McCoy's character, and left him totally at sea.

"Somebody," Kirk said, "had better fill me in. Doc, you've said nine times
to the dozen that you don't like the transporter system. In fact, I think
'loath,' is the word you use. 'I do not care to have my molecules scrambled
and beamed around as if I were a radio message.' Is this just more of the
same?"

"It is and it isn't," McCoy said. "It goes like this. If I understand
Scotty aright, the transporter turns our bodies into energy and then
reconstitutes them as matter at the destination…"

"That's a turrble oversimplification," Scott objected. The presence of his
accent, which came out only under stress, was now explained; they were talking
about machinery, with which he was actively in love. "What the transporter
does is analyze the energy state of each particle in the body and
then produce a Dirac jump to an equivalent state somewhere else. No conversion
is involved—if it were, we'd blow up the ship."

"I don't care about that," McCoy said. "What I care about is my state of
consciousness—my ego, if you like. And it isn't matter, energy or anything
else I can name, despite the fact that it's the central phenomenon of all
human thought. After all, we all know we live in a solipsistic universe."

Kirk searched his memory. "But you still haven't answered my
question. What's all this got to do with the transporter?"

"Nary a thing," Scott said.

"On the contrary. Whatever the mechanism, the effect of the
transporter is to dissolve my body and reassemble it somewhere else. Now
you'll agree from experience that this process takes finite, physical
time—short, but measurable. Also from experience, that during that time period
neither body nor consciousness exists. Okay so far?"

"Well, in a cloudy sort of way," Kirk said.

"Good. Now, at the other end, a body is assembled which is apparently
identical with the original, is alive, has consciousness, and has all the
memories of the original. But it is NOT the original. That has been
destroyed."

"I canna see that it matters a whit," Scott said. "Any more than your
solipsist position does. As Mr. Spock is fond of saying, 'A difference which
makes no difference is no difference.'"

"No, not to you," McCoy said, "because the new McCoy will look and behave
in all respects like the old one. But to me? I can't take so operational a
view of the matter. I am, by definition, not the same man who went into a
transporter for the first time twenty years ago. I am a construct made by a
machine after the image of a dead man—and the hell of it is, not even I can
know how exact the imitation is, because—well, because obviously if anything
is missing I wouldn't remember it."

"Question," Kirk said. "Do you feel any different?"

"Aha," said Scott with satisfaction.

"No, Jim, I don't, but how could I? I think I remember what I was
like before, but in that I may be vastly mistaken. Psychology is my specialty,
for all that you see me chiefly as a man reluctant to hand out pills. I know
that there are vast areas of my mind that are inaccessible to my consciousness
except under special conditions—under stress, say, or in dreams. What if part
of that psychic underground has not been duplicated? How would I know?"

"You could ask Spock," Scott suggested.

"Thanks, no. The one time I was in mind-lock with him it saved my life—it
saved all of us, you'll remember—but I didn't find it pleasant."

"Well, you ought to, anyhow," Scott said, "if you're as serious about all
this. He could lock onto one of those unconscious areas and then see if it was
still there after your next transporter trip."

"Which it almost surely would be," Kirk added. "I don't see why you assume
the transporter to be so peculiarly selective. Why should it blot out
subconscious traces instead of conscious ones?"

"Why shouldn't it? And in point of fact, does it or doesn't it? That's
pretty close to the question I want answered. If it were the
question, I would even submit to the experiment Scotty proposes, and ask
everybody else aboard to as well."

"I," said Kirk, "have been on starship duty somewhat longer than either of
you gentlemen. And I will say without qualification that this is the weirdest
rec room conversation I've ever gotten into. But all right, Doc, let's bite
the bullet. What is the question?"

"What would you expect from a psychologist?" McCoy said. "The
question, of course, is the soul. If it exists, which I know no more than the
next man. When I was first reassembled by that damnable machine, did my soul,
if any, make the crossing with me—or am I just a reasonable automaton?"

"The ability to worry about the question," Kirk said, "seems to me to be
its own answer."

"Hmmm. You may be right, Jim. In fact, you better had be. Because if you
aren't, then every time we put a man through the transporter for the first
time, we commit murder."

"And thot's nae a haggle, it's a haggis," Scott said hotly. "Look ye, Doc,
yon soul's immortal by definition. If it exists, it canna be destroyed—"

"Captain Kirk," said the rec room's intercom
speaker.

From Spock
Must Die! by James Blish (1970)

Way Station

There were a lot of things, he told himself, that Man would have to
unlearn, as well as things to learn, if he ever should become aware of the
galactic culture.

The limitation of the speed of light, for one thing.

For if nothing moved faster than the speed of light, then the galactic
transport system would be impossible.

But one should not censure Man, he reminded himself, for setting the speed
of light as a basic limitation. Observations were all that Man — or anyone,
for that matter — could use as data upon which to base his premises. And since
human science had so far found nothing which consistently moved faster than
the speed of light, then the assumption must be valid that nothing could or
did consistently move faster. But valid as an assumption only and no more than
that.

For the impulse patterns which carried creatures star to star were almost
instantaneous, no matter what the distance.

He stood and thought about it and it still was hard, he admitted to
himself, for a person to believe.

Moments ago the creature in the tank had rested in another tank in another
station and the materializer had built up a pattern of it — not only of its
body, but of its very vital force, the thing that gave it life. Then the
impulse pattern had moved across the gulfs of space almost instantaneously to
the receiver of this station, where the pattern had been used to duplicate the
body and the mind and memory and the life of that creature now lying dead many
light years distant. And in the tank the new body and the new mind and memory
and life had taken almost instant form — an entirely new being, but exactly
like the old one, so that the identity continued and the consciousness (the
very thought no more than momentarily interrupted), so that to all intent and
purpose the being was the same.

There were limitations to the impulse patterns, but this had nothing to do
with speed, for the impulses could cross the entire galaxy with but little lag
in time. But under certain conditions the patterns tended to break down and
this was why there must be many stations — many thousands of them. Clouds of
dust or gas or areas of high ionization seemed to disrupt the patterns and in
those sectors of the galaxy where these conditions were encountered, the
distance jumps between the stations were considerably cut down to keep the
pattern true. There were areas that had to be detoured because of high
concentrations of the distorting gas and dust.

Enoch wondered how many dead bodies of the creature that now rested in the
tank had been left behind at other stations in the course of the journey it
was making — as this body in a few hours' time would lie dead within this tank
when the creature's pattern was sent out again, riding on the impulse
waves.

A long trail of dead, he thought, left across the stars, each to be
destroyed by a wash of acid and flushed into deep-lying tanks, but with the
creature itself going on and on until it reached its final destination to
carry out the purpose of its journey.

From Way
Station by Clifford Simak (1963)

Finally, the transmat is actually a blasted object duplicator. A subatomic
level 3D printer. What Star Trek calls a "replicator."
You see, you can send the radio signal to several transmats and the traveling
object (or person) will pop out of each and every one. Even worse, you can
record the radio signal so it can be re-used at a latter date. And
incredibly worse, the recorded signal can be edited so that the
resulting object (or person) is structurally different.

This opens up several more huge cans of worms.

First off, there is the basic fact that the
invention of a matter replicator will cause the utter collapse of the global
economy. The collapse can be slightly less that "utter" if somebody can
invent a substance that cannot be transmatted/replicated. Otherwise it will be
impossible to have physical money which cannot be instantly counterfeited.

But the ethical questions grow exponentially worse once you start replicating
people

Star Trek tried to dodge this problem by saying people could not be
duplicated because of reasons (except those times when
they could).

If you have two or more PFC Floyds, which one is legally the "real" Floyd.
Which one gets his paycheck, which one is married to Mildred?

If you keep a recording of a Floyd transmatting, and one day Floyd dies in an
accident, you could use the recording to bring him back to life. Can he collect
on his own life insurance?

If transmatters are the kind where scanning destroys the original, you send
Floyd to Mars, but then you just make a recording instead of sending the signal
to a receiving transmat, are you guilty of kidnapping? Or murder, since the
original is so much hot vapor? Does it stop being murder if you replicate Floyd
before the trial?

If transmatters are the kind where scanning does not harm the original, is it
ethical to use it to send a duplicate Floyd on a suicide mission? This was
actually a common practice in the novel Farthest
Star. Officials talk you into volunteering for a painless suicide mission,
painless because it won't be you who is actually dying. Step into the transmat
then go home to your wife. Meanwhile your duplicate does the mission and dies in
agony, spending their last breath cursing the day you were born.

In George O. Smith's Identity (the final Venus Equilateral
story) things are really vile. Legally the duplicate of a person is property,
not a human being. So if a doctor wants to perform a tricky surgery on you, they
will use the replicator to run off a dozen copies of you and practice on them
til they all die. Then the doctor can do the surgery perfectly. In the story
nobody cares that there really is no way to tell a duplicate from an original.
Well, nobody but the duplicates of course, they object strongly to being
disposable.

Also in the Venus Equilateral stories, a recording can be edited. So you can
make a recording of a cube of dirt, edit the recording, and use it to replicate
cubes of solid gold.

Editing a recording gets more extreme in Farthest Star. They could edit a
copy of you to make you a water breather or otherwise alter your biochemistry
and body.

Stargates

With this technique, one makes two points in space contiguous — somehow.
Generally one of the types of Discontinuous
("teleport-like") faster-than-light drives are used as a model. The two
points might be brought together by folding
space in the fourth dimension. A wormhole
or Einstein-Rosen Bridge might be utilized.

The point is that unlike replicator-like transmats, these do not change the
traveler. Instead they change the space in between the start and
destination.

A two-dimensional ant can travel faster-than-light on a
long rug crumpled up in the third dimension.
Artwork by David
Povilaitis

From A Wrinkle in Time by Madelein
L'Engle (1962)

The red ship takes the long way around in conventional
3D space, the green ship takes a shortcut through the fourth dimension taking
advantage of the fold.
From manga The Ideon - The Motion
Picture

A "Stargate" or wormhole opening in Flatland will look
like a circle. A Stargate or wormhole opening in our 3D universe will look
like a Sphere, not like a disc.
Artwork by David
Povilaitis

Weaponized
Transmats

The dreaded Aperture
Science Handheld Portal Device from the game Portal

Half of the reason that receiver-less
and transmitter-less transmats are so unreasonable is that they can be used
to make some rather ugly and unstoppable weapons.

A receiver-less transmat can make a nuclear warhead unexpectedly
materialize close to an enemy warship. Or inside the warships defensive force
fields. Or inside the warship itself. Heck, materializing a puny hand
grenade inside the warship's CIC
will probably kill everybody in it and at least temporarily disable the entire
ship. The same goes for assassinating the leader of a hostile nation by
materializing a nuclear warhead inside their underwear or up a convenient body
orifice.

A transmitter-less transmat can assassinating the leader of a hostile
nation by making their still-beating heart appear in the transmat, while the
rest of their body in the original location futilely tries to live without
it.

A transmat that requires both transmitter and receiver can still be pretty
nasty, if the transmitter can transmit something that is not actually in
contact, and the transmitter is small enough to fit in, say, a rifle-sized long
arm.

In Mindbridge by
Joe Haldeman, a transmat transmitter is a special crystal. Some aliens manage
to make a gun-like device with a tiny crystal, which will transmit everything
inside a cylindrical volume about one centimeter in diameter and about ten
meters long. Basically it acts like a disintegrator ray. It cuts a long thin
tunnel in the target. In the novel the transmat needs no receiver, but the
weapon will work just as will if need it. The receiver (where ever it is) will
just have to be periodically hosed off to remove the cylinders of armor, bone
and body tissue.

In The Armageddon
Inheritance by David Weber, "warp rifles" have much the same effect as the
Mindbridge weapons. Its just they send the cylinders into hyperspace. Warp
grenades send into hyperspace anything within the "blast radius". If you are
lucky, half of you will be inside and half out, killing you instantly. If you
are not, you will find yourself floating in hyperspace with your lifespan
limited to your oxygen supply. And nobody will ever find your body.

In The Universe
Between by Alan E. Nourse, researchers manage to anger being who live in
another dimension by accidentally mutilating the other dimension. The beings
retaliate by trying to remove the machine doing the mutilating. The
researchers start running around like their hair is on fire when volumes the
size of city blocks start randomly vanishing all over New York City.

In some science fiction stories, the operating principle of starships
faster-than-light drives are based on transmat technology. Occasionally this can
be turned against the starship as a weapon.

In the wargame Starforce
Alpha Centauri the FTL engines of the starships are actually psionic
women, who teleport the ships from star to star by using the power of their
minds. As a weapon the psionic team can send a telepathic command (a "combat
cast") to an enemy ship's psionic team, forcing them to make an uncontrolled
teleport to an awkward location. Such jumps are typically five times the
distance of a "safe" jump, so it will take the enemy ship a long time to crawl
back to the battle. A ship's psionic team can divert part of their power into
an "anti-cast" to try and mute an enemy's combat cast.

In War in
Heaven by David Zindell starships move by opening up wormhole entrances
before them and moving through. The entrance location and destination are
created through a metaphysical process that the pilot controls by using
mathematical theorems. Whatever. The point is that in combat, the idea is to
open a wormhole in front of your opponent that will teleport them to the
surface of a sun or other deadly location.

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Antimatter
Fuel

Spaceship Design

Basic
Design

Advanced
Design

Atomic
Radiation

Life
Support

Artificial
Gravity

Realistic
Designs

Spaceship Decks

Sample
Deck Plans

Control
Deck

Engine
Deck

Astrogation
Deck

Sensor
Deck

Communication
Deck

Other
Decks

Space Infrastructure

Space
Stations

Spaceports

Planetary
Base

Infrastructure

TransHab
Calculator

Crew and Gear

Crew

Sidearms

Slugthrower

Energy

Exotic

Gear

Space
Suits and Tugs

Man
Amplifiers and Robots

Ground Cars
and Flitters

Deep Space

Maps of
Space

Weird
Astronomy

Keeping It Real

Respecting
Science

Thermodynamics

Reactionless
Drives

Space War

Introduction

Astromilitary

Detection

Weapons

Conventional

Exotic

Defenses

Warship
Design

Tactics

Planetary
Attack

Future Culture

Measurement

Language

Symbols and
Insignia

Games

History

Future
History

Modeling
History

Alternate
History

Space Nations

Space
Law

Worldbuilding

Colonization

Trade
and Pirates

Empire

Spicing It Up

MacGuffinite

Faster
Than Light

Aliens

Antigravity

Time
Travel

Matter
Transmitter

Psionics

Apocalypse

Atomic Creations

Poster:
Space Age

Art
Gallery

Atomic
Novels

Seal
of Approval

Suggested
Reading

Appendices

Glossary

Equations

Useful
Tables

Online
Calculators

Mission
Table

Calculating
History

Worked
Example

Ring
Raiders

Cape
Dread

RocketCat's
Universe

Footnotes

Index

Atomic Rockets information

©1999-2015 Winchell Chung (ᚾᚤᚱᚫᚦ) ρ=Σ+Ψ

Page last modified
Jan. 26,
2016, 00:36 UTC

Website design
and coding by Matthew Lam.
Orbitron font used
under OPL
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