Note - Google Doc version at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19gYlG-VC5vrNtbDaXypoAFDm68i6VFSraJKeNUjmsFM/edit?usp=sharing
, anyone can view or comment..

==========================

I was sitting in a folding lawn chair, kicked back with a drink in my
hand. The cooler to my right was full of cans of Coors, bottles of
pineapple juice, and a few bottles of Malbu Coconut rum. If this was a
movie, the camera would zoom out to let the viewer see another,
similar chair, with a little camp table next to it. The older man in
the chair, wearing shorts, flip flops and a flower print shirt,
exchanged the tablet he was reading with the can of Coors on the
table, then took a sip and pondered for a bit before speaking.

“It’s not that far off, “ he said, “but the Zuchai Crystals are part
of the jump capacitors. And there’s parts about how the Grid and Coils
that are… not right. Considering the handicap the writer was under,
it’s really pretty amazing. “

I nodded, took a matching sip of the pineapple and rum, and let him
settle his thoughts. We’d met before, a few times, and he’d told me
stories. I knew that you had to let him gel his thoughts, so I sat
back in my chair.

We were sitting in a failed housing development in rural Florida. The
developer had paved the roads and cul de sacs, and then the 2008
housing bubble hit and nobody wanted to buy a house way out here in
the middle of nowhere. I’d parked my car a street over, and when he
parked it took up the whole cul de sac… but the shade was nice. And
his ride had an icemaker, among other things, so we had cool drinks
and snacks. That made waiting through his reading a bunch of emails
and discussion, then waiting while it digested more tolerable.

He began speaking again, “And so… I’m not going to give you anything
classified. Nor do you get the basic math behind any of it, and
definitely not any of the really useful ‘rule of thumb’ math that lets
you do things rather than understand how they work. All the science is
going to be what you call ‘high school level’ , the level where people
can discuss things with some relation to reality, rather than ‘skill
level’ where it’s actually useful knowledge.”

He leaned forward and looked me dead in the eyes, very serious now,
“You push for more than that, and you’re breaking the agreement. I am
not going to be responsible for messing up the flow of civilization in
this weird variant timeline in which you live, especially since I
don’t want a second wave of Solomani figuring out how to follow me
home.”

As he leaned back in the chair, taking another sip of beer, he began..

“It comes down to certain key points in technological evolution.
Magnetism - the first time some rube figured out that tying a piece of
lodestone to a string and hanging it on his boat, there was a leap in
transportation technology. Now you could cut straight across the sea,
rather than having to hug the coast to figure out where you were.
Interesting analogy to the Jump drive, heh? Out there in the middle of
the ocean for a week,  cut off from the rest of the world, and then
boom! You’re at a port it would have taken months to follow the coast
to get to. “

“Then, later, someone figures out that there’s a relationship between
rubbing a cat with a piece of amber, lightning, and combing your hair…
which is nice and everything, but not really useful until they figure
out that there’s a relationship between that and magnetism, which is a
force that’s pretty well understood by that point. Suddenly, there’s
generators and motors and telegraph and telephone and all that good
stuff. You don’t really understand magnetism until you’ve got an
understanding of electricity, and you get a grip on electromagnetic
force. “

“And still, you fumble around and talk about ‘magnetic fields’ and
eventually get the idea that they’re useful, and get radio. Time goes
on, and eventually someone makes another leap and figures out that the
photon carries EMF… which raises some weird questions about ‘is it a
particle or a wave?’ and that gets people curious about quantum
mechanics.”

He sipped at the can, realized his beer was empty and nodded toward
the cooler. I tossed him another, freshened my drink, and kept taking
notes.  Part of the deal was I wasn’t allowed to record the
conversation… and he had the equipment to make sure I kept that
promise.

“QM leads, eventually, to speculation about gravitons. Your culture
has detected gravity waves, so you’ve got some pretty strong hints
they exist. But you’re still stuck at the ‘groom the cat with an amber
comb’ stage.. No, really, you’re not even quite there. You’ve realized
there is, in fact, a cat. “

“The really big steps that you’ve not taken yet is figuring out how
gravitons work, and then the relationship between photons and
gravitons. You can at least easily observe light, so puzzling out
photons wasn’t that hard, until you got to wavelengths you can’t see…
but detecting gravitons isn’t easy. The details of how gravitic
detectors work is part of the off-limits part of this conversation. I
will say that the first lab experiments for us that lead to
breakthroughs involved very very small versions of the Cavendish
experiment. Things done down at the Casmir effect scale. “

“High school physics time - the graviton is analogous to a photon, in
that it exhibits particle/wave duality. Just as many things emit
photons naturally, gravitons are pretty much continuously emitted and
absorbed by… well.. Everything. “

“A graviton decays on impact with an object. That decay produces no
detectable effect in the EM spectrum, but it does have a very tiny
‘denting’ effect on the fabric of space-time. If we’re going to use
the classic sheet of rubber analogy, then a graviton leaves a planet,
hits the bottom of the empty beer can, and makes a wee little dent in
the space time between the two, and the can rolls toward the dent. “

He flicked the empty can on the table with his finger, and it rolled
off onto the pile below. “Voila!”

“Of course, all the particles in the object - planet or beer can - are
doing the same dance on a tinier scale, so there’s a dent around the
object, making the gravity well for the thing.. And in the case of
planets, pulling them together to form in the first place.”

“Now, I mentioned that gravition/particle interaction does not produce
a detectable effect in the EM spectrum. The converse is not entirely
true - it is possible to do things in EM which have detectable effects
on gravitons. We are again straying into details of which I will not
speak. No matter how many of these beers you give me. Although a hold
full of them would sell pretty well when I get home, mind you. “

I shrugged, “Forty cubic meters of cans of Coors adds up to a lot of
money, and unless you’re willing to part with something useful rather
than just story time… “

“Anyway, “ he changed the subject.

“The first useful thing when you figure out electrogravitics is just
to be able to generate a field that interdicts gravitons from crossing
it. That’s contragrav, and it’ll let you make floaters and grav sleds.
You still need some kind of reaction drive to move it around, but at
least it ignores the local gravity field. “

“The second useful thing is when you can get a sacrificial mass to
give up more gravitons than it should. That leads to grav plates,
which are nice, but more importantly it leads to being able to pull
things along, and that’s true antigrav. That gives you air/rafts, grav
belts, and the first generation of M-Drives. M-Drives gulp down huge
amounts of power, but that’s ok, because convincing some hydrogen to
be much,much more gravitational than it should leads to fusion
reactors that are small, cheap, and effective.“

“The third useful thing is when you figure out that fields can be
convinced to interact with each other. There’s where you get Jump
drive. “

“Now, all this conversation started because of an email about Jump
drives, so we’ll go there for a bit. “

“One thing you’ve learned about, especially you personally as a Ham,
is Standing Waves. Two different waves in the same area, getting in
the right kind of sync, leaves you with a wave that’s fixed in space
and doesn’t go anywhere. In a radio, it builds up RF that burns out
the finals because all the energy you’re pushing won’t leave the
antenna.”

“With gravitics, you get a zone of gravitons settling into an area of
space time that keeps digging itself a deeper and deeper dent, until
finally the rubber sheet gets fed up with it and goes SPROING!” He
paused then, thought about it, and said,” Might as well try going to
another star with a trampoline, or some such rubbish, right?”

“There are, of course, issues - like, all the matter in your ship is
going to be drawn toward that ditch. So you need a contragrav bubble
around the ship so you don’t get destroyed by your own J-drive. Like
you need sacrificial mass to provide the extra gravitions, so you need
lots and lots of LHyd you can dump out, in addition to the lots and
lots of LHyd to power it. And we’re talking power levels where even
superconductors get hot, so you need more LHyd to cool that...although
vented coolant is used as sacrificial mass too.”

“And you need to do it quickly, because a long slow pull on the rubber
sheet leads to the Universe getting grumpy and things , for want of a
better word, tearing rather than slingshotting. There’s some
scientists who are pretty sure that the weird stuff the Ancients did
with bubble universes were cases of a deliberately slow J-field build
up and a controlled tear. We don’t know how to do that, and the
experiments were… not pleasant. Not very survivable, either. There’s
several Red Zones where experimental bases used to be … never mind,
not relevant, other than when you get to where you start trying to
build a J-Drive, do not do it within 10 light seconds of anything you
care about.”

“Beer, please?”

I passed him one, then showed him the cooler was running low. He took
the opportunity to go aboard, empty himself, and fill another bucket
with ice, while I walked to the car and got another case out of the
back seat.  We settled back into our chairs, and I smiled at the open
cargo door above us, and realized he’d turned the enviro systems up. A
steady breeze of cool, dry air came out, doing it’s best to mitigate
the still, humid, hot air of a Florida afternoon over asphalt.  We
spent a few minutes settling back in before he picket the tablet back
up, scrolled through, and continued speaking.

“Step one, course gets built up in the computer, yeah. Preplanning of
navigational charges, yeah. Aligning Zuchai crystals, no.”

“Step two, Big Honking Handwavium Reactor goes gonzo, yeah. Funny
thing here… Normal long-duration reactors have one set of gravitics,
and one set of sacrificial masses that get replaced during annuals.
The one for the jump drive uses some of the fuel going in as much more
sacrificial mass, sacrificed at a higher ratio than normal, as well as
using the normal sacrifice systems. So there’s two graviton sources,
overlaid on each other and producing a very strong field. That there’s
two sources means the technical term for this kind of reactor is
\Binary Hyperdense Hydrogen Reactor’, so he got the acronym right even
if he got the words wrong. “

“Step three and four is where things are off the rails, which means we
need to talk about Zuchai crystals”

“Capacitors … normal caps have layers of conductor and non-conductor,
and the electrons ‘pile up’ in the space between them. Massively gross
oversimplification. But you can make a capacitor from foil and paper,
and it’ll hold a charge. More paper, more foil, better materials, and
you still have electrons piling up between atoms. At some point
though, you get so much charge that the dielectric - the paper -
doesn’t hold up any more. With normal electronics, there’s a pop
sound, the smoke comes out, and the device doesn’t work any more. “

“At the power levels for jump drives...well… the pop sound is much
louder, destructively so. Work around is to work in parallel, have
more caps. The size of a capacitor bank needed for the Snipe to jump,
using even superconducting and superinsulating materials would be…
probably about double the size of the jump drive now. Maybe triple.”

“Zuchai crystals have a feature in the crystal lattice between the
atoms that lets them store electrons in additional electron shells.
Sort of like the way you’d pump the shells in a free electron laser,
the electrons just move up a shell. What’s special about Zuchai is it
will then let you fill in the lower shell too, and let that pop up to
another electron shell. The other atoms in the lattice have a lot of
protons and they kind of force everything to behave even though the
thing is ionized to hell and gone. On the other hand, the outer shell
is ‘full’ , so you don’t get the acid/base effect you’d expect, and
the whole thing doesn’t just eat itself.”

“For a while, anyway. Leave the crystals charged for too long, and you
get random electrons in the outer shells that decide to wander, and
then things get ugly fast.”

“So, then the power from the Caps - the Zuchai Crystals inside the
capacitors - is dumped into two sets of gravitic generators. The
so-called ‘Jump Coils’. These are going to produce gravitons by the
lorry load, and dump them outside the ship in very specific patterns
to produce that standing wave effect we talked about earlier. This
gives you a spherical jump field. Now, there is a set of antennas on
the hull to release those gravitons, and one meaning of the words
‘jump grid’ is those antennas. It’s kind of like people saying
‘wheels’ on a car, when they mean the rim and the tire, as opposed to
‘wheel’ as just the rim.”

“The first jump drives just used the Coils and a spherical jump field.
A lot of ships still do that - The Service likes it better, since you
can get by with damage to the surface antennas and still Jump. There’s
also the advantage that with a ship with a drive capable of over-norm
mass you can clamp a pod on the outside of the ship and still make
your normal jump.”

“The disadvantage to a spherical field is that if you get unexpected
masses in it, then you’re going to misjump. No ifs, ands or buts. Have
some unexpected space rock go shooting by just as the computer closes
the switch, and you have a problem. The Service has a lot of sensors
on our ships, so it’s not such an issue, just know the rock is coming
through, delay the jump a few milliseconds, and then go. Merchants
will head out to known ‘quiet places’ where there’s not much in the
way of dust or debris.”

“Jump Grids, in the proper use of the term, are a specialized phased
array antenna system that let you deform the jump bubble to make it
conform more closely to the ship. The advantage here is that stray
mass - ie, the sand you dumped overboard an hour ago that’s still on
your vector - is not in the field. You go where you were planning to
go, regardless of what’s under your feet when you hit the trampoline.
On the other hand, that hinges on having enough of the redundant grid
of antennas intact, so ships which use this method and have taken a
lot of surface hits have a problem. The Navy likes this system,
because they like sand, and they like lots and lots of surface armor
with multiple layers of redundant antennas.”

He rolled his eyes at the mention of The Navy, but then looked back
down to the tablet resting on his tummy, scrolled a bit while
muttering, “where was…”

“Ok, so that covers three, four, five… yeah, the caps dump into the
coils, that’s six….”

“BHHR steps down - well, yeah, it goes non-binary and behaves like a
normal reactor, but a big part of that is not maintaining the jump
grid or the coils, because they’ve done their job. The rubber sheet
has been twanged like a rubber band, and you’re outside normal space.
He is right about making sure the jump bubble is intact, and that’s
mostly handled by the equilibrium between the last of the sacrificial
LHyd outside the ship being drawn to the only mass in this pocket
universe - the ship - and the inner contragrav field that first
shielded you from the Jump field forming keeping it from falling all
the way in.  You realize that in this pocket universe, your ship is
like 99% of the mass of the whole universe? So the LHyd falling in
would make you into a star. “

“Pulses… yeah, you can pulse the grid. Not commonly done, you should
have had your bubble and trajectory right when you first made the
jump. “

“Jump complete - that’s going to happen no matter what. The universe
gets tired of having a piece stretched all out of the norm, and it
snaps back into place. Not the same place, mind you, which was the
whole point of the exercise.”

He took another sip of his beer, then said, “Lunch? “

I got the other cooler from my backseat, and pulled out the subs I’d
picked up on the way over. We ate, talked about other things for a
bit. I went aboard and used the fresher, while he scrolled through the
emails, and as I came out and sat down, he was grinning.

“This other thread - about skills and licenses and such. They’re
focussing on the technology and the type of drive, and not thinking
about how they’re actually used.”

“Ship’s Boat - what’s that guy doing with his life? He’s either a
commercial pilot, and eight out of ten that means he’s shuttling from
Highport to Downport. Or he’s a fighter pilot. Or he’s a long-run
insystem pilot.”

“Nine out of ten, the guy has a mission time of less than two hours.
All of its hands-on.”

He paused - “When I say hands-on, do you savvy? I’m saying he actually
has hands on a stick and throttle, he’s looking and making decisions
based on what he sees outside. He’s got a destination he can actually
look out the window and see, like the Highport above or the Zho he’s
chasing. Might be that the HUD is helping him see it, but it’s still a
line of sight that doesn’t involve much planning about flying to where
it’s going to be in a few days, or flying to a particular spot in
space.”

“He’s making decisions about the last 200 meters to a landing pad or
docking port, and he’s doing it with more instinct and feel and
training than he’s doing it by instrument and computer. He’s doing it
in a craft that’s very responsive to the helm. “

“And he’s doing it 40 hours a week. For a guy doing the High/Down run,
that’s four up and four down a day. He’s almost all stick-time.”

“Compare that to a guy in a Type-A. In half his work-weeks, he’s
stepping in every few hours and checking the Jump field. In the other
half, he’s set the autopilot, and he does one lift and one drop.
Nothing fancy, and for a big part of his atmo time, he’s limited in
what moves he can do by the aerodynamics of the ship and his approach
protocols. Yeah, the contragrav gets rid of the pull from the planet,
but the ship still has inertia, and the aerodynamics are pushing on
it, so it can’t make the tight turns a 20 ton fighter can. “

“So the difference is like being the pilot of an F-16, and the pilot
of a 747 for an airline. The fighter pilot spends all his time
sharpening his skills for tight, fast moves. The airline pilot takes
off, sets the autopilot, kills time, then lands. “

“And then they look at grav pilots, like an air/raft. That is, in some
ways, the worst of both worlds. Anyplace that has a traffic grid,
you’re probably never going to fly manual. Just tell it where you want
to go. “

“If you are out in the hinterlands, “ he said, waving a dismissive
hand around, “then you’re probably going to be going low and slow to
stay off the local’s sensors. Or you’re going low and slow to look for
something. Or because you’re using the air/raft as a tractor to lift
something from one place to another. Very rarely are you doing the
all-day-climb-to-orbit.”

“So… the skills in your ‘game’ reflect what people get into the habit
of doing as they do their jobs, and that does in some ways balance
into what happens when you go and get tested to get certified that you
know how to use that hardware. A guy with level two certs on small
craft has probably spent a huge number of hours doing hands-on flying.
A guy with level two certs as a starship pilot probably has spent 25
weeks of the year not having his hands on a stick, and when he does
his habits are straight, sensible approaches to starports, not the
turn-and-burn 6G that a Rampart jockey does.”

“Which means that if you put a starship pilot in the cockpit of a
Rampart, he’s not got the practice, habits or temperament to do what
the guy who does it every day does. “

“On the other hand, if you ask a Rampart jockey or a High/Down
operator to set a ship up for jump, they’re going to look at you like
you’re nuts. Or if you ask them to land it, they’re going to see it as
a huge, lumbering elephant of a thing, and not feel comfy trying it,
because the normal come in fast, then pull 4G’s decel does not work in
a Type-A… and they have that nagging feeling that if they forget that
they’ll end up lithobraking.”

We talked a bit more, rambling about other things. Personal lives, my
spouse, his series of girlfriends, that sort of thing. And then the
inevitable came - the beer ran out.  His ability to consume it with no
ill effect was impressive, and it had been spaced out over the long
day. It was dusk when I packed up my lawn chair and cooler, and he
packed his lawn chair and cooler. We shook hands, he boarded and I
drove off a few blocks. Then that odd mirage effect made the stars
that were coming out ripple as the contragrav field encircled
(ensphered?) the Snipe, and it fell into the sky above me.