NOMAD Technology: Wormholes

Note: This article uses Faster Than Light: Nomad by Stellagama Publishing, but can be easily translated to any science fiction RPG.

A standard FTL Engine¹ travels between two stars (or star-like masses) as long as they are close enough together. A wormhole creates a path through hyperspace that connects two stars no matter how distant they are. Traversing this path can take one between galaxies.

Wormhole Basics

Open vs. Closed

Wormholes are either “closed” or “open”.

Closed wormholes require an FTL Engine to open just enough to travel through. Many are black holes or white holes. Most of the rest have similar characteristics: a “turbulent” region of space within which electromagnetic and gravitational forces would tear a ship apart.

Open wormholes provide tunnels through which anyone can travel through. Theoretically. In practice, traversing an open wormhole without shielding causes Wormhole Sickness. Wormhole Sickness manifests as a deterioration at the cellular level, initially presenting as radiation sickness. Sometimes the patient recovers on their own; sometimes they die, horribly. Orthodox medical knowledge does not help in treating Wormhole Sickness. The only known preventative is to enter cryostasis while transiting the wormhole; even then, frequent travelers can still contract the syndrome.

A Hole With Two Ends (Usually)

A Wormhole almost always connects only two volumes of space, in both directions. Entering one end always carries the traveler somewhere close to the other end.

Some very, very advanced civilizations have created multi-destination portals, even entire networks of wormholes through unknown means. Current science says this is impossible, but current science is demonstrably wrong. Nevertheless, such networks are incredibly rare, possibly unique.

Space and Time

Another, little-understood phenomenon involves wormholes through time as well as space. Moving faster than light already violates Relativistic causality, so wormholes through time should surprise no one. That said, no known civilization has created temporal wormholes intentionally, so time travel through wormholes remains a usually unhappy accident.

Sources of Wormholes

Natural Wormholes

Only certain stars have natural wormholes between them. The science is still catching up, but factors that indicate a wormhole might exist include, in order of precedence:

1. Both stars are black holes.
2. One star is a black hole.
3. One or both stars are large, like a hypergiant or supergiant star.
4. One or both endpoints are in double or even triple star systems. (Something about stars orbiting each other creates wormhole apetures.)

Artificial Wormholes

Certain Cosmic-scale civilizations can artificially create wormholes. “Early Cosmic”² civilizations merely collapse a star and hope a wormhole forms (and it goes somewhere interesting), but later Cosmic science can control the collapse of stars. Some Cosmic-scale civilizations can even create wormholes without collapsing a star, although the science is far from clear to us lesser beings.

Gates

In an extreme case, a civilization opens a wormhole to realspace traffic using a megastructure that usually resembles a giant ring or open-ended parabola. Any ship with the correct shielding can traverse the wormhole. Often such megastructures are called “gates”.

As the name “gate” implies, these pathways normally don’t stay open permanently. The device consumes a lot of power to make a tunnel through hyperspace that contains realspace. Instead, the apetures on both ends only open when the device at one end powers up. Destroying the device at either end collapses the gate, often trapping if not disintegrating anyone within.

The “walls” of an open wormhole tend to be unstable, so crashing into the walls will destroy the ship. Even touching the walls will damage the ship, sometimes fatally.

A few maniacs have even created entire “gate networks” or walkable gates. The power requirements must be enormous …

Portals

Portals may be wormholes; they may not. Sufficiently advance civilizations make volumes or planes in space that connect one volume instantaneously with another volume of space. The science behind portals is not only unclear but baffling. We include it here for completeness.

Wormhole Travel

Transit Through Closed Wormholes

Traversing closed wormholes is neither easy nor fast. First one needs an FTL Engine to use the wormhole. Entering the event horizon of a wormhole without an FTL Engine’s protective field is a messy form of suicide as one’s atoms are sucked through a singularity.

Second, the FTL Engine needs to be powerful enough to transit to the end of the wormhole. Fortunately, if a properly constructed FTL Engine doesn’t detect a mass within its range, it will simply refuse to engage. No involuntary suicides here.

Once one engage the FTL Engine, though, transit proceeds like any other trip through hyperspace. Only the destination, tens or hundreds or thousands of parsecs (or more) from one’s starting point, changes.

Transit Through Open Wormholes

Open wormholes are deceptively easy to transit: just engage thrusters and fly right through. Assuming it doesn’t collapse, and the ship avoids the unstable walls, and one can avoid Wormhole Sickness …

Wormholes in Nomad

These rules supplement Faster Than Light: Nomad by Stellagama Publishing.

Traversal

Each wormhole path is rated as a number of parsecs (if closed) or an amount of time to traverse (if open).

In the case of closed wormholes, the transit takes whatever the transit time of the FTL Engine is: one week for any technology before the Galactic Age, one or two days in the Galactic Age, instantly in the Cosmic Age.

In the case of open wormholes, multiply the time to traverse by the ship’s Travel Modifier.

Collisions

Colliding with a wormhole’s walls normally obliterates a ship. (Which is why dogfights in a wormhole are a bad idea.) Even touching the walls does (2d6)d6 damage. (That is, roll 2d6 to see how many dice of damage to roll …)

Spacecraft Modifications for Nomad

Wormhole Generator

Technology Age: Cosmic

A Wormhole Generator creates a temporary realspace conduit between any volume in space and any other volume of space for the duration of one transit. It includes Wormhole Shielding.

One can also create a wormhole to let something else through, e.g. plasma from a star. Details are left to the Referee.

A Wormhole Generator only activates once a day, and there is a 1 in 3 chance (1 or 2 on 1d6) that it will become completely inoperable after it is used. Until an engineer from the right Cosmic civilization fixes it, it won’t work again.

A Wormhole Generator costs -2 payload and +20% of the hull base price.

Wormhole Shielding

The Referree can decide whether Wormhole Shielding is necessary – or available – in his cosmos.

Technology Age: Early Space³

Wormhole Shielding prevents the user from suffering Wormhole Sickness when traversing an open wormhole. Without shielding or temporary stasis in a Cryo-Tube, a character will take a Wounded every time they traverse a wormhole; roll for Triage. Robots are immune to Wormhole Sickness; Synthoids are not.

Wormhole Shielding costs -1 Payload and +10% of the hull base price.

Alternate Settings

In standard Faster Than Light: Nomad, characters travel between nearby stars using FTL Engines. That, however, need not be the case.

Natural Wormhole Routes

Wormholes between stars could be common, while FTL Engines could be nonexistent. Interstellar travel requires transiting wormholes while asleep in Cryo-Tubes while computers pilot the ship. Getting from A to B requires using existing routes between A and B. Not using the Cryo-Tubes risks Wormhole Sickness, or simple starvation and old age since the journey takes a long time. Alien predators need not appear at all.

The Wormhole Experiment

An astronaut using Late Space technology might accidentally discover how to create wormholes … no?

A New Wormhole

Maybe a Late Interstellar civilization discovers how to detect and exploit a wormhole between two existing volumes of space. Entirely new sectors could open up, accessible only from one star system. That system might even have a very busy space station that’s a crossroads for different cultures and political factions …

Walking Between Worlds

Visiting other worlds need not involve ships at all. It could be as simple as dialing up another world and walking through a Stargate World Portal. All these worlds might have an unfortunate resemblance to British Columbia or Southern California.

References and Inspirations

Babylon 5, TV series (1993-1998)

Coriolis: The Third Horizon, RPG (2017)

Deep Space Nine, TV series (1993-1999)

The Expanse, book series (2011-2021)

The Expanse, TV series (2015-2022)

Farscape, TV series (1999-2004)

Stargate, TV series (1994)

Stargate SG-1, TV series (1997-2007)

Stargate: Atlantis, TV series (2004-2009)