Grand Unified FTL 5: Portal

Part of the Grand Unified FTL series.

WARNING: this article may contain numbers.

Previously

We considered the “jump drive” present in Traveller and other RPGs, based in older science fiction works: press a button, and you’re parsecs away.

How Portals Work

Conceptually a “portal” is even easier to understand than Jump drive: fly through a doorway in space and end up in another star system. There’s an entire subgenre called portal fantasy where protagonists walk through a magic door, or a looking-glass, or a wardrobe and end up in another world.

Here we’re considering the use of portals in science fiction (or at least science fantasy) so we have to ask hard questions, like:

• Is the portal a simple door, or is it a tunnel like a wormhole?
• Can the portal close? Can it close on somebody passing through? Are they cut in half, or do they simply disappear?
• What happens to a person on the other side of the portal? Radiation? A sudden biological mutation? Do unprotected people traversing a wormhole turn into goo?

Questions About Portals

Do portals stay open all the time? If not, what activates them?

A “natural” portal, or one constructed by ancient aliens, may stay open all the time. A man-made one, on the other hand, might consume a lot of power, so it may shut off when not in use. To open it again, one might have to enter a security code, wait for some authority to power it up again, or simply approach at the right vector.

Do portals allow anyone to use them?

Most portals in science fiction work for anyone, or at least work for anyone who pays the toll and/or uses the right security code. Portals built by ancient and racist aliens, on the other hand, might only activate for beings of the right species and/or bloodline.

Are portals always connected in pairs? If not, what determines which two portals are connected?

Usually portals are connected in pairs. In the Coriolis: The Third Horizon RPG, ancient portals orbit near each sun; each portal connects to another portal around another, specific sun.

However, in the popular Stargate franchise, the eponymous man-sized walkable portals have a DHD (Dial Home Device) that allows travelers to enter the symbols for another Stargate and open a portal to another planet in another star system. Farscape’s wormholes apparently connected to each other in a complex way, so entering one wormhole could theoretically let you exit through another. In the Expanse series by James S. A. Corey a portal that opened beyond the orbit of Uranus lead to a huge hub of similar portals to other star systems, connected by a large space not in our universe.

Portal Time

A few episodes of Stargate SG-1 implied that the Stargates didn’t open direct wormholes to each other but “transmitted” matter from one Stargate to another like a Star Trek transporter).

Ignoring that for now, it does raise the question of how fast a portal moves a traveler from one end to another. A tunnel or wormhole requires someone to walk/fly through its length, naturally. A more subtle question, though, is what time is it on the far side of a wormhole vs. the near side.

A Farscape storyline dropped John Crichton out of a wormhole into the Earth of his own past. The final episode of Star Trek: Prodigy’s first season created a wormhole between the current era of the Federation and the (potential) future of a planet fifty years later.

Portal Consequences

In Farscape anyone who tried to reproduce John Crichton’s portal experiment ended up a puddle of goo. (He just got lucky.)

In the Coriolis RPG, anyone who goes through one of the stellar portals has to be put in cryo-stasis or they would either go mad or acquire physical deformities.

In a few series the portal would also adapt the person going through them to the conditions of the new planet.

Portals really are just magic doors, even in science fiction. In an RPG the designer or GM can layer on any restrictions or requirements, but in the end there are no mechanics needed. A ship flies through this ring or tunnel and comes out the other side light-years (or actual years) away.

Portal Variations

Portal Guns

“Now you’re thinking with portals.”

Inspired by the Valve’s hit game Portal, a Portal gun places each end of a Portal on any flat surface. Once both ends are in place, anything that goes in one side comes out the other with the same speed but a different direction.¹

Only one complete Portal can exist at any one time (per gun). As in the game, though, one can do some interesting things by slinging through a portal, moving the entrance, then falling back through the previous exit.

Projectors

Some people, me included, consider Projectors² the sane version of Teletransport. A Projector “projects” a target like this:

1. A target stands on the Projector Pad, and the Operator starts the Projector.
2. A three dimensional spacetime bubble wraps around the target. This could resemble a translucent force field or an opaque barrier mirrored on both sides.
3. The Projector moves the spactime bubble through hyperspace, jumpspace, the Time Vortex, or whatever higher-order space makes it work to a remote location or another Projector Pad.

To retrieve a target, the Projector Operator reverses the process:

1. The Projector gets a lock on the target. This may be as simple as hoping the target is standing at the appointed place and time, or may involve using sensors or signals to find him.
2. A spacetime bubble wraps around the target.
3. The spacetime bubble relocates the target back to the Projector Pad.

Presumably the Projector can retrieve a person and put them somewhere else in a two-step process.

Variations include a device that allows the wearer to project themselves anywhere through space (and time?³), or at least to one or more presets, and a limited version that only projects between two Projector Pads.

Projectors mix a Jump through time and space and a “dialed” arbitrary destination Portal. Unlike Teletransporting, the target isn’t torn apart atom-by-atom, transmitted as a signal, and magically reassembled somewhere else. It’s the same target, whole and unharmed. It’s spacetime that’s torn, which is only a paradox if you’re a physicist.

Next

We will consider teletransport, i.e. breaking a person into atoms and reconstructing them light-seconds to light-years away.