Science Fiction

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How would interdiction of Spaceships be possible? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello Sci-fi fans and writers, I hope that this here is the correct spot to ask this question regarding a conundrum I have come about during my work on a sci-fi short Story.

Outline

In said Short Story, I have some people (Agents) chasing after some other people (Heroes). The heroes stumbled upon some critical information that could damage the faction (Bad Guy) that employs the chasing party. The information got intercepted in time, but to make sure that the information wouldn't be leaked again, they would need to silence the heroes.

Technology

In space there are two modes of flight: conventional reaction based propulsion and a higher speed propulsion which uses a so-called jump drive which flings the spaceship along a predetermined trajectory at high sub-light speeds (max speeds would be 0.5c). There is near instantaneous communications, but you would need to be in coverage of the network itself, which is flaky at best.

Conundrum

So how would agents be able to intercept / interdict the heroes in a plausible fashion? Would it be reasonable to have a micro wormhole generator or some other way to deploy gravimetric wells, which would destabilize the entire star system? Would it be anticlimactic to just have the agents wait for the heroes to finish their jump, as they would know where they would drop out?

I would love to hear opinions and suggestions from you.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe the fast travel is super sensitive to gravity variances, and if there was a relatively large (i.e. still quite small) change to local gravity along the path of travel the safety systems would kick it out into normal space. It operates on complex gravity surveys that are not updated all that often (i.e. when a star blows up or something else pretty significant).

And, the villians have a fairly large ship / object they can move around to disrupt travel. I'd say they'd have a pretty limited supply of them, and they'd only deploy it for something quite important, and would need pretty decent intelligence on where to plop it.