Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
Given that you are going to need a departure from reality anyway you might as well put it in as a flat "planet killers just don't work" rather than trying to impose some weird limit on velocities that may not actually prevent them anyway.
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I have a strong preference for "rational" fiction which carefully avoids sweeping such issues under the metaphorical rug.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
Well, no. I'm assuming a singularity drive as per Spaceships p33, which is a reactionless drive and thus, absent some creative speed limit, violates conservation of energy.
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"Horizon Mechanics" expands conservation of mass-energy to conservation of information-mass-energy. Using a drive or plant based on its principles simply means that a few tens of billions light-years away, there are slightly fewer places that will ever be within your future light-cone. But since you routinely snip away similar amounts of spacetime every second just by swinging around the sun, and by your body's electrons swinging around your body's atomic nuclei, you're not really losing anything you'd ever notice, even if you figured out how to start spreading your descendants at 0.999999 of lightspeed.
All of which adds up to, in effect, violation of conservation of energy. :)
(Feel free to suggest any poetical metaphors that come to mind, such as "burning spacetime in the photonic engines". :) )