03-03-2020, 11:49 AM | #121 |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Eh, I still maintain that the correct answer to "Why aren't people smashing ships into planets when they disagree over lunch?" is "Because we're not playing genocide simulator the RPG."
Anyway, another neat toggle to reactionless-ish drives is that they have some sort of 'drag' that happens on spacetime. It would pay off the many examples in fiction of a spaceship needing to both 1) be under thrust always, and 2) have an upper speed limit. The drive itself 'drags' on spacetime (or the ether, or the local gravity well, or whatever) such that if the ship isn't thrusting the drive and the ship it's connected to will decelerate down to a relative stop in whatever medium it's dragging against, which can conveniently be a nearby planet or something. And, because this means now that there's a drag component to moving through space, there's a top-speed of a sort that can apply to a given ship. Endless possibilities on cool ship designs or nifty engine gadgeteering to reduce drag, or maybe mess with an opponent's ship say with an anchor-missile that when it hits a ship attaches an etheric anchor that kills a ship's velocity. Maybe even drags the engine out the back, that'd be a cool (weird, spectacular) way to disable a spaceship. |
03-03-2020, 01:42 PM | #122 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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RyanW - Actually one normal sized guy in three tiny trenchcoats. |
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03-03-2020, 01:48 PM | #123 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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03-03-2020, 02:39 PM | #124 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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Now, it is possible to avoid the causality problem and maintain most of special relativity (I think) while having FTL, but it requires a "nature abhors a time machine" clause. lwcamp's Vergeworlds setting does it with artificial wormholes. Basically, any time two wormholes would interact in a manner that would violate causality, the "weaker" of the two collapses and ceases to exist the moment before that would be the case (presumably, if the two are somehow of absolutely equal "strength," which fails is random). I assume this violates some aspect of special relativity, but most of it is retained.
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03-03-2020, 03:50 PM | #125 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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03-03-2020, 04:21 PM | #126 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Well, you can as long as the recipient cannot determine whether the signal has been sent. The reason quantum entanglement isn't FTL communication is because you can't actually use it to communicate.
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03-03-2020, 05:04 PM | #127 | |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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03-03-2020, 05:13 PM | #128 |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Yes, but it only has to arrive before it was sent in some frame of reference.
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03-03-2020, 05:31 PM | #129 |
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Given the peculiarities of relativity, it's easy to experience an event before the cause occurs in your frame of reference, but as long as you are limited to the speed of light, it's a novelty - since the delay to reach the cause will always be greater than the discrepency in observed timing. Combined with the ability to escape your future light cone (i.e. FTL) it allows you to ignore causality.
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03-03-2020, 05:36 PM | #130 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
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More seriously, if you have special relativity and FTL, it's possible to set things up so that a message can arrive before it's sent. The wormholes from lwcamp's setting give a good example (or would, if that universe didn't have that pesky "nature abhors a time machine" natural law). Build two connected wormhole gates; keep one on Earth and send the other on a 0.99c ride (which you can manage fairly easily, as you can keep supplying it with reaction mass via your side of the wormhole, and have it throw its exhaust back through your wormhole) relative to Earth. This will create significant time dilation; keep it going for a while, turn it around and kill velocity, then bring it back. If the time dilation effect means the other side of the wormhole is 1 year in the future, you now have a gateway to Earth one year in the future; even if you never pass another atom through the wormhole, future-you can easily tell you via radio what stocks did well, which team won a given sporting event, etc, which is pretty much the definition of a message arriving before it was sent. Now, I'm not certain how to get a time machine out of some FTL schemes, but it is apparently possible. For my Harpyias setting, FTL communication is only possible by carrying the message on a physical ship, which transition to hyperspace to travel FTL to eligible systems (essentially, hyperspace can only be entered or exited around stars with certain properties; our sun isn't one of them, so Earth is largely cut off from the rest of the setting). I'm not entirely clear how to build a time machine out of that premise, but I don't doubt someone could come up with such a scheme.
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