Coolant [Spaceships]

cvannrederode · 02-24-2020, 03:12 PM

The simplest way to prevent a fast ship from being a WMD is to remove it's kinetic energy entirely. Pull out the psuedo-velocity design switch. This allows you to get from place to place without long periods of down time, but you can't wind a ship up to relativistic speed and wipe out cities.

In my own in-development setting, I'm toying with the idea that the superscience behind reactionless drives is very sensitive to relativistic effects, and their performance drops off drastically as speed increases, before just not working at all at some point. I haven't put anything down on paper (divide by some power of the Lorentz factor, mayhaps?) yet.

But, as people have pointed out, there's no real way around the fact that something SM +6 or bigger at orbital velocity is already carrying enough energy to do some real damage.

02-24-2020, 03:12 PM	#13
cvannrederode Join Date: Apr 2015 Location: Pennsylvania	Re: Coolant [Spaceships] The simplest way to prevent a fast ship from being a WMD is to remove it's kinetic energy entirely. Pull out the psuedo-velocity design switch. This allows you to get from place to place without long periods of down time, but you can't wind a ship up to relativistic speed and wipe out cities. In my own in-development setting, I'm toying with the idea that the superscience behind reactionless drives is very sensitive to relativistic effects, and their performance drops off drastically as speed increases, before just not working at all at some point. I haven't put anything down on paper (divide by some power of the Lorentz factor, mayhaps?) yet. But, as people have pointed out, there's no real way around the fact that something SM +6 or bigger at orbital velocity is already carrying enough energy to do some real damage.