Spaceship Tech in your Setting

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by khorboth

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In my supersoldiers game, I wanted both good FTL travel and a good reason for people to go into stasis during it. So, I created an FTL drive where objective (outside the ship) travel speed was measured in hundreds of times the speed of light. Then, I had subjective (inside the ship) travel speed stuck at speed-of-light. So, a 10-light-year trip might take hours of objective time, but would be four years of subjective time. .

Your math isn't adding up. 10 light years at the speed of light is 10 years.

Then 10 light-years in a "few" hours (4 hours, 20 minutes and change) is something like 20,000x the speed of light. 365.25x the speed of light would be 1 light-year per day.

I don't really care about what numbers you used. I just didn't want incorrect math propagating itself farther down this thread. Matching FTL speeds and distances is apparently not natural for many people.

[khorboth]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Your math isn't adding up. 10 light years at the speed of light is 10 years.

Then 10 light-years in a "few" hours (4 hours, 20 minutes and change) is something like 20,000x the speed of light. 365.25x the speed of light would be 1 light-year per day.

I don't really care about what numbers you used. I just didn't want incorrect math propagating itself farther down this thread. Matching FTL speeds and distances is apparently not natural for many people.

Thanks for catching my math. I changed my example partway through and didn't fix everything.

I had a spreadsheet when the game was active. Yes, trips were hours or days. I recall measuring drive speed in "CC" or hundreds of times the speed of light. So your example would be a 200CC engine.

For verisimilitude, I had colloquial ways of referring to such things in-universe. Because of exactly what you said. It's hard for people to conceptualize the bigness.