Inertialessness (the Lensman & Arilou sort), top speed, and spinning

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Bruno

On the other hand, I'd be ashamed if he made mistakes about the chemistry of his aliens or the unobtanium devices of the future.

Smith usually avoided providing information about that sort of thing; while he did have super-materials, he didn't explain what they were made of (there was an oddity in the Skylark series where he had this coating that caused copper to be converted directly into energy. Didn't work on most things, but worked on copper. Later, it was revealed that it also worked on uranium, which provided a useful power-up. What exactly made copper and uranium similar was never revealed).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Smith usually avoided providing information about that sort of thing; while he did have super-materials, he didn't explain what they were made of (there was an oddity in the Skylark series where he had this coating that caused copper to be converted directly into energy. Didn't work on most things, but worked on copper. Later, it was revealed that it also worked on uranium, which provided a useful power-up. What exactly made copper and uranium similar was never revealed).

There was a superscience "exciter" which happened to be invented by DuQuesne. When this was active the "X" element (which came from meteorites) would plate copper and cause total conversion in a number of useful ways.

Later, the bulging skull wise elder race of Norlamionians provided a variant exciter which made "X" affect uranium. Other elements might have been possible with fuirther redesigned exciters but you're not going to beat uranium for commoness and density so that didn't come up.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

I don't think inert matter is limited to c in the books, so the accumulated ISM ought to accumulate and dribble off the sides like a very thin superluminal bow shock.

Inert matter is clearly limited to c. It was only the inertialess drive that let them go superluminal. The argument was that as matter went faster, its mass increased, so its inertia increased, so the thrust needed to make it go still faster increased . . . but if you nullified its inertia, nothing held it back except the viscosity of the interstellar medium.

Besides, if inertialess matter "collides" with inert matter, it comes to a dead standstill in an instant. No inertia means no tendency to keep going.

I know that everyone who understands relativity is holding their head to keep their brains from exploding. This was a very pop science understanding of "inertia" and "relativity"; for example, Smith showed people on inertialess ships floating in the air, with no mention that colliding with air molecules would bring them to a stop and leave them hanging. There is also the swinging of space axes, which can cut through armor, even though the axe has effectively no mass and is only exerting the force of the wielder's current muscular contraction.

Bill Stoddard

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Notable: A PhD in TL6 Chemistry does not an astronomer or physicist make. It's helpful in some parts of rocket physics (propellants) but not in the actually-getting-it-to-go-somewhere-specific part :) You can think the Sun goes around the Earth and still do Chemistry (especially TL 6 chemistry, which is his era).

As a rule, Smith knew or suspected when he was bending or breaking things. His different stories had different degrees of it. The Skylark stories, for ex, are pure science fantasy. Smith didn't even try to make them particularly realistic.

For ex, Smith knew perfectly well that the accelerations used by the spacecraft in those stories would not only kill the crews, but turn the ship into metal mush, but that wasn't the point of that series.

The Lensman stories have their share of warped science, but he consciously tried to make them somewhat less so than the Skylark stories. The 'inertialess' drive may not make physical sense, but the stories don't pretend that light-speed is irrelevant or that men and machines can survive limitless 'conventional' accelerations. Likewise, the tech is less starkly magical than in the Skylark stories, what it can and can't do is more precisely spelled out.

Smith did make some mistakes. His description of antimatter is accurate in some ways but totally weird in others, it has negative mass, for ex, and experiences attractive forces as repulsion and vice versa. When I first read the Lensman series as a teen, I remember scratching my head over his textual description of positrons, to my surprise I later discovered that he was actually drawing on a conceptualization by Dyson that was no longer much used in descriptions by the time I first read them.\

EDIT: I said Dyson when I meant Dirac. That's what I get for posting when I'm that tired.

One other thing Smith sometimes did was disregard the scale implications of the energy levels involved in his stories. (He was hardly unique in that, and I've seen some supposedly 'hard SF' stories that paid less attention to the issue than he did.)

For ex, Kimball Kinnison's personal dreadnaught, the Dauntless, embodies technology far beyond ours. At one point Smith gives the necessary data to calculate the power budget of the Dauntless, and it comes out to roughly five to six times the insolation Earth experiences. That is, on 1/6 power, the Dauntless could take the place of the Sun, as far as the Earth's biosphere and weather systems go.

Now, that might actually be a realistic appraisal of a true starship's energy budgets, for all we know. But a tech that can do things like that would have all kinds of knock-on effects that aren't shown in the stories.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Which one was that?

IIRC, there's a scene in which a very small engine is being used to force a 'free' spacecraft 'backward' against the full thrust of its own enormous engines. By the rules of the stories, that shouldn't work.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Inert matter is clearly limited to c. It was only the inertialess drive that let them go superluminal. The argument was that as matter went faster, its mass increased, so its inertia increased, so the thrust needed to make it go still faster increased . . . but if you nullified its inertia, nothing held it back except the viscosity of the interstellar medium.

Besides, if inertialess matter "collides" with inert matter, it comes to a dead standstill in an instant. No inertia means no tendency to keep going.

However if the field that makes things inertialess works on the stuff that touches the hull, you end up with a stutter warp effect, where the ship is instantaneously stopping and starting at whatever the rate is that stuff turns inertialess.

This was a very pop science understanding of "inertia" and "relativity"; for example, Smith showed people on inertialess ships floating in the air, with no mention that colliding with air molecules would bring them to a stop and leave them hanging.

Why would inertialess air stop them?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Why would inertialess air stop them?

They seem to stop when they hit each other.

Bill Stoddard

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Inert matter is clearly limited to c. It was only the inertialess drive that let them go superluminal. The argument was that as matter went faster, its mass increased, so its inertia increased, so the thrust needed to make it go still faster increased . . . but if you nullified its inertia, nothing held it back except the viscosity of the interstellar medium.

Besides, if inertialess matter "collides" with inert matter, it comes to a dead standstill in an instant. No inertia means no tendency to keep going.

But in space, you're expecting to hit individual molecules a a time, and the thrust of the mighty engines can apply a finite but still large (very large indeed) acceleration to that single molecule, so that the ship returns to superluminal velocities almost instantly. The increasing mass can be ignored as another small inconsistency, esp since the products of various explosions are shown engulfing ships that would otherwise outrun them if the blast products were c-limited, IIRC. This also avoids the question of why the relativistic c-limit is measured in reference to an absolute frame.

Originally Posted by whswhs

I know that everyone who understands relativity is holding their head to keep their brains from exploding. This was a very pop science understanding of "inertia" and "relativity"; for example, Smith showed people on inertialess ships floating in the air, with no mention that colliding with air molecules would bring them to a stop and leave them hanging. There is also the swinging of space axes, which can cut through armor, even though the axe has effectively no mass and is only exerting the force of the wielder's current muscular contraction.

I took this axe fighting part to mean that inertialess objects interacted "normally" wrt to each other, which is good, otherwise you might instantly die of asphyxiation and starve to death as your intertialess organic molecules proceeded to go about their mutual reacting business at nigh-infinite speed, unhindered by any moment (heh) of inertia.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

But in space, you're expecting to hit individual molecules a a time, and the thrust of the mighty engines can apply a finite but still large (very large indeed) acceleration to that single molecule, so that the ship returns to superluminal velocities almost instantly. The increasing mass can be ignored as another small inconsistency, esp since the products of various explosions are shown engulfing ships that would otherwise outrun them if the blast products were c-limited, IIRC. This also avoids the question of why the relativistic c-limit is measured in reference to an absolute frame.

But still, if you are travelling so fast that the individual molecules, hitting the outer surface of your ship's wall shield, is deflected along it laterally at a speed approaching c, its mass will approach infinity, and thus be enough to exceed the thrust of your mighty engines, no matter how high that thrust is. You can hardly have enough power to push a galaxy out of the way—or a hydrogen atom as massive as a galaxy.

I also suggest that this is consistent with the fact that the interstellar medium acts as if it had a viscosity that gave inertialess ships traveling through it a terminal velocity. An incredibly high terminal velocity, in parsecs per hour or more, but still. . . .

Bill Stoddard

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I also suggest that this is consistent with the fact that the interstellar medium acts as if it had a viscosity that gave inertialess ships traveling through it a terminal velocity. An incredibly high terminal velocity, in parsecs per hour or more, but still. . . .

Can you point us to the passage that mentions the mass increase?