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

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Internal flywheels would be ponderously slow and limiting on the axes of rotation. Trim motors would allow nigh-instantaneous rotation in arbitrary planes.

Okay, tried that out, with catastrophic results, but the problem wasn't that flywheels are slow. Rather, it was similar to the problem of inertialessness:

Prototype was rotating perfectly in the desired axis using flywheel adjustments. With a 1:1 massed rotating core, it was possible to rotate the ship by simply rotating the wheel at twice the desired angular speed. Perfectly responsive etc.

Now, the problem came up once the ship interacted with other objects. Like picking up a crate and rotating with it. It resulted in the ship gaining angular velocity. The internal flywheel controls were not designed to compensate for such unexpected rotations, and you can probably guess where that leads.

It also sounds suspiciously like the issues with using temporary inertialessness to crash objects into each other at relativistic velocities.