- Regarding the one week deadline from detection to arrival: the distance between Pluto and Earth is 4.6 light-hours, which simply means that travelling exactly at the speed of light it would take them 4.6 hours to make it to Earth. Since they are having tech problems, and they're starting slightly beyond Pluto, you can basically adjust these numbers however you want to make it work out for the story. Example: if 1.00c = 4.6hr travel time, then multiplying the travel time by roughly 36x would give you a travel time of 168 hours, or almost a week. That would be (1/36)c, or 0.027777c, or 2.7% the speed of light, which is completely believable for a species capable of FTL travel but currently experiencing some technical difficulties! Feel free to customize this based on your needs, or even do something like require the ship to slowly accelerate and build up speed, which changes the equation. I didn't consider this until now, but if the typical FTL drive is broken on the ship, they will need to resort to conventional means of acceleration, which will result in G-Forces being exerted on the crew. They may not be evolved for that, and it won't be an insignificant amount of G-forces either; it would probably kill humans to accelerate like that. I don't know exactly what the Gforces would be, but there are some physics calculators online that are based around F=ma, and will tell you the acceleration required to reach a certain speed in a certain amount of time, and then you can look a that acceleration and compare it to the acceleration of Earth's own gravity (9.8 m/s^2) which is one "g" of acceleration, to see how strong it would really be. They'll need to use some kind of tech that we don't have yet to cancel these g-forces, like "inertial dampeners" which have been a staple in science fiction for decades but don't have much basis in reality, or maybe a shield that provides a different "frame of reference" inside the bubble, so from the ship's perspective and the perspective of the crew inside the ship, it doesn't feel like you're moving at all because the shield bubble is like a bubble of "still" space, but the bubble can accelerate through our space as fast as it wants to, or as fast as their malfunctions allow them to. This is similar to how the Alcubierre Drive would work, except it would only be a bubble of local space around the ship and wouldn't have any type of physical shielding capabilities.
I added some information about the acceleration and g-forces, as well as a plausible way to explain that away using technology (similar to the Alcubierre Drive) that scientists are already theorizing about in real life.
Cyleleghorn
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