Timeline for How to avoid FTL as a plot device?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 18, 2016 at 4:59 | comment | added | a4android | @TheGeoff You are within the right power of ten & you're right that's usually right. I was lucky. I'd seen Sagan's calculation, so I knew what the answer had to be. Certainly doable, in theory, despite the non-trivial engineering problems. Galactic, relativistic travel is fascinating idea. | |
| Jul 17, 2016 at 22:04 | comment | added | The Geoff | @a4android Yeah, sounds about right, my "of order" was a very quick estimate, it's astronomy, getting the right power of ten is often close enough ;) | |
| Jul 17, 2016 at 5:43 | comment | added | a4android | @AmiralPatate Only Episode 69!! By my estimation it should be, at least, Episode 8572. An alien Earth, of course, but they'd know that before launch. This means their mission profile would be much more interesting than meets the eye. | |
| Jul 17, 2016 at 5:38 | comment | added | a4android | @TheGeoff Carl Sagan calculated the travel time for a trip to the centre of the galaxy at a constant one g, at 21 years. Ten years is optimistic. Relativistic spaceflight is a theoretical possibility, but is most likely a practical impossibility. | |
| Jul 16, 2016 at 19:22 | history | edited | AmiralPatate | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Corrected mistake on the first word. Like, the first word, are you even trying brain?
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| Jul 16, 2016 at 16:50 | comment | added | EvilSnack | Assuming that there is a way to get around the light barrier, there is still no way around the no-free-lunch barrier; so if you want to make your unexplained FTL seem more hard-SF and less Trek-SF, put the no free lunch restriction into technical terms. | |
| Jul 16, 2016 at 7:59 | comment | added | AmiralPatate | @TheGeoff I do mention relativity later. However, when your crew comes back, they'll find an Earth so alien that their mission would have been meaningless. If Ben, Han and Luke travelled at .99% of c, they would have arrived at Alderaan about in time for Episode LXIX: The Empire Is Still on Top of Things for the Thirtieth Millennia Straight. Relativity is certainly not a friend. | |
| Jul 16, 2016 at 0:20 | comment | added | The Geoff | "As far as we know, there's no way to travel vast distance in a timely fashion." Relativity is our friend here. Imagine a spaceship that can maintain a 1g thrust for long periods...the time to travel from Earth, to the centre of the galaxy (~30k light years) is of order 10 years. Crucially, it's only 10 years for the crew, if they turn round and come back to Earth they'll find 60,000 years have passed, but it's entirely feasible to have a 10 year mission covering intra-galactic distances without breaking c. There's some engineering problems, obviously, but it's doable. | |
| Jul 15, 2016 at 19:01 | comment | added | celtschk | @R.M.: That reminds me of the Stargate episode where they by mistake go back through a previously unknown second star gate on earth, located in the polar region, and conclude they landed on an ice planet. | |
| Jul 15, 2016 at 16:26 | comment | added | AmiralPatate | @R.. Except that if you don't know which rules are broken, all you're making is wild assumptions. The only use of hyperspace on screen in Star Wars is travel. You can speculate all day that it could be used to materialize cheese and that it'd make you the richest cheesemeister-general in the galaxy, but at the end of it the only certainty is that you can travel with it. | |
| Jul 15, 2016 at 14:56 | comment | added | R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE | "Avoid explaining how it works" leads to worlds that are not just scientifically inconsistent but also economically inconsistent - that is, there are obvious consequences to contravention of fundamental physical laws that would allow anyone who exploits them to obtain god-like advantage over anyone who doesn't. Pretending humans just don't take advantage of those things is even less believable than pretending physics has loopholes. See the related recent questions on magic and "cheating physics". | |
| Jul 15, 2016 at 14:53 | comment | added | R.M. | Right. One of the reasons things like Star Trek, Star Wars and Stargate need as many planets as they do is because they treat each planet as a uniform whole: The ice planet. The desert planet. The gangster planet. Drop the "planet of the X" trope, too. You don't need to get a whole new planet just because your "marsh planet" storyline is done. A smaller number of planets work if you put more on each planet - both environmentally and culturally. | |
| Jul 15, 2016 at 11:08 | history | answered | AmiralPatate | CC BY-SA 3.0 |