Timeline for What realistic way could limit an FTL drive to only travelling between stars?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
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| Jun 4, 2017 at 14:47 | history | edited | dot_Sp0T | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
fixed messed up rewording
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| Jun 4, 2017 at 13:48 | history | edited | dot_Sp0T | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Added math behind stuff
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| Jun 3, 2017 at 20:15 | comment | added | dot_Sp0T | @ADS I never claimed it to disable aomething. that would be boring | |
| Jun 3, 2017 at 19:07 | comment | added | ADS | Low aiming chance could be beaten by numbers (run billion rockets) and/or by distance (start jumping in the same system, then momentally turn off drive. Now you somewhere in the target direction. If you lucky you hit the target. If not - try again). Your suggestion doesn't disable possibility. It just make it expensive. | |
| Jun 3, 2017 at 17:50 | comment | added | WhatRoughBeast | It would also be a good idea to require that the FTL drive has a very long recharge rate and/or is expensive to operate. Otherwise, you can simply hop around the system until you get lucky. | |
| Jun 3, 2017 at 17:03 | comment | added | MackTuesday | I'm getting more like 1 in 1e18. The radius of the sun is about 4e5 miles and 50 AU is about 4e11 miles, so the proportion will be (4e11/4e5)^3 = (1e6)^3 = 1e18. | |
| Jun 3, 2017 at 15:41 | comment | added | Darren H | Some very quick scribbled calculations suggest to me that if you randomly land anywhere in a 50AU circle around the sun there is a 5e9 chance of landing inside an object. So if every individual on the planet earth today did this, you would statistically expect one death. That's 500 times safer than domestic air travel in 2016 | |
| Jun 3, 2017 at 15:01 | comment | added | dot_Sp0T | @Siguza well there's always a chance that you hit something. E.g. the chance of hitting something in the solar system when aiming at Sol would be the volume of a sphere of 50AU divided by the volume of every object in the solar system cumulated. I'll add this to the answer as soon as I get back to my computer.. | |
| Jun 3, 2017 at 14:37 | comment | added | Siguza | @dot_Sp0T Okay, I read your answer as "make it unreliable" rather than "make it unsafe". However this does only partially solve the problem of slamming something into the planet. If you miss, you just try again. And you should still be able to aim in a way that leaves it possible to end up inside the planet but not inside the sun. Also, I could imagine you might even wanna try and aim for the sun... I'm not sure what is physically possible here, but... antimatter? Something that changes the balance that makes the planet inhabitable? | |
| Jun 3, 2017 at 14:25 | comment | added | dot_Sp0T | @theonlygusti that's the gist, yeah. I mean eventually it depends on the error-margin the author is comfortable with, but yeah. so Travel time between two Earth and Kepler II might amount to a year. Sounds fine to me for somewhat-hard-scifi | |
| Jun 3, 2017 at 14:13 | comment | added | user9182 | @dot_Sp0T you could then end up some 100AU from the solar system's centre. W/o ftl it will take months/years to get to the inner planets from that. | |
| Jun 3, 2017 at 14:07 | comment | added | dot_Sp0T | @Siguza yes, unless you plan for the error and aim somewhere safe.... that's the whole point of it! | |
| Jun 3, 2017 at 14:05 | comment | added | Siguza | This gives you the chance of ending up inside the sun or a planet though (if FTL works out-of-dimension) or slamming against them (if it works in-dimension). | |
| Jun 3, 2017 at 10:30 | history | edited | dot_Sp0T | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 129 characters in body
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| Jun 3, 2017 at 10:25 | history | answered | dot_Sp0T | CC BY-SA 3.0 |