acceleration limits?

[dccarles]

Actually no. The equivalence of FTL travel to time travel is established by Special Relativity, which deals with Euclidean universes. It depends on simultaneity not being invariant. You don't need General Relativity (which deals with non-Euclidean universes) to demonstrate that FTL travel is time travel.

Mmm. Thank you. I'd forgotten about that when my brain as-ploded when I started in on tensor calculus. I will cheerfully admit I don't quite understand it, even though I can grasp time dilation, and the explanations of time travel always seem to lose me.

--Devin

 

[boomslang]

There's no limit. You can push your 1G engine until you reach lightspeed and beyond. A good 10G engine will take you across interstellar distances in about 40 days.

Not from an objective observer's reference frame, however. A light-year still takes a year as far as the rest of the cosmos is concerned. And I doubt that even a reactionless m-drive could exceed c...

Still, enough fuel and life support and I suppose it's theoretically feasible -- in the great "near-c rocks" tradition...

 

[Icosahedron]

Not from an objective observer's reference frame, however. A light-year still takes a year as far as the rest of the cosmos is concerned. And I doubt that even a reactionless m-drive could exceed c...

Still, enough fuel and life support and I suppose it's theoretically feasible -- in the great "near-c rocks" tradition...

As I understand it, you wouldn't get much above half-c. Your mass (and fuel requirements) would then dramatically increase.
...Unless you get more energy out because you have a greater mass of fuel, too... I'm afraid the interrelated mass, time, acceleration and energy ramifications tend to lose me around this point. I only ever learned to use one equation at a time.

 

[The Oz]

The normal-space speed limit of Traveller ships might not be set by their drives, but by the ability of their hulls to withstand impact with space debris at high velocities.

I did some calculations on this, using STRIKER data, and an unarmored starship can get up to about 0.167% of lightspeed before impacts are dangerous. This is about 500 km/sec, a speed that a 1-G ship can reach in about 14 hours of constant acceleration.

Ships with HG armor-1 do much better; they can reach over 2% of lightspeed. A factor-15 armored warship can withstand impacts at nearly 60% of lightspeed, and in theory a factor-21 buffered planetoid could withstand cosmic dust impacts at up to 96% of lightspeed.

 

[spank]

Thanks Oz, that will be quite useful

 

[robject]

Not from an objective observer's reference frame, however. A light-year still takes a year as far as the rest of the cosmos is concerned. And I doubt that even a reactionless m-drive could exceed c...

Still, enough fuel and life support and I suppose it's theoretically feasible -- in the great "near-c rocks" tradition...

Only in a game, of course. I like Oz's point better than the near-C arguments anyway.