thus we cannot prove that you didn't make a better system. for we will never know if it exists or not. Also I drink alcohol for science. because alcohol is science. delicious science.
I'll pay you sqawr nomples and a myoop boppa for it! Even if Damion hadn't said anything we couldn't prove that Trev isn't God Emperor incarnate or that EU is ruled by Khorne's Berserkers. Technically alcohol is not science but it's consumption can be part of empiric qualitative studies, you know, in science we need to iterate tests endlessly to verify previous findings and models. Also, to try to master the brewing process is science.
pretty sure alcohol is chemistry in action, chemistry is science, therefor alcohol=science in action. XD Also, when biology makes a mistake, is it bioillogical activity?
How does biology make a mistake? Mistake requires an intention. Biology has no intention, it is just a description of biological processes. Alcohol is organic compound. Yes, drinking it is chemistry, it's composition is chemistry. Science is a systematic enterprise. Alcohol != Science >> True Alcohol == Science >> False One of my thought subroutines submitted a minority report. I self diagnosed and detected that humor is toggled off. Random: Does this remind anyone of drop pods? Also, NASA is holding a big press conference, a big announcement on something amazing they've discovered. They were secretive as to what it is. There's a joke on The Onion. "People demand NASA stop holding press conferences until they actually find something". I had a fun conversation with some people about how lately NASA has been in the habit of "everyone, gather up, this is AMAZING" and then they talk about stuff they did 5 years ago, a very long and dry explanation of how one of their guys was using the wrong filter and then realized it was the wrong filter and then started using the right filter and that over the past decade they've published cool images and now they aren't exactly publishing anything new or so but weren't those some sweet pictures a couple of months back? Anyway thanks for attending our big announcement"
To paint your base and craven head over the sacred image of the immortal God-Emperor of Man is the worst of heresies! How dare you, heathen!
That seems small for a warship. I think there is a book (can't remember the name of it) where a sub was retrofitted for space.
Yea, it's a tiny ship for crossing interstellar space! Even so, it is really difficult to be stealthy in space considering you're likely running a lot hotter and have more surface area. Anything that warps space or reaches relativistic velocities is by definition shining like a bright star.
of course, once you reach light speed you're travelling faster than they can see you, so by the time they've seen you, you've already passed them and are on to the next target.
I've been designing a system for emulating this effect in a game. It's quite interesting that depending on the trajectory and varying speed you can literally make it appear as if there were multiple ships visible simultaneously in a given area even though there's only one ship flying. I've been pondering upon the ramifications of that and I think that the best way to maintain engagement with another ship with FTL velocities is to chase the other ship- this way the delay between seeing the ship's bright glow is minimal due to the distance being the shortest. The problem is of course that you cannot fire FTL unless you can somehow create a warpfield for your weapons themselves. Iirc. Star Trek torpedoes had their own warp engine. I could be wrong though. Firing lasers means you are not even going to hit the other guy unless he's coming your way and you're deflection shooting with enormous lead which is akin to saying you're not going to hit if there's any change to the trajectory from estimated, given the distances covered during FTL engagement. This is exactly what I'd like to toy around with.
yeah you definitely do -not- want to follow someone in a FTL engagement (this of course presumes you're physically flying faster than light, not tricking it by some other mechanic), all they'd need to do is let something go out the back end and you literally wouldn't be able to avoid it before you'd been ripped apart by it's mere existence. Granted, they'd never -know- you were there (which would be really interesting since you'd be seeing light shadows the entire time you were trailing them until they dropped below the speed of light, and then you'd have almost no time at all to react and slow yourself before you went careening through them, which might make a torpedo a very plausible method of FTL hunter, but definitely not a good idea to follow them in person) This wouldn't be as big an issue with the Star Trek style warp engine, however with warp technology you're not actually travelling faster than light, you're crossing distances in space faster than light can travel, but you're actually pulling that area of space towards you and then letting space reform around you, or some such similar concept, you're still only physically travelling at whatever your fastest method of physical travel is until such a time as you exit the warp field. It's a super simplification for it, and the entire concept is of course theoretical to the point of fiction (science fiction, hah!) but the best way I've seen it described is like folding a cloth and then running a needle through it, where the ship is represented by the needle and space is the cloth, the ship only actually travels a very short distance, but as far as space is concerned it traveled a massive amount of distance in a very short amount of time. Which is why in most Star Trek once a ship has gone to warp, conflict is over unless you can figure out where they're going. Theoretically you might be able to find and enter their warp bubble, and this is obviously one of the things they attempt to magic away with the 'trans-warp beaming' technology in the movies (which once you can locate a ship accurately enough to beam a person onto it'd be fairly easy to translate that into 'we know where warp bubble is, then you'd just have to figure out a way to enter another warp field without destroying both ships in the process) Of course, with this style of travel the 'visibility' issue only actually comes into play when you are actually in 'real space'. Hyperspace is similarly protected in this way, as you're actually entering a separate layer of space entirely, so theoretically you could 'peer' into hyperspace, things don't work the same in that layer. Star Wars is more science magic however and I haven't really kept up on the supposed theory they use for FTL. Gates are fairly obvious in their weaknesses, especially if they're limited in where they can be placed. Sure you could build one strategically, but generally speaking, you're either going to know where they're coming from, or where they're going to, or both. And with gates you can usually tell something is wrong the moment communication is interrupted with the other side. Of course, all of these things assume you can 'jump' to these preposterous speeds of travel, science fiction rarely considers ramp up time to be 'cool' and so it often gets lost in the need to move things along, chances are very good that any form of FTL would also need a significant power source, oodles of protective measures and a tremendous amount of time to prepare before you could even begin accelerating to speed (or creating a warp bubble, or entering hyperspace etc...) They talk about these hangups when it's a convenient plot device to remove an 'easy out' for the crew, but otherwise rarely mention all the work that goes into it. And, maybe after a few centuries of refinement it might be that simple, but that also presumes centuries of dealing with the types of warfare involved in having that tech. Okay, that went way longer than I meant it to XD one fun thing I thought of as I was doing this is, seriously, with all the crazy shit that happens to the Enterprise, that can't be exactly normal operating or I guarantee you people would be selling their first born child just to get stationed on a different ship by the time TNG occurs, The Enterprise C was literally LOST IN TIME FOR 22 YEARS, 10% of red shirts die in TOS and 12% of the crew die and while sure there are military conflicts involved at times and you have to expect casualties, the number of bizarre occurrences on that ship alone would be the stuff of legend, if that was commonplace across space? I'd side with Bones, just ignore that bit of gratuitous lens flare. I mean honestly, sure as much shit happens on the Enterprise they had remarkably few casualties, if shit like that happened frequently on other ships, I can only imagine what Star Fleets casualty rates are, 12% on the best ship in the fleet, and that's in 'peace' time (for the most part) most of the original series takes place during a period of armistice.
I've been working hard to understand how our physical understanding of the (Alcubierre) warp drive really works. I was trying to understand whether it acts as a field that multiplies the velocity of the craft parallel to that of the field's direction or whether it is the field 'bubble' that moves according to it's strength. Needless to say I'm not usually running into swarms of people who can reliably answer that question although I've run into a number of physics students who didn't know anything about Alcubierre's work or NASA's research into it and how NASA researchers managed to find ways to optimize the formulae so that the expected energy requirements dropped several order of magnitude. For the dropping of a mine on the path of your follower while enveloped by a warp field, I agree the mine can be any inert mass or even gas as impacts at these velocities and due to the mechanics of entering the forward section of the chasing warp field will quickly result in interesting things happening depending on circumstances. While this can easily be very effective, if you take into account the sizes of the ships - kilometers long with very liberal Wh40k super ships, they're still tiny, tiny dots as they're moving >c. In addition to your point about not being able to see the chasing ship due to all the effects of it's approach being hidden by the fact that the ships are traveling >c it would be really difficult to actually land a hit on the following ship even if you knew where it was - dropping something behind you means it is essentially equivalent to static object being dropped, close equivalent to a ship dropping a floating mine behind itself. The other ship really needed to be following the exact trajectory, which is unlikely unless the chase has been going on for some decent duration without changes in the chased ship's trajectory which allows the two trajectories to converge. Any changes by the lead ship will separate the trajectories with vast distances. If this was correct, it would mean that an inert ship that went undetected by 'invading' ship would have a massive advantage after picking up sufficient speed for pursuit - being able to fire torpedoes that home in on the other craft without the torpedoes or the intercepting vessel ever becoming visible unless you brought friends with you or reversed direction to see what is behind you. Luckily (for the 'invader') since we're including a significant delay of detection it is possible to make a complete reversal of course to "look behind" and the interceptor might only pick this up after the course has been resumed or the intercepting vessel has been spotted. The detection mechanics themselves are very tricky. Ramping up the speed - I really don't know how and I have a feel that no one knows how a warp drive operates in mechanical terms - how fast can the field be brought to maximum strength and so. Is it simply a matter of driving power to the device like creating a magnetic field or does it involve procedures involving the "exotic matter" that take time? Who knows? What I do know is that the field itself - depending on how steep the edge is, how short the threshold is, can lead to situations where the field itself can rip incoming and leaving matter into pieces. Also, things that enter from the front become really, really dense - imagine that an object is entering the field at 5c and within the field it is leaving the threshold at, say, 200,000km/s - it gets 'packed up' parallel to the field meaning it's going to explode violently - and whatever is thrown in front of the field is picked in again meaning the whole force of this explosion will be bottled up by the forward threshold and emitted into the field and largely at the ship itself. Hyperspace is very similar to the physics concept of enveloping yourself in some kind of tachyon field or changing your ship to have the properties of tachyons. Essentially you cannot interact with normal matter and your minimum velocity is >c. This means you could drop out of the 'tachyon field' in the middle of a star or enemy ship which would be very awkward, unless it was a torpedo doing it in which case you could penetrate any defenses with ease while also probably experiencing considerable "over-penetration" with potentially much of the torpedo being unable to complete exiting the field!
One of my favorite quotes about space is - "space travel is mostly boring, everyone agrees boring is good", I tried to find the cartoon it was from but couldn't. Alive but bored makes for very boring scifi, which reminds me of: "Which one would you like to read about" http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/crew.php And I don't think it's very easy to communicate and theorycraft around concepts like warp drives using single paragraph posts!
a lot of it is science magic too, which makes it even more difficult, the problem with leaving a mine behind in a warp field is basically, the mine would simply follow you until it exited your warp field at which point it would return to regular space, unless whoever was following you was also in -your- warp field, the mine would have no effect on them unless the mine itself was able to recognize a passing warp bubble, and then ENTER that warp bubble, at which point it would act just like any other inert object in space, presuming it was as most mines are, stationary. The trick to warp technology is similar to the idea of hyperspace except, instead of altering the ship itself or entering a different space, you're wrapping a small part of space around yourself and then letting the universe compensate for what you're holding on to and pulling you along for the ride. As far as anything outside your warp bubble is concerned however you're not actually there, and there's nothing there to actually interact with as 'there' isn't actually a place in space until you exit the bubble. At least that's the theory as I understand it, imagine it like suddenly pulling a sphere of water out of a pool, all the rest of the water will fill in the void immediately, the difference being that in space you're removing a slice of the void from the void, and space is unsure exactly what to do with that so your piece of the void is able to slip through the cracks in physics, quite literally. As for the following of one ship at light speed, the crux there is of course the trajectory, if you don't follow the -exact- angle and path the other ship takes, depending on how much faster than light you're going by the time either of you actually stop you could literally be light years away simply because of a fraction of a degree difference in heading, unless you're following exactly parallel, and keep in mind that even if you -are- following exactly parallel even the most miniscule of gravity wells could pull you a fraction of a degree further off that heading than the ship you're following (or vice versa) and without some form of (admittedly science magic) inertial dampening system you literally wouldn't be able to turn natively without slowing down because the action would rip the humans apart even if the ship could somehow survive. Another reason why acceleration would almost be mandatory, we can accelerate forever at a reasonable clip, and decelerate as well, as far as we know nearly indefinitely, but try to go from stop to light speed and you won't be cleaning up the crew off the walls, there won't even be a recognizable vapor remaining of them. The 40k ships have a system of travel all to themselves, since their version of 'warp' isn't even remotely the same as Star Treks, their 'technology' is a combination of wormholes and magic and raw madness, whole ships are lost to the warp and never seen again and others reappear centuries later sometimes unscathed, more frequently warped almost beyond recognition. Honestly you'd have to have faith in something to quite literally ride a ripping lightning bolt that would far rather cook you, eat you, or warp you into some abomination than help you move across the galaxy but faith is one of the few values that isn't lacking in that universe... misplaced all over the galaxy, but definitely not missing XD
