3 ms·
Which they needed because it’s tricky to dodge stuff at warp speed: "Faster than light, no left or right: course-corrections can fracture the hull."
by drfuchs 8y ago
Which they needed because it’s tricky to dodge stuff at warp speed: "Faster than light, no left or right: course-corrections can fracture the hull."
- ben_w 8y agoThey need a navigational deflector well below warp speed, and that line in Voyager was contradicted by what was shown on screen in various episodes.
- cfadvan 8y agoTo be totally fair, FTL implies time travel, and even sub-light (but hefty fractions of light) lead to staggering time dilation effects. None of this is ever touched in most sci-fi and certainly not Star Trek. Everyone is sipping around at high multiples of lightspeed, yet no one ever remarks that they constantly arrive before they leave. They use impulse drives to go at high fractions of c, yet they never return to an Earth many thousands of years in their subjective future. It’s a great series, but it’s not hard sci-fi, just a great storytelling mechanic.
- krapp 8y agoTrue, but no one ever claimed (or should claim) that Star Trek was "hard" sci-fi. At best, it sometimes tried, depending on the writer, to make nods to actual science. The original series seemed to have input from actual engineers and scientists, which is why you have the nacelles separated (to protect from radiation) and Bussard collectors, but then as time went on, it sort of became magic particles and subspace and not even bothering with the pretense.
- anoncoward111 8y agoHow big of a boom are we talking when I go through a molecular cloud at 0.1c in something like, let's say, the space shuttle?
- ben_w 8y agoLike I said, half a gigawatt per square meter. The front of the ship would be glowing with about the same luminosity from the stuff it hits as the total power output of the space shuttle engines during launch.