5 ms·
No, it assumes you start and end at whatever that maximum velocity is that we've been able to achieve. That'd be fun to add, though. I'm not really sure what h
by tunesmith 7y ago
No, it assumes you start and end at whatever that maximum velocity is that we've been able to achieve.
That'd be fun to add, though. I'm not really sure what human-safe acceleration is - people here assume it's in the 1g-3g range. (That seems like a lot to me though, particularly for a long period of time - I think anything more than a fraction of g would be wildly uncomfortable.)
- quickthrower2 7y agoWouldn't 1g be perfect? I've been enjoying it for a few years now on this planet.
- tunesmith 7y agoI took it as 1g of acceleration. I don't know. Wouldn't plain old 1g mean no acceleration at all? Edit: Oh... I guess not. :) I got confused with the extra g's we'd need to escape earth, but that's so short-term that it can be ignored. Yeah, I think 1g would be perfect.
- quickthrower2 7y agoWhen you sit in a car and it accelerates forward you can feel your back being pushed into the seat. When you lie in bed gravity will also push you into the bed. In both cases it's a force acting on your body. So being pushed in space in a ship accelerating at 1g will feel like normal gravity with the 'ground' being the back of the ship.
- healsjnr1 7y ago1G would be great as it would remove any unexpected physiological impacts of living in zero or low gravity. Having said that, the distance and duration means that only a small portion of this journey would be under acceleration, the rest would be in zero g. Spending a century in zero g would probably have a bunch of strange side effects and almost certainly mean that the people alive when they arrived wouldn't be able to stand the planets gravity. This exact topic is what about 80% of The Expanse is about.
- bestest 7y agoNot quite true. You'd spend half of the travel time under 1g accelerating, then the ship does a 180 degree flip in 0g, and then you spend another half of the travel time under 1g decelerating. Edit: Of course, at constant 1g acceleration, at day number 354 we reach 1c. Don't know if we should start coasting before we reach 1c or just the hell with it and see what happens if we keep accelerating.
- klyrs 7y agoSo many people in this thread are acting like constant acceleration is possible. Unfortunately the faster you get, the more energy it takes to maintain constant acceleration. > Don't know if we should start coasting before we reach 1c... Don't worry about it. Your rocket would need to expend an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to c. The energy stored in your finite-sized rocket is finite. At a certain point it becomes futile to keep trying to accelerate -- though I suspect that the impacts of space dust will eventually cause a significant amount of drag http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/rocket.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/r...
- perl4ever 7y ago"Unfortunately the faster you get, the more energy it takes to maintain constant acceleration." I'm not sure what you mean by this. You could also say "the slower you get, the more energy it takes to maintain constant acceleration". Constant means ongoing, so as long as it is constant, you are going to have to expend more energy. Unless you mean that somehow, you could determine your absolute speed by how much you accelerate for a given expenditure of energy, but wouldn't that violate relativity?
- tunesmith 7y agoCan you alternate accelerating and decelerating? I mean that's a heck of a lot more energy, but at least you're not risking reaching light speeds.