3 ms·
Is it fair to call the Rocinante a time machine? If it can achieve 5% of C in 37 hours it can go seriously relativistic in a reasonable amount of time. It becom
by hirundo 7y ago
Is it fair to call the Rocinante a time machine? If it can achieve 5% of C in 37 hours it can go seriously relativistic in a reasonable amount of time. It becomes possible to travel across hundreds or thousands of Earth years in a lifetime, like Andrew and Valentine Wiggin or Colonel George Taylor.
The travelling through space feature is pretty cool too though.
- rbanffy 7y agoIf you want to go relativistic, you'll have to deal with the fact vacuum is not as perfect as you'd like it to be. You'll need some form of abrasion shield because you'll be hitting a thin wall of hydrogen at relativistic speeds.
- hirundo 7y agoMaybe with efficient fusion you could just push a small asteroid on acceleration, then drop it and use the drive plume as a shield on deceleration.
- dclowd9901 7y agoQuestion: Doesn't this already happen to us all the time every day? Isn't it the essence of all radiation damage to our bodies?
- hirundo 7y agoAtmospheric hydrogen hits you at around 10^3 m/s. Relativistic hydrogen hits you at around 10^8 m/s and has more mass, up to infinity.
- rbanffy 7y agoCheck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle for an idea of what being hit by relativistic particles will look like.
- rolph 7y agoBussard ramjet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet
- rbanffy 7y agoIf the field manages to catch everything in the ship's path, that's good, but not all particles will cooperate. You'll catch some, push others out of the way and still get hammered by all the stubborn neutrally charged ones. And that's only for the atomic scale. Smashing into a grain of dust at a relativistic speed is very destructive.