Would it be possible to use FTL drives as WMDs?
What I mean is using E=mc² to it's maximum potential. Even flinging bullets the size of cars at FTL speeds should destroy star systems, if I got it correct; or at least, cause some serious hurting to a planet of at least Earth's scale; or maybe collapse a star by sheer force of impact.
Actually, no. FTL works via physics loopholes, not by imparting actual kinetic energy to the ship. If a ship was stationary in it's warp bubble I imagine it would be stationary in normal space too if the bubble suddenly vanished.
Would that also bypass temporal physics? What I mean is, despite traveling light speeds, if you're stationary inside a bubble that allows you to travel FTL, you won't suffer the consequence of traveling at ludicrous time speeds? 1 year of "real time" travel (perceived within the ship) = hundreds of real time years passing (across the universe). After all, it would effectively be a temporal shield as well as a bubble in the sea of space itself.
The core of the hypothetical scenario I put in my TL;DR; post
was about being shielded from the
relativistic effects[1] and thus having a 'normal' journey, as if you were walking to the shops or something.
I'm not sure if you're saying that with a "temporal shield"
only 1 year would pass for the hundreds of years you travel. That's what happens with nothing "special" (except relativity, of course). For time passing you at 1/100th the rate, just ensure you're travelling at...
1/100 = 1 - v2/c2
v2/c2 = 1-(1/100) = 0.99
v2 = 0.99c2
v =(0.99)0.5c
v = let's say 0.995c, to 3dp, but right now I don't think the precision matters too much at that magnitude of c.
Going 100LY in a single year (objectively
and subjectively) under a "no time-dilation" supra-lightspeed Warp Drive mechanism is entirely... erm... possible... Given the premise
of a "no time-dilation supra-lightspeed Warp Drive" in the first place of course.
Looking up the Star Trek formulas for warp-speed, 100LY travelled in a single year is Warp 4.6-ish in 'old money' (TOS has the multiple of the speed of light being the cube of the Warp Factor, or 3.98-ish for TNG (a slightly different exponent, which was also tweaked at the top-end so Warps >9 used a revised exponent and you should no longer reach Warp 10[2]).
Going those 100LY in a single day would be 36,525c, or thereabouts[3], or Warp 33 as far as Kirk is concerned. (The "Warp 10 time-travel slingshot" events as originally seen on TV and then re-used for the fourth film obviously were significant for their velocity change, i.e. the slingshot, as much as for the speed they were going.) Captain Janeway would have loved to have gone that fast, as it appears to be above the Warp 9.9 they managed at one point (ignoring shortcuts not involving her own ship's engines), and they would have taken nearly 17 hours longer to travel the 100LY. Their own wished-for journey of 70,000LY would have taken about 1y11m to complete at 100LY/day.
Man, it would suck being a space fly hitting that "windshield";
Trek has "deflectors". As well as any technobabbly stuff about the warp field that might mean things edge around the ship anyway. Handwavium, though, the lot of it.
[...]they too are historical figures and were able to get away with abusing timelines to save the other historical figures from the police station by bending time-space like a pretzel by just thinking about an idea, and willing themselves to commit to it in the future.). What happens then?
I'm a great believer in "What you go back and do, you've been back and done." I don't think those films
entirely stick to that convention, but that particular scene doesn't rely on them being special other than
able to (having survived and succeeded thanks to their own future-selves' interventions) do what's necessary in the future of their own personal time-lines in order to fulfill what has already happened in their (now) past. (Don't forget that the guys told
themselves to trust their 'time-guide', in the first place...)
I like how Doctor Who played with that concept in the original Stone Angels episode. Timey-wimey, indeed. Not
all of Doctor Who is as consistent (but some of this might be explained or made irrelevent with the occasional destruction and recreation of
the entire universe across all space and all time!!!).. meanwhile those of a different fictional bent might like to look up the fanfiction piece "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", and then there's the fate of Dios in Pratchett's book "Pyramids" (although time is more convoluted than that, in a few other of the Discworld books, e.g. Nightwatch). Twelve Monkeyshas this concept at its very core. And, back to star Trek, "How do you know he didn't invent <the thing Scotty has just apparently anachronistically told a guy in the past all about>?" says our favourite 'Scottish' engineer.
(Hmm, did I just edit that all in the correct order? I did a lot of cut'n'pasting in order to make it more manageable to read, but may have disastrously failed.)
[1] If non-warp journey would make your time pass at a rate of (1 - v
2/c
2), or (1 - 0.7
2/1
2) or approximately (1 - 0.5), which is 0.5 the rate of the universe you'd be in if you weren't moving. So a 4LY journey might appear to take two and two-third years to you, even if someone with an equidistant viewpoint on your start and end points sees you
taking five and a third years. If we use a 'warp bubble' to make your travel (still effectively 0.75c from that edge-on viewpoint at rest with respect to both of our end-points) happen slow enough within the altered reality to
not cause noticeable relativistic effects, then we're talking about time passing as much (or as little) as the end-points.
[2] Although they
did, sometimes... Scriptwriters, huh..?
[3] I'm going to say assuming that this 100 years straddle a "leap-day on a century", even while I'm being arbitrarily accurate over arbitrarily large numbers...
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