That's interesting, all this talk about FTL and sensors made me wonder how the lightwave equivalent of breaking the sound barrier would look like. Isn't it like infinite blue shift when you go at the speed of light, you'd produce lightwaves with infinitismal wavelength.
Depends on how the FTL works. With the Alcubierre drive being talked about in another thread, from within you'd see a bubble of normal space, surrounded by a wall of varying EM spectrum. Depending on the degree of compression, the leading edge would be blue-shifted beyond the visible spectrum and would also potentially start generating Hawking radiation if the edge becomes sufficiently compressed to generate a singularity. As the edge of the bubble curved around to the equilibrium points directly perpendicular to the ship, you'd see a rainbow effect of outside light shifting back down to normal. Then the opposite for the trailing edge, red-shifting down into infrared and eventually radio noise.
From the outside, I have no solid idea what it would look like. I'm guessing the bubble would warp light passing through it, but I'm not sure of the geometries involved, which would also depend on the angle you're viewing it from. I'm guessing from an oncoming POV, it would seem less bubble-like and more like a blue, slightly convex wall. From the trailing POV, it would be a long, stretched-out reddish comet shape?
EDIT: One interesting bit would be that *everything* blue-shifts and red-shifts, so for instance as you accelerated you'd start seeing the background infrared and microwave radiation as visible light in the direction of travel, and UV and X-rays as visible light behind you.
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Topic: How would space combat really work? (Read 7607 times)