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[Dozebôm Lolumzalės]

Sorry if I came across wrong. I just meant that "this wasn't the place for this."

[Amperzand]

Today, I was assigned the homework of taking a Star Trek episode where a spaceship accelerates to .5c over half a solar system, then applying calculus and physics to it.

Turns out to do something like that, you'd need to accelerate at something like 8*10¹³ Newtons, 149,000m/s², or 15,000 Gs continuously for a little less than a third of an hour.

If it isn't clear, that would plaster the very flat remains of the crew across every surface, accelerate every loose object into a bulkhead-shattering impactor, and push the antimatter fuel out of alignment with its containment fields, causing a reaction.

Today was a good day.

[i2amroy]

Today, I was assigned the homework of taking a Star Trek episode where a spaceship accelerates to .5c over half a solar system, then applying calculus and physics to it.

Turns out to do something like that, you'd need to accelerate at something like 8*10¹³ Newtons, 149,000m/s², or 15,000 Gs continuously for a little less than a third of an hour.

If it isn't clear, that would plaster the very flat remains of the crew across every surface, accelerate every loose object into a bulkhead-shattering impactor, and push the antimatter fuel out of alignment with its containment fields, causing a reaction.

Today was a good day.

Which is exactly why you have warp drives and inertial dampeners in Star Trek; specifically so that everybody doesn't die.

[Flying Dice]

Well, mainly because this isn't the thread for this. There is a dedicated science thread and the Small Random Questions Thread, either of which would probably have been better fits.

I specifically asked if there was a dedicated science thread in the very beginning...

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=112684.0

[Amperzand]

Well, mainly because this isn't the thread for this. There is a dedicated science thread and the Small Random Questions Thread, either of which would probably have been better fits.

I specifically asked if there was a dedicated science thread in the very beginning...

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=112684.0

Don't worry, I'm not trying to fill the happy thread with calculus, this just made me happy in general.

inertial dampeners

See, the issue is messing directly with the forces of inertia is even scarier. Sure, they let your spaceship crews survive suicide burns, but they also let you do really silly stuff with kinetic energy and gravity, yadda yadda, casual galaxy-killer ultraweapons.

[hector13]

Example needed.

[Amperzand]

Some further research would suggest that while "Inertial dampers" do actually both exist and work, about the best you can reasonably get is a big spring. They delay the forces and spread them out, but these are not forces for which that would work, at least outside of ultraspecialized megastructure shenanigans, which aren't going on. The term we're looking for is "Inertial negation", which directly counters or removes the effect of inertia, and effectively allows indefinite acceleration. Because accelerating ever-closer to the speed of light has no real limit, and doing so just keeps adding more and more kinetic energy, in fact doing so exponentially to my knowledge, you can basically make an indefinitely scarier impactor if you keep adding energy to the system. What this means is that if somebody decides to accelerate a ship with one of these for a few centuries, they can hit a sun hard enough to blow it into energy.

For that matter, assuming you can use the thing to alter gravity at high energies, you can just... Turn off the singularity at the core of a galaxy. What this would likely do is throw very fast chunks of singularity everywhere very suddenly, which would be bad.

Galaxy-destroying was rather hyperbole, but such things are not very safe.

[NullForceOmega]

Some further research would suggest that while "Inertial dampers" do actually both exist and work, about the best you can reasonably get is a big spring. They delay the forces and spread them out, but these are not forces for which that would work, at least outside of ultraspecialized megastructure shenanigans, which aren't going on. The term we're looking for is "Inertial negation", which directly counters or removes the effect of inertia, and effectively allows indefinite acceleration. Because accelerating ever-closer to the speed of light has no real limit, and doing so just keeps adding more and more kinetic energy, in fact doing so exponentially to my knowledge, you can basically make an indefinitely scarier impactor if you keep adding energy to the system. What this means is that if somebody decides to accelerate a ship with one of these for a few centuries, they can hit a sun hard enough to blow it into energy.

For that matter, assuming you can use the thing to alter gravity at high energies, you can just... Turn off the singularity at the core of a galaxy. What this would likely do is throw very fast chunks of singularity everywhere very suddenly, which would be bad.

Galaxy-destroying was rather hyperbole, but such things are not very safe.

Not relevant, inertial dampers are deliberate handwavium intended to make the superluminal travel in Star Trek viable, trying to apply real-world physics to something deliberately designed to not function that way is kinda ridiculous.

[Amperzand]

Not relevant, inertial dampers are deliberate handwavium intended to make the superluminal travel in Star Trek viable, trying to apply real-world physics to something deliberately designed to not function that way is kinda ridiculous.

If nothing else, I find it legitimately entertaining to pick apart the poor science of soft science fiction. Doing so has become a hobby for some groups of people, really. The same applies to people who know how the medieval era actually worked and fantasy settings. Sure, it isn't supposed to make sense, but that's no reason not to make fun of it for not doing so. And I do mean "Make fun of" in the literal sense. Think of it as the critical-reasoning equivalent of going jogging.

For that matter, assuming you can use the thing to alter gravity at high energies, you can just... Turn off the singularity at the core of a galaxy.

That is the oddest sentence I've been creeped out by yet, I think.

It isn't really in any normal context, and it doesn't say very nice things, does it?

Sorry, I hope that's not the bad sort of creeped out. :V

[itisnotlogical]

Despite some hiccups, yearly Halloween L4D2 night went well! My friends and I all had a ton of fun and killed a lot of zombies. It's just a shame we couldn't play longer, but most of us had forgotten to install L4D2 in advance so we had to wait while everybody did that.

[Egan_BW]

Surprisingly related to the above post, this video kept me quite entertained for an hour.

[Teneb]

The cake(day) is mine. All mine.

[Tack]

Surprisingly related to the above post, this video kept me quite entertained for an hour.

Why are so many people linking ShackTac here?
^{_{Watches entire video.
Sees about joining Shacktac}}

Despite some hiccups, yearly Halloween L4D2 night went well! My friends and I all had a ton of fun and killed a lot of zombies. It's just a shame we couldn't play longer, but most of us had forgotten to install L4D2 in advance so we had to wait while everybody did that.

Why did I not think to do that, it sounds like amazing fun.

[Sergarr]

Because accelerating ever-closer to the speed of light has no real limit

There actually is a limit, when your energy become so high that, metaphorically speaking, vacuum starts to have friction. Though it is pretty high, 1 kg of iron, having 1.1*10^23 number of atoms, could have maximum kinetic energy of 8 joules * 1.1*10^23 = 8.8*10^23 joules. Which actually isn't nearly enough to even mass-scatter Earth (which requires energy of 2.487*10^32 joules, or about 1 billion times higher).

You'd need about 1 million tons of iron to do that. And to mass-scatter Sun, you'd need a billion times that.

I'll leave it for you to calculate how many tons of iron one would need for a galaxy-killing impact, and how many iron asteroids you'd have to harvest in order to produce it.
This belongs here because making !!FUN!! calculations makes me happy

[miauw62]

inertial dampeners

See, the issue is messing directly with the forces of inertia is even scarier. Sure, they let your spaceship crews survive suicide burns, but they also let you do really silly stuff with kinetic energy and gravity, yadda yadda, casual galaxy-killer ultraweapons.

This is actually basically the plot of Absolution Gap :v (which takes place in a universe where FTL doesnt exist, but sub-light travel between stars is common)

I'd recommend it, it's pretty great. (but read Revelation Space first)