This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
the metre was redefined as C รท 3x10^8 quite a while ago so the heading quote is no longer correct - is there any reason for it to stay this way?
The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.[1]
Zeke Sulastin: I added the Broadsword and Morningstar to the Wing Commander piece - the Broadsword was fit with an in-system jump drive (i.e. Novaya Kiev) and the Morningstar prototype fighter had an intersystem drive (that didn't always work ...)
Blue toothThePirate: removed from the Hitchhikers Guide entry:
"The books add a further form of travel, essentially a fanciful kind of warp drive which makes the violation of relativity become 'somebody else's problem'."
The SEP field was a cloaking device, which made everyone around simply ignore the ship. The Bistromathic drive was what gave Slartibartfast's new ship its name, The Bistromath (sp?).
Krid: Sorry, but that's wrong. The SEP field is NOT a cloaking device, it just makes things Somebody Else's Problem. This was used early in the series to have an otherwise unaided spacewalk, as 'the problem of the lack of air became somebody else's'. I don't recall an SEP-enabled warp drive, but the SEP field is certainly FAR more than "a cloaking device".
Kendrakirai: changed the Star Trek entry, removing this 'transposes a vessel's mass into a different dimension, thus allowing it to exceed the speed of light, though the exact properties of subspace are not well defined. Wormholes also exist as shortcuts between distant points, but with one exception, these are neither stable nor reliable.
Looney Toons: <TONGUE IN CHEEK>Gus, the new image is interesting, but the contrast is so low that I have trouble making out exactly what it's supposed to be.
Gus: <phhbbbbt!> I suppose I could figure out how to rewind it to frame 1, somehow. Personally, I think a big black square has an interesting katachi. // later: Well, I just froze it. I'll put the moving ani on a jump, for those who need to see it go.
Looney Toons: Actually the TARDIS was occasionally shown travelling in real space in various episodes of the original Doctor Who.
Branfish: Removing this: "In Red Dwarf, it turned out that physics was just wrong on this point, and that if a ship accelerated long enough (about 3 million years), it would eventually reach the speed of light." ~ It's just not true. Red Dwarf was still travelling at normal speeds when Lister came out of stasis, and it noticeably accelerates when it breaks the light barrier in "Future Echoes", so it's clearly not just a case of it finally reaching the speed of light after accelerating all this time.
Andyroid: Cut out the Fancruft out of the Star Control II entry, and moved some of it to a more appropriate place on Another Dimension.
Fast Eddie: Pulled the image. It didn't really add much.
Starscream: What would traveling through a dimension that doesn't fall under our laws of physics fall under? I was thinking "warp", or a mix of "warp" and "jump".
Robert: That's a plain warp drive
JoeyJoJo: sounds like a Shortcut drive to me
Kizor: Heh. The Star Control II entry makes me crack up by ending an extensive discussion on physics with "Among its other properties, Hyper Space is also the dimension with the coolest background music." Nice!
From the intro: "traveling from Neptune to the Earth in under a year would require traveling at nearly half the speed of light". No, actually: Neptune is only about 4 light-hours from the Sun, so traveling at half the speed of light would get you there in about nine hours (varying depending on where Earth and Neptune were in their respective orbits).
The E=MC^2 explanation for why you can't reach the speed of light was inaccurate, so I changed it. That equation is about energy-mass equivalence. The speed of light cap is set by the general formula for composition of velocities, which is v=(v1+v2)/(1+((v1*v2)/(c*c))). If you set v2 to c, you can see how as v1 approaches c, v-v1 approaches 0. That's not the only way to do it, but it's one of the simplest.
