Bill Pragnell wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Bill Pragnell wrote:
>>> Ok, I see what you mean. (I don't like warp drive personally, it's a retrofitted
>>> contortion that, as you say, requires quite fine gravity control.
>> Well, it's the one that actual scientists are actually talking about. :-)
> 
> Not the only one! Wormholes have been discussed in the journals for a couple of
> decades now.

I meant in terms of "warp drive", the one scientists are talking about is 
making a bubble of space and moving that using gravity techniques.

I wasn't speaking of Wormholes is "warp drive" but another kind of FTL. 
Wormholes are also gravity phenonomena.

> Perhaps we're thinking of a different warp drive - I think star trek's warp
> drive ended up as a bubble of compressed spacetime, not a different realm...

OK. Sometimes it's a different realm, sometimes (more realistically) it's a 
"bubble of compressed spacetime."  I'll grant you "hyperspace" to mean the 
former. :-)   I haven't heard of any serious scientific progress in 
hyperspace travel.

> That's what I mean - it looks hopeful, but we don't know enough to have any
> specific ideas yet. :)

I'm not into it enough to know that.

> a rehash of Niven's The Smoke Ring).

There was one I read, I don't remember what it was called, something with 
giant cat aliens in it.... Anyway, they could go FTL, and coming out, they 
had to use the FTL engines to slow down, as they came out close to 
lightspeed. What impressed me about one small part of the story was they 
were going to sneak-attack this space station, and there were all kinds of 
speed-of-light calculations they were doing. As in, "We come out 70 light 
minutes from the space station, with the first of three slow-downs 65 light 
minutes out, and the second 55 light minutes out, but we won't do the second 
one, so after 55 minutes they'll see we haven't slowed, tell the guardian 
warship that's 12 light minutes on the other side about it, and by the time 
we see the guardian ship react, we'll be 32 light-minutes out, etc etc.

>> And piling up big fat masses isn't gravity manipulation to achieve FTL
>> travel? :-)
> 
> Well, we could do that now!

With enough work, yes. :-)

I'll grant you that wormholes look more feasible than warp drive, which in 
turn looks more feasible than hyperspace.

> Buying online's the best bet - but then browsing is impossible.

Yeah. I have a hard time finding new authors on Amazon. Especially someone 
(like Jim Butcher) doing stuff that's good but that I wouldn't normally 
expect to be good.

> (I read A Fire Upon the Deep for the first time last year - probably the best SF
> I'd read for a long time!)

It was way funny back when it was written, given that all the aliens 
complaining about slow netnews bandwidth was right on the money.

Everything Vinge does is great, yes. Wonderful ideas.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

Post a reply to this message