"Approaching light speed!"

[Vance]

Actually no, because the Earth itself is not a solid object. You are pushing back a part of terrain. Seriously, I explained this. And as a result of this, you're dispersing your kinetic energy against a variety of targets, including disparate layers of the whole planet. This is chaos at work. If this didn't happen, two cars moving slowly in different directions would destroy the planet. The force STILL has to go somewhere.

Even accepting that motion is relative, there is a standard of use in all things. In Trek, it's the galatic center crossed by Sol's position. Just saying 'it's all relative anyway' is just an intellectual cop-out to zero-out any discussion of drive theory.

Years of living with and under engineers has taken their toll...

 

[JarodRussell]

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/centrifugal_force.png

 

[sojourner]

Actually no, because the Earth itself is not a solid object. You are pushing back a part of terrain. Seriously, I explained this. And as a result of this, you're dispersing your kinetic energy against a variety of targets, including disparate layers of the whole planet. This is chaos at work. If this didn't happen, two cars moving slowly in different directions would destroy the planet. The force STILL has to go somewhere.

Even accepting that motion is relative, there is a standard of use in all things. In Trek, it's the galatic center crossed by Sol's position. Just saying 'it's all relative anyway' is just an intellectual cop-out to zero-out any discussion of drive theory.

Years of living with and under engineers has taken their toll...

OK Vance, to satisfy you lets add "a part of" to precede any use of "the earth" in the above conversation. It still boils down to from the relative view inside the car, it is at a standstill while it moves a part of the Earth underneath it.

 

[Vance]

OK Vance, to satisfy you lets add "a part of" to precede any use of "the earth" in the above conversation. It still boils down to from the relative view inside the car, it is at a standstill while it moves a part of the Earth underneath it.

Yes, but it also points out that saying "The position, velocity, and vector, of the earth, relative to my car" is a pretty pointless thing to use.

 

[Trekker4747]

This:

Has pretty much been my "warp theory" for some time now.

Pretty much, it operates on the idea that "space is curved" and that the ship's "warp field" simply "sinks the ship" deeper into space's "fabric" (while not actually changing it's position) and the the ship simply moves on fairly normal Newtonian principles.

Since it's "deeper in space" the distance between the two points is shorter and the movement of the ship has an effect of the speed relative to "normal space" being FTL. (Though, really, the ship isn't moving much faster than 1/2c -or full impulse.)

This pocket "pulls in light (or rather light can fall into this pocket)" explaining why one can see "into normal space" while in "subspace."

This also "explains" the whole "Warp 10 equals infinite speed/occupies all points in the universe" thing. As "Warp 10" would be the exact center of the circle, thus, it's at all points of the universe at once.

 

[Christopher]

Problem is, astronomical evidence suggests pretty strongly that the universe is actually almost completely flat. One could treat the galaxy as a whole as a kind of gravity-well "depression" within that flatness, with its own localized depressions for stars, but the curvature on the scale of a few dozen or hundred light-years between star systems would be fairly minimal -- and since the curvature of the galaxy's gravity well would be "concave" rather than "convex," sinking your ship "deeper" would effectively make the trip longer by your model, not shorter.

 

[Ronald Held]

The Universe, or our causal section of it is flat to high accuracy. Massive bodies produce their own 'depressions' but they are small on the scale of a Hubble length.

 

[The Castellan]

Or....since we did not do FTL yet....Cochran discovered there is no time dialation....come on, we never tested it.....yet. So who knows.

 

[Christopher]

^We already know, thanks to Miguel Alcubierre's 1994 paper (that's a PDF link, by the way), that a warp metric would impart no time dilation on the vessel within. It is a proven fact that time dilation does exist in general; particle accelerators have been routinely accelerating subatomic particles to nearly the speed of light for decades, and it has been confirmed that their decay slows down from the perspective of an external observer exactly in accord with the predictions of Special Relativity. However, it's called Special Relativity for a reason -- its equations don't apply in every case. A warp metric is a product of General Relativity, a more expansive set of rules. If you just go real fast in normal space, you will be time-dilated, of course. But a warp ship isn't moving in the conventional sense at all. It's having the geometry of spacetime altered around it. So the same equations don't apply. Time dilation happens in other cases, but not in the case of a warp drive.

And for gods' sake, why do so many people think it's "time dialation?" There are no dials involved. It's di-la-tion. Eight letters, three syllables. The same word as when your pupils dilate to let in more light.

 

[Trekker4747]

Or....since we did not do FTL yet....Cochran discovered there is no time dialation....come on, we never tested it.....yet. So who knows.

As a matter of fact, it has been tested.

 

[Christopher]

Oh, also, time dilation is something that happens at speeds approaching lightspeed, not at FTL speeds. If you plug FTL values into the time dilation equation of Special Relativity, you get an imaginary number as a result, which is either meaningless in real-world terms (since abstract numbers can do things real objects can't) or means something quite bizarre (like maybe going back in time?).

 

[Ronald Held]

When did the SR and GR effect have anything to do with dials?
No reason to expect any time rate variations, as the space-time is as "flat" at the center as for a distant observer.