Columbia and Impulse?

[sojourner]

Don't be confused by that book. That's not how relativity works. From the "stationary" observer, looking at NX-02, it would appear time on the Columbia had slowed down. From the NX-02 the outside universe looks like it sped up. However, from the perspective of the NX-02 crew, it would still have taken (if I recall) 12 years for the ship to reach its destination. Relativistic speeds don't mess up your own frame of reference.

In summation:
Part I:
*From the point of the Columbia crew, it will always take 12 years to reach Erigol at .95c, or whatever speed they were at.
*Erigol would observe that the same trip took 100 years.

Part II:
*Standing on Erigol, a day is 24 hours long.
*If Columbia was watching Erigol, they'd clock a day as taking 3 hours.

What the book was describing was indeed superluminal travel. It's the only way to make you go 12 light years in 6 months. Of course, relativistic superluminal travel results in weird situations, like people interacting with you before you arrived.

Part I is incorrect.

Subjective time aboard Columbia would be only a few months, much shorter than 12 years. (Otherwise they would have died due to lack of provisions) Now, when they reached Erigol, they would have found out that 12 years had passed for the rest of the universe, not 100 years.

From the Master:
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_bKY-CGW9k&NR=1[/yt]
http://www.youtube.com/v/anxiXMPXZoY&NR=1&hl=en&fs=1&

 

[STR]

Are you sure about that?

Part I:
*From the point of the Columbia crew, it will always take 12 years to reach Erigol at .95c, or whatever speed they were at.
*Erigol would observe that the same trip took 100 years.

If Erigol is 12 light years away from Columbia, then from a stationary viewpoint (ie Erigol) a vessel travelling at 0.95c would take 12.6 years to traverse the distance. It doesn't matter where you stand, that's the longest it could ever take!

12.6 years is the time it will always take for the traveler. An observer would see a different, distorted time based on their own mass and velocity. As another weird example, if you were to fall into a black hole, you would experience it as flying straight through to the singularity like a normal freefall (what happens when you hit the singularity is anyone's gueerss). An observing watching you would never actually see you hit the center, because time is distorted so much by the black hole's mass.

Part II:
*Standing on Erigol, a day is 24 hours long.
*If Columbia was watching Erigol, they'd clock a day as taking 3 hours.

So Columbia would see 8 Erigol days pass per each of their own 24 hour periods. Which means they'd ratchet through the 4600 Erigol days that the trip takes at a higher rate.

Not quite, they'd see a lot more days pass. High relativistic speeds are just as much a time machine into the future as much as it is a method of travel. Columbia would see not 4600 24 hour Erigol rotations in its 12.6 year travel, but almost 37,000.

Relativistic concerns aside, does the Columbia really carry enough impulse fuel to burn the engines continually for over twelve years? That's a lot of fuel![/QUOTE]

Relativistic space is also Newtonian space. All you need the engines for is to do an inital burst to get up to speed, and to decelerate the ship when you get to your destination. The rest of the time you're coating.

 

[sojourner]

12.6 years is the time it will always take for the traveler. An observer would see a different, distorted time based on their own mass and velocity.

As I said before, you have this backwards. The observer on Erigol would see it as taking 12.6 years. The traveler on Columbia experiencing time dilation would see a much shorter time.

 

[SpyOne]

Sojourner has this right.
Don't take my word for it: check with Carl Sagan:
A journey to the center of the galaxy, a distance of about 25,000 lightyears, would take 21 years from the perspective of the crew, and 30,000 years for an observer on Earth. (Accelerating at 1g for half the trip, decelerating at 1g for the other half.)
(it's right around the 3:30 point in the video embedded above).

Time dilation slows the passage of time for the observer moving at relativistic speeds, not for the rest of the universe.

 

[Mytran]

Relativistic concerns aside, does the Columbia really carry enough impulse fuel to burn the engines continually for over twelve years? That's a lot of fuel!

Relativistic space is also Newtonian space. All you need the engines for is to do an inital burst to get up to speed, and to decelerate the ship when you get to your destination. The rest of the time you're coating.

You're bang on here, of course! The only thing I'll mention is that the ship needs to carry enough fuel to accelerate and decelerate at non-newtonian speeds, which is not normally what starships do. So to paraphrase myself:
Accelerate to 0.95c at non-newtonian speeds? That's a lot of fuel!

 

[Ronald Held]

Yes it take more fuel than a ship does carry to accelerate anywhere near c. Somehow the IDF is alledged to help out? Then again energy/power calculations were not the writers' strong suit.