I say that it's already been proven that all of the planets orbit the sun in separate inclinations. Looking at the simulation of the Sol System generated in Celestia, all of the orbits did not line up with one another unless I was very far away from Sol, and this isn't even counting the Kuiper Belt Objects.
The main 8 planets all are within a few degrees inclination to equatorial plane.
I assume you mean the equatorial plane of the Sun -- the Earth's axis is tilted by about 23 degrees relative to the plane of the Ecliptic, to which the other planets (Pluto no longer being classed as such) appear to orbit relatively closely. The Ecliptic is tilted by about 7 degrees relative to the Sun's equatorial plane.
Yes. And this is why the planetary formation from disc accretion model seems to work. It would take a ginormous amount of delta-v change to significantly alter a planet's orbital inclination.
The delta-v required to change the inclination of a circular orbit is 2*v*sin(delta-i/2), where v is the orbital velocity and delta-i is the inclination change. It doesn't scale with mass.
Either the Klingons were in our backyard, or, the probe got caught in one of the many, many cosmic phenomenon that we've seen fling ships far across the galaxy in the several Trek series. I always opted to interpret the scene as the latter, because the former seemed unlikely to me. Though now that I rethink it, I think a Bird of Prey could probably handle the two Bic razors that would get sent out to meet it from Jupiter Station (as seen as our system defense in BOBW), and when I really rethink it, I subscribe to the 'Star Trek V was Kirk's fever dream' theory, anyway.
At light speed, no time passes for you on the ship; 10 years passes at your starting point (your initial inertial frame of reference).
But it would have several big problems, all related to the distance and travel time. It would take nearly 100,000 years to travel the distance, and that would cause big problems for powering it. For using RTG's, one would need a radionuclide with at least that long a half-life, and having a long half-life means a low decay rate, and thus much less heat. Nuclear reactors would not have that problem, but unlike RTG's, they have moving parts. Maintenance will be a big headache over such a trip -- one will need some very good AI for one's maintenance robots.
Piezoelectric effects on internal masses resulting in pulsed gravity thrust. Sounds like MEGA Drive = Impulse Drive.
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It will be interesting. Professor Woodward has made a very brief succint reply to the paper I linked above, but I don't have a copy or link to it. In short he sites gravity (spacetime) would exhibit mach effects anywhere, not just close to black holes, as the Rodal paper suggests.Piezoelectric effects on internal masses resulting in pulsed gravity thrust. Sounds like MEGA Drive = Impulse Drive.
A 25 year trip to Proxima Centauri would never approach close enough to c for time dilation to have very noticeable effects.
