Time Travel in the Iron Empires [Majory Geekery]

[Dwight]

@stormsweeper

I’m not sure Chris is aware of it, but the idea he sets forth is a variant on the “special frame of reference” wherein all superluminal travel requires using a special, shared frame of reference in which they can’t violate causality. It sorta kinda breaks relativity, but there you go.

I believe it is esentially the same thing I had posted. A loophole past the limit of C. When you dig down deep it effectively is about finding a shorter path between two points than a simple straight line. Which is indeed wierd to think about.

[Trithemius]

@cmoeller

One physical effect of the D-drives, particularly at hyper-expansion,is what happens when radiation enters and exits the distortion field. Photons passing through the field will “bunch up” on the perimeter (there’s a large coriolis “behind” the field and a smaller one in front as the field slips through space). The energy escapes from the field in atypical bursts that can be picked up by sensors. When ships emerge from HEx, there is a distinctively large release of energy.

Awesome! Terrifying “drive-torches” ahoy!

[Aramis]

A number of sci-fi settings simply make it such that, at superuminal velocities, one is not perceptible by STL sensors, and vice versa.

It solves the “Ship appears then backs up and goes forward simultaneously” of FTL exit.

Then again, ranged perception is all time travel… to the past. Nothing we perceive is the present; it’s time delayed by the distance from the event to our senses. Light by 1 sec per 298Megameters. Sound 1s per 343m in dry air, and 1s per nearly 1500m/s in water.

Radar, for example, doesn’t tell you where something is, it tells you where it was a fraction of a second ago (Usually, this is close enough for most functions…)