Technofiction Writing Tips - Part 2 of 4 - Space Travel Without Warp Drive
... shooting people into space with cannons was in 1900. But it doesn't violate laws of physics the way warp drive does.) If you're not going to use constant acceleration, if you're sticking with boost-and-coast, the technology that is real today, plan on using some form of suspended animation or grow-when-you-arrive. An interstellar trip is going to take centuries to millennia. o If your journey is constant acceleration, the people on the space craft will spend most of the journey traveling close to the speed of light -- relativistic speeds. This means that travelers' clocks will be ticking ... . In STL stories that's not true: star systems are really far apart! It takes years to decades to go from one to another. So what changes in your story telling? Here are a few basic changes: o The fastest way to travel between stars with STL drives is a constant acceleration drive -- basically the propulsion stays running for the whole trip. During the first half of the journey it accelerates and during the second half it brakes, so you arrive at the destination standing still, not zooming by at something close to the speed of light. (Note: we still don't ...
Tags: warp drive | space travel | constant acceleration | technofiction writing tips | STL travel | science fiction |
Tags: warp drive | space travel | constant acceleration | technofiction writing tips | STL travel | science fiction |