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Old March 26th, 2004, 05:52 PM

Baron Munchausen Baron Munchausen is offline
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Default Re: Newtonian ships or not?.

In order to 'maneuver like a plane' there would have to be an atmosphere for wings to work on. Or alternatively, you need to be moving at a signifigant fraction of the speed of light in order to get similar effects from the 'vacuum' of space (which is of course not an 'absolute' vacuum even between the galaxies). The maneuvering spaces would be seriously huge at those speeds, of course. Your turn radius would be larger than the solar system.

Did you know that they have estimated ships moving at around 70 percent of the speed of light between stars will heat up to several thousand degrees like an SR-71 due to the friction of interstellar gases? So even if they develop a means to accelerate near the speed of light they will have to develop a means of dealing with the heat buildup to actually travel that fast. In space all you've got for eliminating heat is radiation.

Now as for the 'Newtonian' movement question I think that what you are asking is will we ever have reactionless drives or will we always have to throw something out behind our ships to make them move... It's tricky to predict technology. If they ever figure out how gravity works they very well might find a way to manipulate it, and then we've got reactionless drives.
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