Newtonian ships or not?.

[Randallw]

With the attention my thread on Aliens is getting I thought I'd try something else.

What are peoples views on propulsion for space ships of the future?. Obviously ships of the near future will be Newtonian and have to do things like turn halfway through the trip to decelerate. Will there, though, be ships in the future which can manouvere like planes?. It seem that in literature there are the hard science writers who only using newtonian movement, and there are the more "pulp" writers who have ships moving about wherever they want. In the "Timeships" the writer still has newtonian movement in about 800,000 AD. To move from the Dyson Sphere to earth a pod with no personal propulsion is flung on a gravitational course to intersect earths orbit. The Time traveller asks what if they miss, and the Morlock after trying to understand the question says simply they won't because its impossible for the calculations to be wrong.

[Atrocities]

I was thinking about this the other day.

If by chance we do begin to explore the stars our technology, even though advanced, would be compareable to the old wooden sale vessels that we used for centuries here on Earth.

Those wooden ships were the ticket for how many centuries before the invention of steam came along and then metal ships and ultimately neuclear power?

When we start exploring space, and I believe we will never do this, but the ships used will be a standard design for many decades.

Think of it this way, we used those wooden ships for centuries before Steam power was developed, and a new form of locomotion was adopted. The same can be said here. We will use the technology we have at the time and it will slowly improve until one day a major break through will occur that will propel our understanding of space flight technology forward by leaps and bounds.

How long that will take only time can tell us.

[PvK]

Hard to say since there is practically no theoretical basis that I know of suggesting any way to develop FTL travel. It will be difficult to get to other systems though without something FTL, and FTL generally means something extra-(as in "beyond")-Newtonian.

Some Sci-Fi writers who avoid considerations of Newtonian movement are doing so because they want to simplify things and make them more recognizable and/or appealing to unsophisticated audiences, or to enable or disable certain kinds of situations. Other writers are themselves more interested in a certain imaginary existence than they are about making probable predictions.

I don't think Newtonian movement or conservation of momentum will ever "go away" though, as some bad sci fi flick animation seems to suggest.

PvK

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Last I heard, there where tiny particles that travel faster than light. Neutrinos, I think. And, of course, electromagnetic radiation travels as fast a light.

[capnq]

There are theoretical FTL particles called tachyons, but they've never been experimentally observed.

[geoschmo]

While I personally cannot concieve of any realistic theory of propulsion that will allow us to achieve FTL travel, (heck I personally can't concieve of the theory of relativity and quontum mechanics, and those have been demonstrated in experiments. ) I hope that as a species we don't give up dreaming about it trying to discover ways to do it.

It would be as if we became so convinced that the earth was flat that we don't bother to send sailing ships beyond the horizon.