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.

[Baron Munchausen]

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.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

your post stired up a thought...what if the heat generated by interstellar dust was used to pre-heat the reaction mass?

[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.

[Lord Chane]

Originally posted by Atrocities:

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.

Why not?

[Randallw]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
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

Ha, I knew saying plane, someone would think of spaceships with wings . Let me use examples to show what I mean. Hard Science ship, a ship that accelerates at a fraction of c and needs to do stuff like turn halfway through the journet to decelerate. Pulp ships, the good old Star Wars or Star trek ship. Disregarding their faster than light speed, when they move at sublight speed they can turn whenever they want and stop suddenly without regard to inertia.