[TML] White Dwarfs, Black Holes & 100 Diameters

[Timothy Little]

On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 05:21:46PM -0500, Garry Ward wrote:
> From: "Jerry W Barrington" <jursamaj at yahoo.com>
> > If you can reverse your vector and jump back within 2 days, you
> > get back to your start before you left.  Sure, *you* want to use
> > the drive just for fast interstellar travel.  But that is a
> > necessary result of relativity, and somebody will exploit it.
>
> Ah, huh?

The short explanation: time is not an absolute.

For starships moving at different velocities, the criteria for whether
two distant events are simultaneous will differ.  These two events are
"went into jump" and "came out of jump".  The amount of variation in
the times of these events is up to one year per light-year (more than
3 years per parsec), depending upon speed.

The only way to avoid this problem is to define the operation of jump
in terms of some external reference frame.  It is probably not a
solution to say that the reference frame is fixed by the origin and/or
destination stars, since stars also have different velocities.

One potential solution could involve some property of the galaxy (or
even universe) as a whole defining the reference frame of jump.  This
could enable retaining both relativity and FTL in the setting without
time travel.


- Tim