TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name @lemmy.world

1y ago

Battle of the Bands

122 comments

Ahh, but in Star Wars, "Light Speed" is exactly as fast as the plot demands. Checkmate, science dorks!
- In Starwars they travel through hyperspace, hitting light speed is how you get into it!
  
  I just assumed light speed was a colloquialism for hyperdrive.
  At any rate, hyperdrive blows warp out of the water in raw speed. A trip across the galaxy is just a few days. The downside is that you're pretty much limited to already charted safe routes unless you want to test your luck with potential ship-killing hazards that can't be detected before hitting them.

"The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing interstellar distances in a few seconds, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. As the Improbability Drive reaches infinite improbability, it passes through every conceivable point in every conceivable universe almost simultaneously. So you're never sure where you'll end up or even what species you'll be when you get there. It's therefore important to dress accordingly. The Drive was invented following research into finite improbability often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap one foot to the left in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy. Many physicists said they wouldn't stand for that sort of thing, partly because it debased science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties." Hitchhiker's Guide
- I know a lot of die-hard fans have a lot of problems with the movie but personally I love it, especially these narrated animated bits.
  
  People were mad it didn't follow the book when Adam's was very insistent all versions of Hitchhiker's should be different.
  
  Absolutely. And Stephen Fry, for all his faults, does a great job narrating.
- I can't read anything from the Hitchhikers Guide without reading it in the authors voice
- I thought the answer was 42

But Ludicrous Speed is supreme to all other speeds. The Plaid Life is the life for me.
- What's the matter, Colonel? Chicken?!
- You sure buddy? I saw some plaid speed, and all it had was some concussions. You know what happens at warp 10?
  Lizard. Fuckin.
  Come at me with this plaid shit when janeway goes all reptile style on ya. Until then, we know it's "Paris or bust."

It could be the 40K fan in me, but warp speed sounds like a drug the inquisiton should take a look at.
- You're thinking of the acid drive
- Also totally sounds like a drug you could gland in The Culture

The ship is actually not even moving. Space moves around the ship.
- In United Federation of Planets, space move around ship.

How fast can the Enterprise make the Kessel run?
- This fast:
  
  They're such a cute couple. Better not leave their babies behind!
- Depends. Are you asking about the canon Kessel run, or the objectively superior EU version?
  In the EU pre-Disney, Kessel was a black hole and there was a race around it. The more powerful your engines, the closer you could get to the black hole. Which is why Han used a distance measurement instead of time (of course, the most likely in-universe fan theory is that Han was BSing the two farm yokels by throwing out space technobabble, but Star Wars authors never settle for the easy answer when they could write an entire book to fill in the plot-hole).
  
  Never made sense in the EU. You get yanked out of hyperspace way before you need to account for that kind of gravity. My headcanon was always that it's just some spacer jargon we don't have the context to parse. Like how a 12 second car is fast, even though time is not a unit of speed.
  
  An even easier explanation is that they're speaking Basic, not English, so any words that have different meanings are just different in that language.
  
  You think some guy in a bar would just make shit up to sound cool?
- Not very. The Millennium Falcon is about the size of a Runabout. You're not making those turns in a battlecruiser.
  
  The Defiant could handle it just fine, and obliterate the Millennium Falcon on its way through.
  
  The Falcon is much bigger than a runabout. 23.1 meters by 13.7 meters for the runabout, 34.7 by 23.8 for the Falcon. It's 1.5 times longer and 1.7 times wider.

Even as a kid I knew that, and hated the “light speed” references.
Later on, I justified it as imprecise use of language, which happens all the time anyway. “Light speed” became a generic term for “going super fast”. Or something.
- Just ignore "light speed", "ludicrous speed" is where it is at.
  
  Jammed!
  
  "Sir, you better buckle up!"
  
  They've gone to plaid...!

I thought warp speed is the speed of light. Anything above warp 1.0 is faster than the speed of light.

It depends on your frame of reference.
From inside the ship, light speed is faster. You travel arbitrary distance in an instant.
Outside the ship, everyone else sees you moving 1 light year per year, but for passengers, the voyage is essentially a forward-only time machine.
From outside the ship, warp speed is faster. Observers will see the warp bubble with a ship inside it moving >1 light year per year, and because it will arrive at its destination before light from the ships own past will arrive there, it acts like a view-only backwards time machine.
- for the passengers it's a backwards only time machine, since they travel back to a few centuries when they arrive, because that's the speed it would take them with light speed

To be clear, even if you're moving at 1000x the speed of light, and have figured out a way around relativity so that you don't have time dilation (and so you can, y'know, go faster than the speed of light), galactic distances are still so vast that interstellar traffic is largely not feasible. Our galaxy--one of billions, trillions, or more--is about 2M light years across. Going all the way across the galaxy at 1000x the speed of light would still take 2000 years.
- Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
  It's a hundred thousand light years side to side
  It bulges in the middle, six thousand light years thick
  But out by us, it's just a thousand light years wide
  We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point
  We go 'round every two hundred million years
  And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
  In this amazing and expanding universe
  
  ...And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space 'cause there's bugger-all down here on earth.
  
  Can we have your liver then?
  
  And despite all this, my consciousness is stuck with a shitty meat body and a credit score.
- Milky Way is much smaller than that. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5M light years away. Maybe that's where you got 2M from. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light year diameter.

"She'll make .5 past lightspeed."
Lightspeed seems to be a catch-all layterm that means the speed of light and everything faster. Hyperspace is a better description of what's happening. And different ships traverse hyperspace at different speeds depending on their engine.
"I've outrun Imperial starships. I don't mean the local bulk cruisers, I'm talking about the big Corellian ships now."
Which is faster? I guess it would depend on which ships you're comparing to each other.
- Lightspeed seems to be a catch-all layterm that means the speed of light and everything faster. Hyperspace is a better description of what's happening. And different ships traverse hyperspace at different speeds depending on their engine.
  In Star Trek or sci-fi in general?
  Light speed is the theoretical maximum speed limit at which an object with mass can move within normal space. Hyperspace was a sci-fi invention that was used as a theoretical work around for this problem. So any space that allows you to travel faster than the speed of light is technically hyperspace, whether that be extra dimensional travel, or going through a wormhole.
  
  I've always considered the trans-warp conduits to be the closest thing to hyperspace travel in Star Trek.
  
  In Star Wars. Sorry for not saying so explicitly.
- "She'll make .5 past lightspeed."
  This is an excellent reference; it's one of the few times in the trilogy details are made in technical terms.
  Point 5 of what? Is it just 450 million kilometers per second? Seems hardly likely, since they're zipping between star systems in matters of hours. So is it, like in Star Trek, some logarithmic scale, where 1 is equivalent to warp 10, and you turn into a mudskipper.
  However, The Empire is "The Galactic Empire," and the intro to IV implies the events take place in a single galaxy "far, far away." So all Wars travel is within a single galaxy. Trek ships travel the universe, visiting nebula and other galaxies. The distances between galaxies (millions of LY) dwarf those within galaxies (hundreds of thousands). Trek ships are vastly faster than Wars ships, by this measure alone.
  
  Trek ships don't go to other galaxies often, they specifically talk about it being incredibly slow to even go to tbe other side of our galaxy. That's the whole premise of Voyager, they got stranded at the other end of the galaxy and it will take decades to get back. The exception of course being discovery with its spore drive. They have no issues leaving the galaxy, though they don't do it often.

Warp speed and light speed are overrated. It's all about rule of cool and Elite's Witch Space has the coolest name.
- Sound too. Especially when capital ships drop out.
  
  god I wish I liked actually playing Elite Dangerous, because shit like this is so cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-OTVKg2xI0
  
  The first time I saw a capital ship drop out of witch space into a conflict zone was something.

47 years later and I'm still not quite sure what "She can make point 5, past light speed." means.
- It's dumb but it's been retroactively taken to mean that it has a Class 0.5 hyperdrive, whereas a Star Destroyer has a Class 2. (Smaller class numbers are faster.) Light speed in Star Wars can be much faster than the speed of light.
  But then, pretty much everything to do with specifications and numbers of Star Wars tech is a clusterfuck of technobabble that makes Voyager's look coherent.
  
  I don't think you are meant to over think it
- I always thought of it as 1.5 light speed
  
  Which isn't a practical speed for interstellar travel. It's literally just over warp 1.
  More practical would be to assume that there's a k missing 1.5k (thousand) light speed is warp 9.975.

The Star Wars universe doesn't make much sense spatially anyway. Locations are as close or as far apart as the plot requires, sometimes ridiculously so, and never more or less.

Janeway fucked that sexy Irish holodeck character. She was fiending for dick. Then she got that dick and crafted that dick into a better dick and then she locked herself out of tinkering with the dick even further.
- It's been a long road
  
  Getting from there to here

I assumed that the SciFi show would adhere to the laws of Physics

Both of them are made up
- That's a conspiracy theory I haven't heard before. Enlighten me, how is the speed of light made up?
  
  I’m assuming OP means that the fictional warp drive and light speed drives from the television show and motion picture respectively, are not in fact real. But I could be totally off base and this random commenter on a Star Trek forum created a conspiracy theory nobody has heard of. /s
  
  Just like birds, light doesn't exist. Obviously.
  
  For one you can not go the speed of light, it is not possible.
  My point is that the spacecraft in both star wars and star trek behave in a way that suites the plot. If the writing needs a craft to to take longer to get somewhere then they will add distance to the journey or decrease its speed.
  It is a waste of time trying to argue about fictional story telling

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