The mysterious Beta Grove, revisited. SPOILERS - by Bluegrime
Bluegrime on 25/5/2008 at 01:12
The biggest problem with saying that the Beta Grove travelled at the speed of light is that you have to explain how it decelerated enough before impact to avoid utterly destroying the planet on impact. If you look at the relative speed that a meteor has, and how much damage it can do on impact ( Like that honkin' huge crater in Arizona. ), and then consider how far below the speed of light meteors travel at..
Well, it creates a bit of a problem. The only way that the planet could have stood a chance in hell of not having its atmosphere turned to plasma is if the Grove either went a sub-FTL ( Substantially lower, actually, since even approaching that speed probably would've done some ugly things to Tau Ceit IV when it hit. ) speed or a wizard did it.
The problem with the "Citadel Exploded and Made Beta Grove Go at the Speed of Light" idea is that if blowing shit up was the way to break the speed of light, then surely someone in the game world could've figured it out a bit sooner, and certainly they wouldn't be using what are apparently reality altering engines to accomplish it.
( Ps. Everything on the VB is unreliable because its the future. )
Zygoptera on 25/5/2008 at 03:36
Quote Posted by Bluegrime
The problem with the "Citadel Exploded and Made Beta Grove Go at the Speed of Light" idea is that if blowing shit up was the way to break the speed of light, then surely someone in the game world could've figured it out a bit sooner, and certainly they wouldn't be using what are apparently reality altering engines to accomplish it.
Assuming you're referring to me, I wouldn't have the grove traveling at light speed- it's ridiculous and unnecessary for it to do so. Simply have the large explosion generate sufficient dayusexions<sup>TM</sup> to open a rift in normal space, or generate a wormhole or whatever. The data from the explosion could then be used to recreate its effects without the need for the large thermonuclear explosion. The idea would be to avoid the
demonstrably unrealisticness of relativistic speed travel for 'well-it-
could-happen-I-suppose' Trektastic hand waving.
kodan50 on 25/5/2008 at 14:33
Are we referring to how the many got to it's advance stage in such a short time? I might be missing something. Beta grove had a virus. How long did it take the humans and animals to mutate into what we see before we jettison the grove? If the hacker is in a healing coma for six months, then what we see is the results of at most 6 months. This isn't factoring in how long SHODAN actually had the project running in Beta, only based on how long of time the hacker was under. If we can assume that beta flew into a worm hole, then it could have been transported all the way there. If it only took a few months for the virus to mutate the crew and animals into what we saw on Beta, how long did the virus have to finish it's mutatuin project once it landed?
I doubt it would have ever reached anywhere near light speed, so I would rule that out instantly. The reason is because once it would have hit the planet, I am certain that it would have been incinerated. Besides, don't molicules break up at light speed? It wouldn't be plausable at that point for it to travel light speed anyways. I'm not too tech savvy on all the experiments resulting in how the FTL drive can accellerate the ship safely into those kinds of speeds, but I am certain beta grove did NOT have that kind of technology.
Wait, what the hell? Woudn't a wormhole push it at, or past the speed of light? ...
Well, just my thoughts...
RocketMan on 25/5/2008 at 15:51
Quote Posted by kodan50
I doubt it would have ever reached anywhere near light speed, so I would rule that out instantly. The reason is because once it would have hit the planet, I am certain that it would have been incinerated. Besides, don't molicules break up at light speed? It wouldn't be plausable at that point for it to travel light speed anyways. I'm not too tech savvy on all the experiments resulting in how the FTL drive can accellerate the ship safely into those kinds of speeds, but I am certain beta grove did NOT have that kind of technology.
Wait, what the hell? Woudn't a wormhole push it at, or past the speed of light? ...
Well, just my thoughts...
Our biggest problem is with the craft getting to the planet before the VB and landing intact. That's the delicate part.
In practice, anything moving near light speed would likely break up but not because of the speed itself...merely due to the small but very real concentration of matter in empty space ablating the grove as the particles hit it at relativistic speeds.
Wormholes can theoretically be constructed in more than one fashion. Some involve huge tidal forces and equally huge velocities. Others are like flying through an open window and are considered relatively non-invasive. That's why I figure wormholes are still plausible.
kodan50 on 26/5/2008 at 02:01
So it would be collision of matter that would break something up at light speed. So, with that logic, it should be possible to accellerate something at the speed of light, and even past, to which it would not break up as long as it doesn't hit even a single particle of dust. If Star Trek has taught me anything, it is that something that enters a wormhole does not seem to exit at the same speed it entered. Maybe. If the wormhole accellerated it for only the point to the speed of light, then the other side would have to somehow slow it down...
Aw heck, aliens tractored it to the planet to investigate, only to all be turned into the mutants. There was a battle between the infected mutants and the infected aliens, however the aliens were losing. In their last effort to survive, they tried to mimic the genetic code of one of the dead mutants, only to find the mutated DNA is destroyed upon the death of the mutant. They found enough human DNA to reconstruct a single human, and they take the rest of the alien troops and inject the single human DNA to have them all turn into the human form. But then the virus then starts to mutate the genetic code and that is why all the hybirds look the same :D Or, something of that nature... I haven't really had a chance to play the game. Something to do with me not owning it.
catbarf on 26/5/2008 at 03:17
If thousands of years had passed, as in #1, you'd think that the rest of humanity might have improved on their FTL technology for things to be seriously different when the VB got there.
RocketMan on 26/5/2008 at 04:26
Quote Posted by kodan50
So it would be collision of matter that would break something up at light speed. So, with that logic, it should be possible to accellerate something at the speed of light, and even past, to which it would not break up as long as it doesn't hit even a single particle of dust.
You would think that.....but there's something else. Surpassing the light barrier is forbidden but it has nothing to do with the matter vaporizing it. Even if you had nothing in your way, any body that approaches relativistic speeds gains mass via the Lorentz Transformation. It's a hyperbolic relationship so the body's mass approaches infinity as it reaches c. Further accelerating the body requires an ever increasing amount of energy, also approaching infinity. Therefore there simply isn't enough energy available to any body to get it to light speed on account of it's increasing mass.
Nameless Voice on 26/5/2008 at 13:12
Quote Posted by kodan50
If the wormhole accellerated it for only the point to the speed of light, then the other side would have to somehow slow it down...
The whole idea of a wormhole is a shortcut between two points. If you imagine the universe as the outside of a ball, going through a wormhole would be passing through the inside of the ball to get from point A to point B without having to travel over the distance on the 'outside' of the ball.
In other words, the disatance through the wormhole would be much shorter than the distance through normal space, so it would not be necessary to go at any particularly high speed through the wormhole.
You could also think of it as a long wall; going around the wall might involve travelling for half a kilometer in one direction, then half a kilometer back. But if you simply climb over the wall, which might take you ten seconds, you're not travelling at one kilometer every ten seconds (360km/h).
The Magpie on 26/5/2008 at 14:09
Great analogy.
I recently did some simple calculations myself on the physics of the Beta Grove acceleration/deceleration, only to discover that (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?p=141096#post141096) someone else had published first, haha.
Either rely on the wormhole, or some psi power mumbojumbo accelerating and shielding and mass reducing etcetera, all overseen by SHODAN.
Or both, actually.
Could also have been... "LOOK! COWS!"
--
Larris
kodan50 on 26/5/2008 at 14:24
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
The whole idea of a wormhole is a shortcut between two points. If you imagine the universe as the outside of a ball, going through a wormhole would be passing through the inside of the ball to get from point A to point B without having to travel over the distance on the 'outside' of the ball.
In other words, the disatance through the wormhole would be much shorter than the distance through normal space, so it would not be necessary to go at any particularly high speed through the wormhole.
You could also think of it as a long wall; going around the wall might involve travelling for half a kilometer in one direction, then half a kilometer back. But if you simply climb over the wall, which might take you ten seconds, you're not travelling at one kilometer every ten seconds (360km/h).
I think I see what you are saying. The grove would have flown into one of the wormholes, and the distance between the start and end point would be much smaller than that of normal space, so the grove could travel all the way from point A to point B technically a shorter distance than it would have from normal space, even though point A and point B are the same distance. I think I know what I am trying to say. It is almost like you take a wormhole, stretch it to point A and point B, then cut a large peice out the middle and connect the broken ends. Point A and point B are still in the same place, but the distance relative to inside the wormhole would be shorter. Is that right?
