Thread: Navigating The Stars At FTL

Assume you have a starship that can fly FTL through real space by accelerating. Yeah that should kill you from G force alone, but your ship creates gravity own it's own, so you have a counter gravitational force so that you don't die.

Now onto navigation. Everybody knows even galaxies move, everything in the universe moves. Seems to me that a good way to travel would be to just follow orbits, even at FTL. The reason being because if you fly in straight lines, your chances of flying off course increase. Everything in the galaxy seems to follow orbits of one kind or another, so I think following predictable orbits would likely be the ONLY way you will navigate effectively (at great distances).

What's the point of flying straight when the planet you wanna get to will have moved by the time you get there?

So all travel would follow curved routes, until you reach your destination. It may take a bit longer than flying straight, or it may even get you there faster.

At any rate it would be predictable, since your computers should be advanced enough to calculate orbital paths just from observation, because I'm including long range FTL sensors.

Why not just build a stargate and travel from one point to another through It?

Originally Posted by cosmictraveler

Why not just build a stargate and travel from one point to another through It?

That sounds novel at first but think about the implications.

1. It should require at least two Stargates, one to enter and one to exit. Somebody had to put those stargates there in the first place. Using starships

2. If the Stargate can literally drop you anywhere and you don't need to have another, than the implications are massive. Because if other people have them, they can show up at your home world anytime they want, and travel time as we know it no longer exists. Even starships are no longer necessary, except for asteroid mining and for military functions.

Travel time as we know it in science fiction would no longer exist.

You would send another stargate to wherever the first one goes to then It would self activate when you send anything through the first one to the second one.

Originally Posted by lorbo

Now onto navigation. Everybody knows even galaxies move, everything in the universe moves. Seems to me that a good way to travel would be to just follow orbits, even at FTL. The reason being because if you fly in straight lines, your chances of flying off course increase. Everything in the galaxy seems to follow orbits of one kind or another, so I think following predictable orbits would likely be the ONLY way you will navigate effectively (at great distances).

Why not fly in a straight line to where you know your destination will be when you arrive? You can make any necessary course corrections on the way to account for rounding errors. But it will be quicker and more energy-efficient than following a curved path. (Not that if you travel a curved path, even at a constant speed, you will have to use fuel to continuously accelerate.)

In reality, you might want to use a curved path in order to take advantage of gravitational slingshots.

FTL or foldspace navigation requires that a navigator get so high on spicy worm poop that they can see the future. It's true. Ask Frank Herbert.

or you could just wait for the cylons to take over & hitch a ride with them.