Post by p***@yahoo.co.ukCan someone please help a struggling author with a bit of information?
I am writing a Science Fiction story, and the craft involved goes FTL.
I'm not planning on going into too much detail about how it does it,
just that it does. My question is this; am I right in saying "Faster
Than Light; No Left Nor Right"? i.e. if an object exceeds the light
barrier then it cannot change direction.
They threw that up in an episode of _Voyager_ for some
deranged reason --- it went against a lot of episodes with stuff that
steered while in warp including at least one Original Series episode
where a ship was spinning doughnuts at warp --- but, as with everything
on _Voyager_, people ignore it for both the Star Trek universe and any
other universes it should happen to touch.
As far as the real world goes, you can't go faster than light
at all, so steering is an irrelevancy. For your own setting, you can
make up whatever rules fit your dramatic need or your aesthetic sense.
There are some faster-than-light gimmicks, such as wormhole
travel or hyperjumps, where steering's impossible because there's no
transit time or because the direction is outside your ship's control.
For methods of faster-than-light travel which are basically
slower-than-light-only-faster, such as Star Trek's Dean Drive-based
travel mechanism, I can't see *not* steering making a lot of sense.
Well, apparently at some points in the _Doctor Who_ saga it was
suggested The Doctor just couldn't even influence where the Tardis
went, and I admit that worked out in giving an excuse for him to
end up every week in a quarry in southeastern England within fifty
years of the episode's production date, but that's a special case,
and I don't know when they last seriously insisted The Doctor had no
control over his destination.
--
http://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/ Joseph Nebus
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