Me[edit]

Fan of the show and trying not to fanwank. Hopes to one day learn how to make paragraphs. Might add more content here latter.

Fun Fanwanking Ideas[edit]

Expect poor grammar and bad spelling, this is my brain storming section.

Beyond the Red Line[edit]

Another possiblity for extreme computational needs for FTL drives is because the great variation that can occur in star coordinates when moving extreme distances faster than the speed of light. A very common note in astronomy is that when we look up at the sky, we don't see the sky as it is now but as it was, and the farther something is the more we get a glimps at the past, so far about to 12.5 billion years. Taking this into consideration when FTLing, one would be litterally moving through time (in a sense); at one point they see a birth of a star and when they FTL closer to it, they immedatily see its death. The consequence of this is that when one would FTL, the previous star charts that they used to navigate would not be the same as the new ones they could draw up from their new coordinates. With much larger jumps, their star charts would become progressively more useless as the star systems around them progressively change and move.

In order to keep track of their position (assuming the Colonials soley rely on star charts for positioning) they would then have to run astronomical simulations of how the stars would look like at their new location, predicting how the stars will change in the future for where they are going and how the stars looked in the past from where they came. Unlike in early navigation where sailors could depend on the stars as fixed points, any race that FTLs would have no such luxery. In a sense space travel would be more like traveling through a cave, where you would contantly keep track of the star charts from where you came and constantly generate new ones for where you are going.

Considering how many stars are in a patch of sky and how many position points it could possibly occupy (amongst other things), a really good computer would be needed for FTLing.

See Navigation in the Re-imagined Series and the Red Line

--DuMan 16:58, 30 June 2007 (CDT)