Quote:
Originally posted by Dogface and Soulmage
They will not travel at that speed "forever". Eventually, they will be swept into a gravity well.
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Yes, bullets would continue to travel practically forever. However, people concerned with the navigation hazards they present don't really understand the scale of the universe.
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Yes, that's the problem with SciFi. Genuine reality often just isn't interesting. How often do we hear lines like, "If we jump without careful calculations, we could end up in the center of a star, or. . ."
Not gonna happen. The volume of stars, compared to the volume of interstellar space, is a percent so small as to be invisible without a miscroscope. [That's a mixed-metaphor joke, for our Rio Linda lurkers]. Bullets travelling even at 100,000 mps will almost certainly never hit anything for millions of years, if at all. Not even an extended gravity well belonging to, say, a large galaxy-core black hole. Odds are against the bullet coming anywhere near the center of any galaxy.
So the trick is to write script stuff that has a believable veneer, and let the impossible parts be easy to ignore. Unlike, say, a human hacker writing in five hours a virus for a computer that no human has ever seen before.
Still, you gotta like the idea of "biodegradable bullets" that don't contaminate the fragile environment of interstellar space. (What kinda "bio"? I figure vacuum-inhabiting microbes that usually metabolize cosmic energy, but will "eat" metal and emit tiny little molecules of microbe excrement that are still travelling at 100,000 mps but are too small to damage anything unless they score a direct hit somebody's DNA.)
