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Originally Posted by Tabitha
Im not a science major, but I have a friend who is a physics major and she told me once about a thing called the "star bow effect" and how it could have gotten the RTF well on their way to Earth with no propulsion required at all. Of course, from what she said, it was extreemly unlikely they found the natural requirements needed to do something like that, being, two black holes close enough to each other that if one were to go bewteen them, exactly on the event horizons of each, that the gravitational pull would sling the object at increadible speed on a course away from them. Thats about all I know, but since we were sorta talking about FTL, that might have been a solution somehow, I dunno...
tabbi
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Tabbi,
That's the problem with applying hard science to sci-fi: conventional Einsteinian/Newtonian physics don't allow FTL travel except under the most extreme circumstances. The problem with the 'bow effect' is that you have no way of decelerating; you'll run out of fuel long before you get to where you can stop....not to mention, how do you get to the black holes in the first place?
This is where "handwavium" gets employed in sci-fi writing, by simply saying that 'x' drive is capable of both starting and stoppnig your travel. Until I started applying the jump-line drive to BSG, apparently in concert with the similar "LaGrange Point Drive" of the BSG Tech Manual site, the only plausible drive I had ever heard of for Galactica was the "Albucierre"[sp?] drive.
This involved generating a massive gravity-diplacement wave that the ship would "surf" on. I discounted it for BSG almost immediately because a wave of the strength necessary to move the Ol'Girl would crush the rest of the RTF.
