The standard physics term for " the speed of light in a vacuum" is lower-case letter c. If you just want the Cliff Notes, read on. If you want all the nitty-gritty details including savage equations with nasty pointed teeth, there is an great scientific paper here.
So authors who want to write hard science fiction but do not want to loose their audience are in a bit of a bind. That rat-bastard Albert Einstein's theory of relativity more or less forbids starships and other things from traveling faster than the speed-of-light. Traveling between stars at speeds up to the speed-of-light can take centuries, which does not allow science fiction authors to write fast-paced novels. The audience immediately wants to know why this tactic was not used in any of the seven earlier movies. SPOILERS: Vice Admiral Holdo causes the lead Resistance ship to make the jump to lightspeed, which does something catastrophic to Snoke's flagship. The only problem is readers asking awkward questions try to penetrate the blackbox, usually in the form of "If the FTL drive can do this, then it should be able to do ".Īn example of a blackbox breaking and ruining everything can be found in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Using blackboxing the author can have the highly-unscientific FTL drive that their readers crave, but make the rest of the background ultra-hard science fiction. If any reader asks the author how the drive works, the answer is "Splendidly". The author just gives the drive a technobabble name and leaves it at that. In extreme cases, the author does not even mention how the FTL drive works. Functionally the only thing that penetrates the black box are the pre-established limits, not the operating mechanism. This means the disruptive effects of the FTL technology are never explored in the novel, because it never occurs to any of the characters in the story to look. The FTL method that is part of the background of a science fiction novel is put into a black box, that nobody can look inside. In the better scifi novels, the author uses a technique mentioned in the Fate Space Toolkit RPG: " blackboxing". The second FTL page is for samples of faster-than-light travel in various science fiction. Jettison the pod ftl free#
AND simultaneously is as free as possible from nasty unintended consequences that will allow their readers to point out logical inconsistencies and laugh. This page is about a science fiction author designing a faster-than-light system that logically allows the sort of science fiction background they want to write about. Space opera with no StarDrive is like chocolate cake without the chocolate. However, while Faster-Than-Light travel is about as handwavium as you can get, it is unfortunately the sine qua non of interstellar space opera.
I wanted to keep the website as free from handwavium as possible.
I wasn't going to put this page in, but I have to.
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