How is the jump into/travel through hyperspace / lightspeed used? When using lightspeed, everything outside the spaceship ages quicker than the pilot traveling at lightspeed. Any thoughts on this?

Within VE, is this purely a faster way of traveling without the aging thing, or are there other factors to keep in mind?

Ya, going through hyperspace would be an amazing thing to do. Faster and can lead to more places.

Thedrish wrote:Keep in mind though that in RL, going faster than light, time around the spacecraft will go faster than the pilot would experience. Stuff related to Einstein, etc

Aye, but if you technically travel a shorter road, you get somewhere before someone going the longer road at the same speed.  The effects of aging should not come into play.  That's essentially what hyperspace is, a "shortcut" rather than actually traveling faster.

I love being a physics major

Kanderin Draken wrote:Don't try and critiscise Doc's Physics, he can and WILL make you look very, very stupid :P

Yah, first hand experience.

Psh, come on, that was just once

Angel wrote:Besides, we're writing science fiction. It's called a willing suspension of disbelief. Or do you need us to explain how blaster rifles, ion engines, repulsorlifts, lightsabers, artificial intelligence, and the Force work as well?

It's Science Fiction, not Fiction Science

Kanderin Draken wrote:Don't try and critiscise Doc's Physics, he can and WILL make you look very, very stupid :P

Although I had no intention to criticise anyone, I just tried to make a point that there is more to it than just "a shortcut"

Virtually all fictional Faster-Than-Light travel systems have ways of bypassing special relativity, which has as a side-effect the time dilation you're refering to.

The movies illustrate hyperspace as a sort of mottled blue tunnel through which ships fly. We can safely assume, per the illustrations above, that this is a means of shortening distances without actually doing much about speed. Star Wars helps to illustrate this a bit with the "starline" effect and from the third-person camera views of ships jumping out of hyperspace very suddenly.

To take examples from a few other fictional universes. Star Trek uses the concept of 'subspace' rather than hyperspace. The ships in that universe create a shell around themselves that shifts the ship into subspace and allows them to travel faster than light (while also avoiding sticky physics problems). One of Timothy Zahn's non-Star Wars books, called the Icarus Hunt, had ships that featured a 'cutter' mounted on the front which would literally cut the space in front of the ship apart and allow them to enter some sort of hyperdimensional reality wherein they were able to achieve superluminal travel.

Anyway, yeah, seeing as we deal with Star Wars, time dilation isn't a problem. Assume that tens of thousands of years of spacefaring civilization has found some sort of answer to the problem.

This place tends to be my standard place to look for SW tech information, talked to the guy a couple times (He did the deck plan for the Corellian Hound). No real reason other than it seems to all make sense to me, as a major in, um, nothing.

http://www.colonialchrome.co.uk/
http://www.colonialchrome.co.uk/Pages/Misc/Root_2_A_Tech101.html
http://www.colonialchrome.co.uk/Pages/Rants/Rant_Articles.htm

Dont make me try and remember General Relativity, and then go Generally Relativistic on your arse.


(seriously dont, I've blanked those three months from my life, the words null geodisic have no meaning to me anymore)

That's time dilation at work!

Magic!