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Edited by DJenser: 3/5/2014 7:13:59 PM
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Realistically speaking, unless we created FTL travel (or some other means of overcoming Einsteinian time dilation), travel to other planets will still take years. Maybe not for us, the players, but years will have passed on Earth while we were zipping along at near-[i]c [/i] speeds. Honestly, I don't think we're "trapped" in our Solar System. What's keeping us here is that the keys to our salvation lie scattered about the system and we need to clear out all of the squatters in our backyard in order to get at them.
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  • Doesn't it only take light 8 minutes to reach us from the sun? So if we were traveling at c or faster than it, wouldn't traveling to planets only take minutes?

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  • Yes but if you travel at the speed of light, time slows down for you. [spoiler]is that right?[/spoiler]

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  • Exactly. To anyone not traveling at the speed of light, the spaceship got to Mars from earth in like 2 minutes. (Not YEARS as the previous post states). But to the pilot of the spaceship, it would almost feel like no time has passed.

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  • Oh good we're on the same page. This might be they're excuse fir not having since it would only feel like a few seconds then what's the point.

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  • Sorry for the confusion. Travel to [b][i]extrasolar[/i][/b] planets would take years at the speed of light. Within our Solar System, it would still be easy to lose hours (or even days) running back and forth to the outer planets, depending on their orbital position. You're assuming that Mars and Earth are in conjunction when they could, in fact, be on opposite sides of the sun at that point. That would take just over 21 minutes. Doesn't seem like much, but it adds up over time. Now, let's talk about Jupiter... At opposition, it's 577,253,838 miles away, & it would take nearly an hour one way. Making that trip a dozen times would seem like nothing to you, but you would have lost a day in real time. Saturn is nearly twice that distance. Of course, all of this rests on the assumption that you're starting out from Earth. Say you had to travel from Jupiter to Saturn and it was in opposition... You would be losing 2 hours of real time each way, and we're not even talking about going past Saturn at this point. ...And don't [i]even[/i] get me started on navigational hazards... Like the man says: "It ain't like dusting crops, boy... Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it."

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  • See, that answer makes sense. Thank you.

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  • Nowadays, we face 3 main obstacles with rapid inter-system travel: Fuel, Life Support and Inertia. We can accommodate or even overcome one or two of these obstacles to one degree or another, but the third one inevitably limits our ability to move rapidly around the system. In game terms, creating propulsion capable of zipping us across the solar system at the speed of light is probably not as great an obstacle as devising a means of overcoming inertia. Technically, we'd only need to use fuel to accelerate, decelerate and maneuver. The rest of the time we can coast. The other benefit to being able to rapidly accellerate & decelerate is that we reduce the need for large supplies of life support (air, water, etc) due to reduced mission time. The problem is that, without overcoming inertia, we would arrive at our destination looking like a spacesuit full of oatmeal as our soft tissues are liquefied by unimaginable G-forces. In the present, we must limit our acceleration & braking to a certain threshold in order to keep crews from dying as the mission gets underway. The biological element is the chief limitation in any mechanism used to traverse the system. Until that could be overcome, in-system travel will, in fact, take years. Therefore, in addition to devising a means of lightspeed or near-lightspeed travel, I can only assume that Humanity has also developed a means of eliminating or mitigating inertia.

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  • WORMHOLES !!

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  • [quote]Honestly, I don't think we're "trapped" in the lie scattered about the system and we need to clear out all of the squatters in our backyard in order to get at them.[/quote] Intriguing angle.

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  • Yeah, sorry... Choppy editing job. I've fixed it.

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  • It's cool, I knew what you meant. It's a viewpoint I hadn't considered before. That we may already have been engaged in extra-solar explorations.

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  • Think about it. If the Traveler can travel between stars (or perhaps even galaxies), why couldn't Mankind? I think the only reason we hadn't launched massive interstellar expeditions, aside from the ridiculously high cost (even by Golden Age standards), is that we had been devoting our time & energy to exploring every cubic inch of space within the Sol System. Once we had managed to harness the nearly limitless resources contained within the other planets & asteroid belts, we might have then been able to turn our attention outward... In fact, I daresay we were on the cusp of doing so. (I suspect that the Warp Gates used by the Vex were created by us, just before the Collapse.) Unfortunately, we never got that chance.

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  • That said maybe humanity, post-Traveler, wasn't expansionist and just basked in the glories of the "Golden Age".

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  • Your reasoning is sound alright.

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