I. Love. Science.

Seriously. Science is like the coolest thing ever.

Today, I had some awesome conversations about how my spaceships would be able to transport people literally trillions of miles away to colonize other planets as well as do trade and what not. Scientists (real scientists today) have discovered planets with earth-like conditions as close as thirteen lightyears away. That doesn't seem too bad, I guess, if you could get a ship that could travel at, or close to, light speed. I wondered how I could get a ship that could travel as close to the speed of light as possible, as well as sustain that energy for years of travel time. This is where the fun really starts.

I got a few ideas from friends that included constant acceleration and nuclear pulse propulsion, both of which sound pretty cool. Basically, if the ship accelerates at ten meters per second squared for fifty percent of its journey and decelerates at the same rate for the other half of the journey, so it can stop at it's place of arrival, the ship reaches near light speed on it's way across space. With this method, it would take about fourteen years to reach the closest hospitable planets. But here's a cool feature! The people on board the ship would experience the journey as only about five years or so instead of fourteen. Thank you, relativity. ALSO. Because of the acceleration speed, the ship would have artificial gravity on it that is similar to Earth's. Boom. This is awesome.

Now think about using nuclear pulse propulsion to do this accelerating and decelerating. One way to do this is to detonate atomic bombs behind the ship, on the other side of some kind of wall/shock absorber combo of course, that provide specific impulses of six thousand to one hundred thousand seconds. For comparison, the engines in NASA's space shuttles can produce specific impulses of 453 seconds in a vacuum. Just think of specific impulses as measurements of thrust. I personally like the idea of having thrusters that are powered by lasers shooting at specifically designed fuel that compresses so forcefully that it creates nuclear fusion (what powers the sun) explosions. The energy from these explosions can be funneled in certain directions so that the ship can have control over its movement, as well as use some of the energy to run the ship and whatnot. Science.

Now on to Scarlett's wormhole magic. The current idea is that she finds a wormhole drive (actually the snippet I'm working on now) that is able to open wormholes to another point in space. This drive shall work because in this universe, the the third dimension is actually folded over on itself in the fourth dimension. This creates mappable "close points" where the drive can open a wormhole to specific coordinates. Scarlett can get to these close points and activate the drive, put in the coordinates, and open a wormhole with little energy required, at least compared to opening wormholes willy-nilly. This means she can jump on ships from out of nowhere to raid them, but it puts in a little bit of excitement because she has to reach a close point through straight space before she can disappear. How's that sound?

See? Science is fun. I got so distracted by these conversations that I didn't have much time to actually write, though. But hey, these ideas are pretty cool! At least I'm having fun.