"Take off speed" for interplanetary transfers

I can help a little, but I'm afraid my role will be something of a buzz-kill.

@Pendaelose:

I appreciate you are trying to explain special relativity to people, but I'm afraid you've represented it quite wrong.

There are a lot of errors here. Doubling energy expenditure would not double your apparent velocity as kinetic energy follows a squared relationship with velocity (at least for low velocities. At higher velocities it becomes more complex). Saying that you can just "double" your velocity to an amount higher than c is very misleading without introducing the concept of proper velocity. The amount of time dilation is not a linear increase, but is in fact based upon a Lorenz transform.



Where delta t' is the "proper" time (be careful with that concept as it probably doesn't mean what you think it means). For reference, here are the correct numbers. I will defer to any actual theoretical physicists if they come wandering by. I do not claim to be perfect.



Special relativity is an incredible theory based upon a lot of sophisticated mathematics. I appreciate what you are trying to do, but please do some reading up on things before explaining it to others. Misconceptions can be very damaging.

And as to everyone else with hypotheses about FTL travel - I think you may be a PhD in theoretical physics short of being able to adequately discuss such matters. I certainly know I am, and I do actually need to deal with relativistic corrections in some of my work.

I'm not going to say "leave this to the professionals" as that sounds incredibly condescending to people who are often genuinely interested in the topic. However, I am going to suggest that some people have a lot of reading to do before they come back and try to explain things.

Hey guys, look! A real scientist!

let's not mess with this one.

I don't like to buzzkill , madsci. Had to let them think their energy was going farther than it possibly could
Also, I tried understanding the maths once in my freshman year of highschool. Didn't turn out well, I think i was speaking in spaghetti for a few days.

In his defense, the man is a nuclear physicist (I think).

I believe light doesnt have mass at all, the reason black holes draggs light is that energy is suspect to gravity too (you know, mass-energy thing and relativity, your avatar was a genius after all ) besides mass is just as deeply connected to spacetime as light speed itself... but yeah, just theories

but thats a bullshit unless you mean that infinite mass issue, serious problem indeed (timetravel is not that much of a problem, just avoid paradoxes and hard limit navigation computers, trought probably we will experiment with paradoxes, and who knows what we could discover)

@mered4 yes... maybe... i dont know, if pandaleose answers then we will see

in the mean time.... UBER CAN I HAZ EXTERMINANS TAKE OFF SPEED MODELZ?

Edit: Holy **** 5 new posts when i was typing mine!
Edit2: Hail the Real Scientist! i was trying to explain pretty much this, but i didnt have mathematics, thx for bringing in mathematics

Short answer:

Long answer:

VERY long answer:

Just to derail the current discourse:
@exterminans proposed switch in transfer phases seems like the way to go to solve this issue. In the very least I fail to see any downsides to it.