message 0142

• Acceleration and maneuvering in space

>From: Jo Jaquinta <jaymin@maths.tcd.ie>
>Subject: cherryhlist: acceleration
>Date: Tue, 18 May 93 16:54:41 BST

Onno writes:
>Next question: How does a carrier reach these velocities? At the end
>of _DS_, _Norway_ accelerates to a significant percentage of light-
>speed, decelerates, turns around and comes back at high speed without
>crushing the crew or using jumpdrive?
	Yes. She states somewhere in _DS_ that a carrier can hit up
to 10G, with the synced rotational crew-cylinder. If you do the calculations
though, the Norway breaks dock at Pell at XX:00, and at YY:00 it is
going .75C. Plugging the numbers into your standard newtonain acceleration
you get the Norway accelereating at 43G!
	This bugged me for some time. My theory was that the jump vanes
provided some sort of inertial compensation. (If you've got one magic device,
might as well make it explain everything) I.e. if slightly charging
the vanes dampened things by a factor of 10 then real-world acceleration
of 43G computes to a perceived acceleration of 4.3G.
	However, in the end of Chanur's Legacy, (somewhere) she talks
about "boosting up". Like when you cycle the vanes to dump velocity,
here she cycled the vanes to increase velocity.
	This would give the ship the high momentumn, more or less
instantaneously, but cuts out maneuvering. I would imagine it is a
high-power maneuver that really only military-spec powerplants could
hit reliably. (Or unloaded merchants...)
	I can see a wonderful fleet maneuver when the are zooming across
the system, dump down to nil, make a right angled turn, and boost back
up again.  Kind of thing Union would never expect...


		Jo