/sci/ - Science & Math

>>3767862

Oh man, I've had that picture for ages and LOVE it.

Have a short story about solar sails: http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416521461/1416521461___6.htm

>>3069488

You're most welcome!

They had two months until the ship arrived, so they got to work: Unsupervised, with the public unaware, the people of Earth put together, fuelled, and launched a relativistic bomb. The antimatter for its drive was supplied by the Asimov Array on Mercury, the ship's parts built on the Moon, then blasted into orbit and assembled. Small amounts of antimatter boosted fusion reactions, and the ship flew around the Earth-Moon system, for testing. Then it accelerated to Mercury, where it would be fully loaded. The ship's dry mass was ten tonnes, and it would carry over 100 tonnes of antimatter (Consider that a single tonne is sufficient to provide for all of Earth's energy needs as of 2010). Then, the ship, put together in mere days, was blasted into space.
The flares that had been spotted by telescopes on Earth and the Moon were dismissed by the government, but when the antimatter drive was fired, the gamma-ray flare outshone the Sun and was detected by dozens of different institutes that demanded an explanation. When one was provided, everyone was horrorized. The most extremist on Earth cheered, but everyone else became worried. Some of the colonies pointed their radio antennas at the Carl Sagan, hoping that it was not too late, that the tiny beams of radio waves would outrun the relativistic missile even if it was by a fraction of an hour, maybe warn David, give him enough time to turn the ship, take it off-course.

>>2119110

Yeah but your dolphin fetish doesn't ride beams of sunlight and accelerates all the way up to 437 km/s.

Photosails!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUgC6215Gko

OVER AND OVER FOR ALL ETERNITY

But some remember, and tell their children stories. They are stories of giants with spears they would throw at each other and to the Moon and beyond, stories of machines too small for the eye to see, stories of silver birds flying above the clouds and silver men that could out-think and out-run a man, stories of beast-headed women and great sails carrying the first people in the voyages of discovery.

>>1984316

It was an example, I still prefer solar sails above all, at least for interstellar.

inb4 nihilist fatalist emo teenager who thinks he has it all figured out

Oh and on topic, pic related.

Faster-than-light removes the sense of size. When you can zip around the galaxy in no time you forget how big it all is.

People traveling for millennia-objective in only a few years-subjective, tied to relativistic rockets and watching the stars redshift and blueshift, now that's epic. It tells the reader how big the whole thing is, in space and time.

Most science fiction is just concerned about jumping from one world to the next with magical faster-than-light spacecraft they use as if they were planes.

A good thing for a change.

The story ran--how did the story run? Everyone knew the reference to Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more, but no one knew exactly how it happened. Their names were welded to the glittering timeless jewelry of romance. Sometimes they were compared to Heloise and Abelard, whose story had been found among books in a long-buried library. Other ages were to compare their life with the weird, ugly-lovely story of the Go-Captain Taliano and the Lady Dolores Oh.

Out of it all, two things stood forth--their love and the image of the great sails, tissue-metal wings with which the bodies of people finally fluttered out among the stars.

Mention him, and others knew her. Mention her, and they knew him. He was the first of the inbound sailors, and she was the lady who sailed The Soul.

It was lucky that people lost their pictures. The romantic hero was a very young-looking man, prematurely old and still quite sick when the romance came. And Helen America, she was a freak, but a nice one: a grim, solemn, sad, little brunette who had been born amid the laughter of humanity. She was not the tall, confident heroine of the actresses who later played her.

She was, however, a wonderful sailor. That much was true. And with her body and mind she loved Mr. Grey-no-more, showing a devotion which the ages can neither surpass nor forget. History may scrape off the patina of their names and appearances, but even history can do no more than brighten the love of Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more.

Both of them, one must remember, were sailors.