Re: FTL "Warp Surfing" Drive

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Brian Bilderback wrote:

> Randy W. Wolfmeyer wrote:
>
> >He's referring (I think) to Marc Miller's Traveller.
>
> Ah.  I thought I recognized the name.  Never played the game.  My
loss, from
> what I've heard.
>

I've never actually played, but I do have several books from various
editions.

> Makes sense.	It would also stand to reason then that you would have
to plot
> FTL courses that avoided any significant mass en route, no?

That's not too hard, space is really big.  You'd probably plan your trip
in limited distance runs, stopping every so often to check that you're
on
course, making corrections and then go again.

> >R << d << D
> >where R is the radius of the warp bubble, d is the distance from the
> >starting star, D is the distance to the second star.
> >
>
> what does  << mean?  I'm not a physicist or mathemetician. I know <
and > as
> less than and greater than, but not <<.
>

<< means MUCH less than, and >> means MUCH greater than.  Usually in
physics we use these symbols to mean that we can ignore certain
variables.
How much greater or lesser than it has to be to use these symbols
depends
on the problem you're dealing with.

> I'd actually prefer to remain MUCH farther than that from any black
holes,
> for good, thank you.	;-)