Re: Blacker than Black

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On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 11:05 PM, John Tailby
<john_tailby@xtra.co.nz>wrote:

> [...]
>
> Unless ships can jump relatively close to their destination it will
take
> them month's	or years to get to an inner planet in a way that matches
> velocity with the target planet. Vast amounts of reaction mass would
be
> needed to accelerate a ship and then deccelerate it at the other end
of the
> journey.
>

John G Hemry (of the Lost Fleet series that some on here know) shows
this
quite well in his novels. To overcome the vast distances in a solar
system,
he has all his combat happening at relativistic speeds of 0.1 to 0.2c.
Still, it takes hours and days to get into engagement range, and
everyone
can see everybody sooner or later (he also deals with light travel time
of
how long it takes before a defending unit will see an intruding fleet,
just
due to the time it takes for the photons to get from the intruding ships
to
the defending detectors).

Mk