Re:

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.

Before the ships can
>activate their jump drives they must be a 20-diameter distance from a
>source of gravity.  In reality, I think it has to do with being far
enough
>from a gravitational source so that 1) spacetime is locally flat over
the
>area of your warp bubble, 2) so that your warp bubble doesn't disrupt
>things for you starting/destination point.

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?

>In the paper it says:
>
>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 <<.

>I think d would depend more on the mass of the planet/star you're
starting
>near than on the diameter.

That seems right.

You'd want to be more than 20 diameters away
>from a black hole, I'd think (using the diameter of the event horizon
of
>course, the singularity has no diameter.)

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

Thanks for the help, this fascinates AND intimidates me.

3B^2

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