Slower Than Light Interstellar Travel

Spacedock delves into relativity and the mean of reaching other stars without an FTL drive.

Initiative for Interstellar Studies art by Macrebisz for Project Hyperion:

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Battlezone II Music by Carey Chico

Spacedock does not hold ownership of the copyrighted materiel (Footage, Stills etc) taken from the various works of fiction covered in this series, and uses them within the boundaries of Fair Use for the purpose of Analysis, Discussion and Review.

[Threxer]

Remember, it's not about the destination, it's about the cosmic horrors beyond comprehension along the way.

[enoughothis]

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

[WillKeaton]

Shout out to the _Marathon, _ which is actually the Martian moon Deimos, repurposed into a colony ship that took 300 years to reach the system of Tau Ceti. The people who were born during this trip were called BOBs, an acronym for Born On Board.

[HyRin]

Shoutout to Rimworld, a setting with fully interstellar civilizations and multiple settled worlds with super high tech, but no FTL

[achillesa]

SIDONIA IN THE THUMBNAIL WE ARE SO BACK

such an underrated show!

[Metal_Maoist]

I really enjoy the near lightspeed travel in Lancer (the ttrpg). While FTL does exist, it's rare, expensive, only connects between specific FTL stations and needs to be set up at both the start and end points, so most interstellar travel is done at nearlight speed instead.

A lot of the setting takes into account how a galactic society would be shaped by the fact that going to space for a living basically entirely uncouples you from the regular flow of time. On many of the more remote planets, dedicated space traders are treated almost like mystical fey creatures that show up once every one or two decades and never seem to age

[walldogification]

The RPG lancer has a great plot point about sub light ships. A generation ship leaves a dying earth on a journey that will take thousands of years at 50% light speed. Back on earth humans survive the apocholypse rebuild and develop new faster ships and accidently beat the old ship to its destination. Needless to say, when a thousand yeat journey to a new world ends with some other humans sitting on your new Eden, conflict ensues.

[DomyTheMad]

4:25 please do note that from a physics and medicine perspective; "the ability to 'freeze and thaw a person' dozens, hundreds (if not thousands) of years later all but demands the existence of reviving the dead AND near godlike life extension capacity."

[theworkshopwhisperer.]

Talking of maintaining a colony ship with religious fervour. I remember a friend briefly mentioning in elite dangerous colony ships created before the discovery of FTL are treated like uncontacted tribes. There's just so many different things you can do with that. It may be financially unviable but it would definitely be possible to get the descendants of colonists wherever they were going within their lifespan. But the place they were going to colonise is probably already fully inhabited had a devastating war been reduced to ash and rebuilt.

[darthhodges]

Firefly did something unique by having the setting be a highly unusual multi-star system with many habitable worlds (most having been terraformed). Traversing the system with their sublight technologies could take just a few weeks and unless you deliberately tried you were never more than two or three days from someplace to park. Things were close enough together that instant communication was possible across multiple worlds. For comparison real life Earth to Mars transmissions take between 3 and 22 minutes depending on where the planets are in their orbits. Presumably inhabitants of "Earth that was" took generational or stasis ships to that new solar system to colonize it.

[texanzeppo]

Minor correction: Satellites in very low Earth orbit do experience negative time dilation (their clocks tick slower) relative to ground because of their high speed. However, the higher a satellite's altitude, the slower their orbit and simultaneously the less they experience gravitational time dilation as well because they're not as deep in Earth's gravity well. Above an orbital altitude of approximately 10.000 km, Satellites actually experience a net positive time dilation (their clocks tick faster) relative to ground.

[UncleManuel]

"I've been to the edge of space - there is more space."
-Jayne Cobb (Firefly) 😁🤘

[TheArklyte]

Always wanted to see a sleek soft sci-fi ship like Enterprise duking it out with 700+km monstrosity of a hard sci-fi colony ship that might be less advanced in some tech, but was build to far greater degree of reliability and has scale to back it up(phasers are cool until you remember that said "old timer" would have anti-asteroid CIWS flinging enough antimatter canisters to vaporise incoming planetoids).

[maxreimer]

Love the confused captain O’Neil when talking about time dilation. excellent stargate meme

[elijahlevi]

Glad that you mentioned Revelation Space here! Reynolds takes things even further with House of Suns, set millions of years in the future in a galaxy fully colonized by humanity, in which the reality that FTL is impossible remains true. The story takes place over hundreds of thousands of years, depending on your reference frame.

[sheldonpetrie]

I always interpreted that the ISV's from Avatar was a ~14 year round trip from Earth to Pandora and Back Again. They stayed in orbit long enough to refuel before heading home. Another ship would arrive shortly after the previous ISV departed. The skeleton crew that was conscious during the trip would have experiences less than 7 years of time passing of course due to relativistic effects.

If you look at the timeline from Way of Water, it wasn't 14 + 14 years for the fleet of ISV's to return, it like sub 20 years given that that Spider (Miles Quaritch's kid) was a teenager in the movie but was was a Baby when the Venture Star departed. and the eldest of Jake and Neytiri's kids were again no more than teenagers, or the Pandoran equivalent.

After Avatar ends the Venture Star returns to earth (along any other ships in mid transit) as there were many other ships in transit in both directions. Then they regroup to re-arm and re-mobilize to build those large prefab base cores that they dropped from orbit at the start of Way of Water. A fleet of a dozen ISV's all depart a few years later. So say 7 + 3 + 7, well under 20 years to return. The use of fusion drives to clear a large safety zone to enable them to build a secure beachhead was brutal yet effective.

[DrakeAurum]

One of the issues that can come up, and is covered in some fiction, is the possibility of being technologically and literally outpaced during the course of the voyage. This is common in settings with FTL, where the concept of generation ships is often introduced by the heroes' ship coming across an old slowboat in deep space, but it can occur even without FTL - a relatively slow generation ship taking hundreds of years to cross between stars might be overhauled by one built fifty or a hundred years later that's capable of reaching a much higher percentage of the speed of light.

[annonymousrandomfum]

your videos have really helped me efficiently design spacecraft, space warships, space fighters, etc keep up the good work man, I really appreciate the videos.

[mitthrawnuruodo]

Knights of Sidonia is criminaly underrated

[MisterPuck]

4:53 Mind uploads and artificial human bodies made to mimic the way human bodies function is a big plot point the game _Xenoblade X._ In order to save as many people as possible, human minds were loaded into servers on ships that also carried the genetic profiles and materials required to clone new bodies for the preserved minds. Most of them slept, while some were in the aforementioned robotic artificial bodies in order to crew the ship.