Kevin Breeman/Logs

Introduction

This page isn't going to be a series of log entries per se but rather a series of small blurbs describing what Breeman has been up to lately outside of his daily work.

Logs

238908.18: Borg Nano Probes

Before the official promotions banquet Kevin started looking at some borg nano probes he'd received from an officer aboard the USS Avandar. To the right is an image he took of one of them while he was programming it.

238909.15: Distances in Space

I thought I'd write this one as Breeman's writer. Every now and again in our simming the topic of astronomical distances comes up. With warp speed our ships and shuttlecraft don't have quite as much of a problem travelling the insane distances involved in space travel. But it's easy to forget that objects that don't have their own warp fields still do have to deal with these distances. So I thought it would be cool to put up a few facts about how vast and empty space is just to keep things in perspective and prevent the "conveniently close planet" trope [1]

Light Speed

Light speed is the ultimate speed limit in space, outside of warp. Nothing can exceed that speed and still have a mass. That means an electron or a neutrino MUST obey since both have a small mass (very small). Anything that goes above light speed without creating a warp field for itself breaks this law and pays a heavy price. Specifically its mass becomes infinite.

An Imaginary Hyper-Fast Bullet

Just for fun let's imagine we have a railgun that shoots slugs at a velocity of 25% the speed of light. So in other words a bullet from this gun travels at 75000 kilometres per second (or about 46000 miles per second).

Astronomical Units: Local Neighbourhood Distances aren't So Close

Let's start with some short distances. An Astronomical Unit (AU for short) is about the distance from the Earth to the sun. That is 149,597,870,700 meters, or about 93 million miles (see Wikipedia).

This distance looks quite large but really it's quite close. It only takes roughly 8 and a half minutes for light to make the trip. That means that if you were on Earth watching a solar flare on the sun through a telescope you would be viewing the sun as it was 8 minutes ago. Our railgun slug will take four times 8 minutes, so 32 minutes, to reach the sun if fired from the Earth (ignoring the accelerating effects of the sun's gravity of course).

Let's talk about a few of our Sol system's planets. Jupiter is just over 5 AU from the sun. That means that at its closest Jupiter is roughly 4 AU from us. In other words light leaving Earth takes just over half an hour to reach Jupiter. The railgun slug will take 2 hours. The distance from the sun to neptune is about 30 AU. In other words light takes four hours to get from the Earth to Neptune at its closest. The railgun slug will take 16 hours.

A Light Year: Making an Astronomical Unit Peanuts

If it only takes light 8 minutes to travel a 93 million miles (one AU) it takes it one year to travel a light year. Now putting things further into perspective one light year is over 63,000 times the distance of an astronomical unit.

To reach one light year our railgun slug will take four years. And once you have travelled this distance you still need to do it again 3 times before you get anywhere near another star.