Practical problems of near-light-speed travel
A spaceship of several kilometers length is accelerating to a very high fraction of $c$ (basically as close as they can possibly get).
Which problems can the machinery and the crew encounter?
And as follow-up question resulting from this:
Is a multiple kilometer long ship traveling at near light-speed feasible?
To clarify, I'm interested on how travelling at near-light-speed is different to travelling at "normal" speed. Dodging obstacles is not in the scope of this question and has already been addressed.
I expect the following things to be problematic, but don't know if they are actually. It would be nice if you could address them, as well as adding other problems you see.
- Moving fuel to the engine. It has to be decelerated to move from the tank to the drive at the back of the ship. What happens with that energy?
- Moving inside the ship. If it is possible for a human to actually accelerate enough to move, I expect moving down the same corridor in two directions can already be quite an adventure.
- Communicating. If a sensor picks up a problem at the drive, the signal has to travel to a mechanics/computer console, be evaluated (maybe in slow human brains) and then be reacted on.
- Turning the ship to brake. During the turning, different parts of the ship move at slightly different speeds.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/41425. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
AndreiROM is right, thanks to our friend inertia the only time you'd notice anything is while the ship is actively thrusting during acceleration and deceleration, or if you turned really sharply.
This actually has something of a beneficial nature because you could build the ship to where the floor is "down" during thrusting, and so you get something like gravity.
Imagine the ship is sitting on it's drive in Earth gravity. Build the decks so that the floors are where gravity is pulling, and have lifts/ladders to get between decks.
While the drive is operational it will be pushing the floor up toward your feet with the net effect that it will feel like there is gravity. How much gravity depends on how hard the ship is thrusting.
It would be more like a several kilometer high skyscraper instead of a several kilometer long ship. If the decks are laid out parallel to the direction of travel then you will be pushed back toward the back of the ship any time the drive is going, and this would severely limit the amount of thrusting you could do to get up to your desired speed, unless artificial gravity is a thing.
This question has some interesting numbers when it comes to travel times, in case it helps you any:
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/840/how-fast-will-1g-get-you-there
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