Autzoo.1482
net.space
utzoo!henry
Thu Mar 11 23:47:12 1982
quasars as continuous-drive starships, cont.
The people who took issue with my claim that after a year at 1G you are
wasting your time putting on more speed are pretty much right.  Without
thinking about it properly I used an argument from a discussion which
dealt with unmanned probes, where time dilation is pretty much irrelevant.
Further acceleration is beneficial for manned vessels, because you start
gaining time advantage.  Mind you, you'd better be flying a Bussard ramjet
if you expect to get any major time dilation, because even annihilation
engines get hit by the mass-ratio explosion before any really large
advantage builds up.  I have seen the numbers for 1-G total-annihilation
rockets;  they are not that impressive.  We are going to need Bussard
ramjets or some other non-rocket drive for satisfactory interstellar
exploration, and any attempt to explain the quasars as starships should 
consider this.

Does anybody know what the upper bound on quasar acceleration is, based
on the lack of any redshift change seen so far?  Spectroscopists deal in
numbers with six and seven significant figures (really freaky stuff to
hit for the first time after second-year physics...), and I suspect that
it is already pretty definite that the quasars are not accelerating.

Interesting thought:  are we seeing engine glow or exhaust glow?  If the
latter, and assuming a starship-class exhaust velocity, then the jets
are going AWAY from us, and the ships are accelerating in our direction...
The animals in the game preserve are running wild, but the Imperial Space
Marines are on their way...