| Author | Message | ||
     LtCmdr Maiko D'rall |
Contrary to popular opinion, physics is a bitch. You can spend your entire life inventing ways around its various and nefarious limitations, but in the end, you are still stuck with the basic laws of physics. Stopping a starship is not like stopping a bicycle. On a planet, there is resistance from air and the wheel's contact with the grounds, plus usually some sort of braking system that restricts movement of the wheels. No, stopping a starship is often something left up to a pilot's imagination and the present situation. The standard 'all stop' typically requires a drop from warp and a reversed warp field. In such cases, the starship re-enters normal space with the same inertia it had previously - which is usually one quarter sublight or a complete stop. Slipstream is much the same, though there is typically half-impulse inertias to deal with. Stopping at impulse can be tricky. Old Terran exploratory vehicles had to make turns and execute retroburns to slow down and reach a destination. Thankfully, our technology today includes reverse thrust vanes on impulse engines. Getting a starship to stop quietly, then get out of the area quietly, is a pipe dream without this technology. Facing down the Xur in a nebula that renders high-end computing and sensors useless... and having to make a u-turn without them noticing? I think I burned a lot of karma that day. -- Excerpt from "So For This I Get To Wear A Phaser?" - Autobiography, Maiko D'rall |