From: "James Wynn" 
Subject: Re: (urth) chems on Urth and a FTL Whorl
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 13:05:02 -0500

Matthew Malthouse wrote:
Any requirement for acceleration to or deceleration from that speed would
occasion subjective duration for those aboard. Viz the light-huggers of
Alastair Reynolds trilogy.

Then Michael Buice wrote:
Strictly speaking there are only technological barriers preventing the
subjective duration from being as small as desired.  Practically
speaking, however, I can only offer a "yup, what he said."
Acceleration would be the difficult engineering feat.

Crush seeks clarification:
Okay. Are ya'll saying that a generational ship *would* be required for FTL
travel?

Either way, the One Ship theory would not be bolstered since it would
require endless more groundless hypothesizing to imagine why the Cargo
should be transported generationally on Tzadkiel or why it would take
hundreds of years for them to arrive. Or how the ship got so out of control
that orbited the Green/Blue system for 30 years without unloading the Cargo
and why it hung around the system for another 30 years after unloading.

But... it would not prevent a my posit that the Whorl *could* be the
primitive, infantile Tzadkiel. OTH that sort of theory is helped mostly by
limited information, because of the inclination to recycle and re-rig the
data available.

-- Crush



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