posted
The new spaceship was magnificent, if seemed to shimmer under the sunlight. It has curved Hi-Lift wings going back in the shape of a crescent moon, the powerful engines added texture to the Fusion Carbon body. But truly, the engine’s design was compiled from many great scientists in the past; Albert Einstein for example stated that humans can not go beyond the speed of light because of E=MC², the time it would take for cosmic rays to reach earth from distant stars in a complete space vacuum have no mass, and yet, it takes them millions of light years to travel to earth’s surface. That was a story in the past; I have now created a spacecraft that can challenge that theory. The engines I made care called Hyper Atomic Thrusters, they use Hydrogen atoms in space to produce fuel in binary fusion, when they reach full power, it can cause a “jump” through space. A jump is exactly what the name implies. In the fabric of space-time itself, it is impossible to travel fast than the speed of light. Even in the speed of light, it would take thousands of years to travel to the stars in Andromeda. Just because of this reason, one leaves the space-time fabric to enter the little known realm of hyperspace, where time and distance have no meaning. They are not in comparison together; therefore the object will be traveling at no known velocity or ∞ infinite velocity. Through the preparation for the “jump”, a computer must calculate the particle density on route and the direction in X, Y, and Z plains in degrees, the accuracy to the millionth place in decimal.
Note from Kathleen:
Sorry to cut this, but now it's closer to 13 lines.
[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited November 12, 2004).]
posted
Is this the begining? If so, it sounds more like a textbook rather than a story. There are alot of terms being thrown in here all at once. It would be better to introduce your character and plot through action, rather than just information.
posted
This does exceed thirteen lines by any measure.
You are aiming for hard sci-fi, an idea-based story. The first problem is, and of course it may just be my opinion, there is no story yet. To me it reads like a first person history report.
The second, the known science you state is not exact. And for hard sci-fi you have to be.
<Albert Einstein for example stated that humans can not go beyond the speed of light because of E=MC² the time it would take for cosmic rays to reach earth from distant stars in a complete space vacuum have no mass>
First cosmic rays have mass, they are all made of fermions (either electrons or nuclear particles). Thus cosmic rays cannot reach C (186282 miles per second), the energy it takes to accelerate a particle increases its mass, and the more mass a particle has the more energy it takes to accelerate it. Thus by the time it would reach C it would have infinite mass. This is essential calculated by a version of the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction.
Only massless particles can reach C. In fact if you look at light from a particle view, as photons, photons always travel C.
What Einstien stated in his paper 'Eltrodynamics of Moving Objects' [which is his primary work on special relativty] is there are two principles. (1) The laws of physics are the same in any frame of reference, that is iregardless to motion. This would include Maxwell's laws involving electromagentic fields and waves, so that thus: (2) The speed of light is also absolute in all frames of reference, that is iregardless of motion of observers.
And thus if the speed of light is absolute to observers in different frames of reference, thier measurements of space and time and mass would have to be relative.
E=MC² grew out the two invariance principles and not the other way around.
I hope this does not come across as nitpicky, it probably does. Perhaps you don't need to make this in the hard sci-fi vien, but just sci-fi, where you don't have to explain FTL. It's just a given.
The explanations of a hyperspace mechanism for FTL travel are so frequent that it does not really need to be explained to the reader. Sometimes all that exposition just clogs the story.
posted
wow, you know your stuff anyways, my friend told me about this site and said that i would get some good suggestions here... and apparenetly it's true
Posts: 3 | Registered: Nov 2004
|
posted
Well, he said it wasn't polished. I would suggest polishing your text before posting to get the most help from this forum.
Posts: 21 | Registered: Nov 2004
|
posted
Think of this as a rough beginning and then rewrite it in its entirety, rather than cut & paste or make minor changes to this text. This reads more like it was your notes explaining the concept to yourself so you could write it. Your own creative process is unfolding right in the story itself. We can see you thinking, in other words, when what we want is a story to read.
Posts: 284 | Registered: Sep 2004
|
posted
hmm, I guess that my earlier reply was a little spare.
Basically, you've got a couple of things to work out here. First, you need to do some legwork on your fictional science. The Open Discussions forum is the place for that. You can begin by searching for "speed of light" or "science FTL" and reading some interesting discussions, I think. There's a thread titled FTL travel and another called science topics, I found them with the suggested searches.
After reading a few threads that interest you, you could then post a new thread to discuss the particulars of your SF ideas.
The other issue is researching and learning about how to write narrative text, and that's also in the other forum. Key issues include POV, exposition, characterization, tenses, and so forth. The main thing to do is learn to read well written text with a critical eye and see how existing authors have solved the problems of narrative fiction. You can come up with your own solutions, of course, but be sure that you are aware of what you're solving
Keep writing...but more importantly, keep reading. Read about writing, yes, but read, read, read the sort of thing you want to write.
Printer-friendly view of this topic
