"The Ultimate Spaceship Face-off!" Topic

So how fast does spaceships go?
Lets have a race to find out!
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Interesting. Thanks!

Cool.

We're going to stick with its fastest mode of travel and assume it can travel to any place and any time, virtually instantaneously.

Of course it can, why do think it was called Time and Relative Dimension in Space – or TARDIS for short?

A spaceship can travel a fast as it needs to to reach the next plot point.

Speed of spaceships:

USS Enterprise, et al: Any distance of significance can be traversed in roughly 3 to 5 minutes, depending on the length of the commercial break.

Millennium Falcon & other movie vessels: Time of travel is equivalent to no more than three shipboard scenes; in most cases, one scene suffices.

Real world: By the time you get there, your blaster will be the "ancient weapon" that others laugh at.

Yeah, I've got an ancient blaster that people laugh at. But only once. :o)

Blasters are overrated so are phasers, there will always be some sort of dampeing field or some electronic interfarnce, thats when the republic clones and klingons will meet me GAU-8 Avanger, eat 4400 30mm rounds a minute biatches.

TARDIS and Heart of Gold were always first and second. How did the British get so far ahead in imaginary space technology?

Ron

"ARDIS and Heart of Gold were always first and second. How did the British get so far ahead in imaginary space technology?"

England is a thousand years old, america is less then 300, ofcourse they have the best ideas.

Just imagian what kind of sci fi ship the chinese would come up with(hell they would probebly just make it for real and be done with it.)

I think Galactica needs 30 minutes between Jumps.

Joss Whedon once said that Serenity travels at the 'speed of plot', which seems the most sensible speed to travel in science fiction.

In a slightly more logical vein, the speeds assigned to the various vessels reflect the thematic intentions of the shows.

In Star Trek, the thematic intention was to match the concept of 18th-19th Century naval vessels, whose missions combined both exploration and military roles and whose captains' responsibilities including acting as de facto ambassadors or even "king-on-the-spot." The speed of the vessel thus reflects both a certain level of "reasonable believability" and the thematic intention to create a situation where the captain and crew are "the only ones who can do anything" in whatever scenario arises— like when a square-rigger arrived at the island outpost.

In Star Wars, the thematic intention is to have ships that go "whoosh" and arrive at places to have desperate dogfights and dramatic escapes before whooshing off to the next place. The emphasis therefore is on the maneuverability of the ship in the situation at hand, not the time it takes to arrive at the next situation. The former needs to be complex, the latter needs to be minimal.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the point is to be silly. Nothing is sillier than a ship that moves in ways so impossible that it causes impossible things to happen when it does move.

In Doctor Who the show's emphasis is on the actions and antics of the Doctor, and the purpose of the TARDIS is to put him into and out of whatever situation he will be in for the show. It's basically the door into the next scene, and the "ship" itself isn't important (which is why it can look like a police call box— it's just Lewis's wardrobe with a fancy name).

In Battlestar Galactica, again the emphasis is on desperate fights and escapes, upped by a constant threat that can arrive "at any moment" and whose arrival can't be "instantly" escaped. It's a running battle— the retreat of the Ten Thousand, really— and thus the emphasis is on having to fight it out in a highly vulnerable situation (little or no effective "in battle" movement by the fleet), escaping, and then trying to recover and prepare before the next fight begins. Thus, the "jumps" that take time to plan and prepare for, yet are instantaneous, yet also have a limited, potentially predictable range to allow for continued pursuit.

… And so on.

And yes, that all comes down to "the speed of plot," but to some extent it's also "the speed of theme."

Parzival, that's a very insightful way of looking at it. In Star Wars, for example, it takes time to "plot the co-ordinates". That way, the heroes can't simply vanish at the first sign of trouble. It takes a certain amount of time (hours? days?) to traverse Hyperspace. That permits the heroes to unwind a bit, and have conversations relevant to character or plot development. Since they can't really "see" where they are going, they might well end up in the midst of another thrilling adventure when they emerge. It's not for nothing that J.J. Abrams' more action-oriented take on Star Trek treats warp drive a lot like Star Wars' hyperdrive.

Ron

Mabye thats the trick to beat the whole speed of light max, if we make spaceshiops, that travle at the speed of the plot?
We make a ship, and then we say, hey we are taking a trip to proxima, then we have a theater and someone prefroms a half hour monolog, and when it's finished we have arrived at our desintation.

Yeah, I've got an ancient blaster that people laugh at. But only once. :o)

Streitax- do the young ladies admire your ancient blaster? Do you need longer between shots that you used to. Don't worry- even a .22 can kill if used correctly, just proving, its not how big it is, it's what you do with it.