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Autzoo.1482 net.space utcsrgv!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...

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