From: utzoo!kcarroll
Newsgroups: net.space
Title: FTL 
Article-I.D.: utzoo.2331
Posted: Tue Aug  3 12:55:42 1982
Received: Tue Aug  3 12:55:42 1982

  
   Poul Anderson had a nice-sounding method of faster-then-light
travel in (I believe) his Polesotechnic League stories.
It involved  installing a device on a ship that causes the
entire ship to make a microscopic "quantum jump", the way that
an electron does in a tunnel diode--moving from one location to
another without occupying the intervening space, and presumably
in zero time. Each jump is quite small, but the device triggers
at a high frequency, so that the ship ends up moving a large
distance in a given time--faster than light, in Anderson's universe.
One interesting feature of the drive is that when it is turned off,
the ship need not have any intrinsic velocity. It could be
sitting dead in space between jumps. Of course, it need not
sit still between jumps; you could go a bit faster by accelerating in
the direction of the jumps, using a normal reaction-drive.
HOWEVER...if you have no intrinsic velocity, there's no time-
dilation, and no Doppler-shifting of the starlight as seen by the
ship, making for easier astrogation.
   I'm not suggesting this as a realistic form of FTL travel,
but then, if we limit ourselves to realistic forms of FTL travel,
the discussion won't last for very long...
Kieran A. Carroll
...decvax!utzoo!kcarroll