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