Re: Engineering Newsletter

[T.L.G.vanderLinden@student.utwente.nl (Timothy van der Linden)]

>This page is _so cool_ that I've stayed up until 3:30 am looking
>at it:
>
>http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/cship.html

Yes, I had found it a month ago or so, and downloaded it all, (took some
time though) now I've a copy at my own HDD.
I had in mind telling you about it, but when 2 weeks ago I walked around in
your netpage, I saw that you already had a link to C-ship.

I tried contacting the author, but have a hard time getting answers. He only
replied my first email very shortly. The next letter involved some questions
but I haven't heard from him since.

>Although his starship design is simplistic and intended more for
>expository purposes than as a completely realistic design, it
>does have some interesting features I haven't seen us discuss
>before.  In particular he discusses the need for streamlining (!)
>for a ship that travels at high relativistic speeds.  In essence
>it's a self-powered ship fueled by antimatter.

He assumes that the interstellar medium and the background radiation give
much drag, I think that is neglectable for speeds under .99c (and probably
even higher)

>The coolest part, though, is a couple of MPEGs that show trips
>through his imaginary "lattice galaxy" at relativistic speeds.
>This is exactly the kind of thing I want to do with my starship
>simulation program (still completely embryonic at this point),
>but with a database of real stars in the Solar neighborhood.
>View the MPEGs, and then we can talk about why it looks like
>you're flying backwards at the start of a trip.

These 6 mpeg have a total size of 5 Mb, so for the other who are interested,
be warned. The rest of the pages is about 1 Mb including the images.

I myself have some doubts about some points in the simulation, but as I said
before, the author doesn't answer my questions.

Timothy