The Leonora Christine passes directly through a second galaxy merely as a way to gather fuel for greater acceleration. She enters the galaxy in its equatorial plane in order to maximize the time spent passing through the galactic gas and dust: a hundred thousand years. A whole spiral arm stretches ahead like a shining blue and silver road. (Wavelengths are shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum by motion towards them.) Giant stars whirl past like sparks in the wind. Passage through dense nebulae causes either darkness or fluorescence as new stars are born.
Two pilots fly the ship manually with advice from the Navigator and the Chief Engineer. Ordered by the captain, they fly through heavy concentrations in order to decrease tau. This galactic nucleus is thicker than the Milky Way's. The ship rocks. Equipment breaks. Lights go out. In just under an hour, the ship has left the nucleus and the other side of the galaxy and returned to intergalactic space. The ship's increasing mass decreases difficulties and dangers. She passes through several other galaxies in this cluster, then through galaxies in two or three other clusters, in a month. Then she is in the unbroken darkness of inter-clan space where straining instruments detect mere glimmers.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I did wonder if this kind of passage thru multiple galaxies by the "Leonora Christine" caused any stars to go nova or did harm to any inhabited planets. I hope not, esp. the latter.
Sean
Probably not- space is very empty.
-kh
Kaor, Keith!
I hope so! I do have some vague recollection of suns being destroyed in TZ as the "Leonora Christine" passed near or THRU them.
Sean
Once again- don't think so:
100,000,000 ly in 1 mo ship's time (per the relativistic_star_ship_calculator) requires 250 G.
How much power would this take?
Let's say Elsie masses 1exp4 tons.
According to (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php), a 5exp4 ship pulling 3 Gs would be producing 2.25 PWe, or ~15,000 times the world's current power generation.
If my math is correct, Elsie would (non-relativistically) require ~83 times this or ~200,000 the world's current power production or an 883 megaton fusion explosion each second.(I'm NOT going to do the math of how many m3 space/H atoms would be required every second to be fused at 100% efficiency to generate this....)
-kh
Thank you, Sean. I vaguely recall those passages, too.
The math is beyond me, but let's say that Elsie at full thrust was a traveling disaster for anything within 30 AU. and that she was within galaxies for 1exp8 years (Very generous- going through big 1exp5 ly diameter galaxies 1000 times.) What are the odds that Elsie will be accidentally within 30 AU of a star system during that time?
-kh
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