This omission makes it easy for the writers to introduce relativity as a nerdy plot point. For example, StarGate: Atlantis had an episode with a ship traveling absurdly close to the speed of light, which was devised as a convenient way to introduce characters that should've been dead for many thousands of years.
The first three that come to mind are: Heinlein's "Time for the Stars", Haldeman's "The Forever War", and Anderson's "Tau Zero".
From those titles, a DDG search finds http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/relativity listing more, also containing the line "Very many sf stories use relativistic time dilation for one-way Time Travel into the future."
Star Trek's "Space Seed" - 200 years in sublight stasis, no mention of speed or distance. Could be 0.5c for all we know. 100 ly at Enterprise's warp 6 cruising speed would take about 4 months, which seems not unreasonable.
The movie "Alien" - stasis, but seemingly with FTL given the times and distances involved. (https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/LV-223 says it was a 2 year voyage to the moon LV-223 in Prometheus.)
The TV series "Red Dwarf" - sublight, though it did break the light barrier once. Science in general is only relevant for comedic effect. https://www.ganymede.tv/2004/04/the-science-of-red-dwarf/ .
None of these seem to be characterized as "it takes you 150 years of travel at light speed to get to a place that is 150 light years away".
Which one am I missing?
It doesn't say if that's 120 ship years or Earth years. I'll assume ship years as that makes the most sense in context.
Assuming constant acceleration to the 1/2-way point, flip, deceleration, and using http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight3.ph... :
T = (c/a) * ArcCosh[a*d/(c^2) + 1] (given acceleration and distance)
60 years = (c / a) * arccos(a * 30 ly / (c^2) + 1)
1893456000.0 = (3E8/a) * arccos(a * 3.15576 + 1)
a = 0.14748 m/s^2 or about 1.5% g
t = (c/a) * Sinh[a*T/c] = 1.15 * ship time ("proper time")
v = c * Tanh[a*T/c] = 0.73 * speed of lightI created a list of all these works I could find a few years ago. Here is one link:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=l6q90mvssgscsj...
I think this is a complete list of the films and tv series:
- The Star Lost
- Pandorum
- Passengers (2016)Indeed, while I remembered the importance of time dialation in Forever War , I didn't remember the FTL travel between collapsars.
Most of Alastair Reynold's novels have FTL - I only know of one that counts, which is Pushing Ice.
The 3-body problem has FTL also.
The chronologically earlier novels in his Known Space universe (the Ringworld one) are mostly around near-c Bussard ramjets.
> Most of Alastair Reynold's novels have FTL
Hmm, wait, which ones? Only one I can think of is House of Suns, in a very restricted manner.
> The 3-body problem has FTL also.
It has FTL communications, but not travel.
For [science] read [magic], more or less, but yeah. In the very first stories they were Bussard ramjets, but this got retconned out (and a Bussard ramjet actually shows up in a later book as a failed experiment). In most of the books they're more or less applied magic, though.
This, incidentally, seems to be a common theme, as later discoveries tended to fall down on the side of Bussard ramjets not working (due to insufficient density etc). The last of Niven's Known Space books have some special pleading for how the pilot has to carefully direct the ramjet to get sufficient combustion volume, a detail that was never present in the old ones.
Or maybe they know you wouldn't travel at light speed in the first place.