Originally posted by Redcap:
E=MC(2) is the problem. The faster you go, the more mass you gain, so in theory, to reach and breach C, you would have to assume infinite mass. For all intents and purposes, this is, so the theory holds, impossible, as you would need to also gain infinite energy as well, as I understand it (and I never even got past basic physics at school
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Hope that helps
What you need is warp drive to cross the light barrier, you expand space behind the ship and contract space in front of the ship. Then you flatten the warp bubble adjusting the time dialation factor so as to deposit the starship on the other side of the light barrier at a natural faster than light speed. All velocities are relative except for the speed of light, which is always the same. There is no particular reason why the star ship has to "remember" which velocity it was traveling at before it formed a Warp bubble around itself.
This would be my ideal time machine, it can go anywhere and visit any time historical and in the future. If it carry's one end of a wormhole with it, then you could travel to any time period and then step through the wormhole and be back home in the present. Unlike many other time machines, the Warp Drive time machine can visit a time before it was created, as the time machine itself travels back in time as opposed to a Tipler Time Cylinder which only bends time around itself. This time machine is also the closest thing that Einsteinian physics would allow something to be towards a Wellsian Time machine. To move back in time, you go faster than light. To go a significant distance in time, the ship has to be traveling close to the speed of light, just under the speed of light to go forward in time and just over the speed of light to go backwards in time.
The ideal setting to launch this Time Machine campaign is in my opinion, The New Era. There was an Imperial Research Station on Luna that was conducting time travel research just before the Virus hit. After the successor government(s) of Terra pulled themselves together they rediscovered this Imperial research station and was able to continue the research, until the Warp Drive was perfected. The trouble with the previous experiments was that whenever the Warp ship tried to go back in time, it would simply disappear never to be seen again. The Imperials were trying to repair this defect with a wormhole that they constructed. Unfortunately for them, they managed only to produce one wormhole and then the virus hit. the Wormhole was stable however and persisted through the 80 years that followed until Terran civilization was able to recover sufficiently to travel back into space and reach the Moon, there the lab awaited them, the warp ship and both ends of the wormhole. After reconstructing the data files that were corrupted by the virus, they managed to get an idea of what the Imperials were working on just before life support system was turned off.
The Terrans can now travel to any era and can retrieve technology from those eras and bring them through the Wormhole, they could even rescue the Imperial scientists that originally died because of the virus, but since they were rescued from a parallel reality, this created no time paradox problems. The apparatus which made the wormhole was destroyed in the wars, so they go only one wormhole to play with. The Terrans don't have the resources to rebuild that apparatus, they can visit the 21st century, they 18th or any time period they choose, even prehistorical ones, but there is only one time machine and one wormhole so its only one period at a time.
At one time they made a sport of killing Hitler. The scientists working on the project really didn't like Hitler, so they cooked up scemes for visiting World War II and killing Hitler. they'd send out a few fighters and shoot down scores of German prop fighters, they'd strafe some tiger tanks with plasma weapons, and send out soldiers in battledress plowing their way into Hitler's bunker and then finish of the dictator in a hail of plasma bursts, then they'd go further into the past and try it all over again. After a while the Terran Government got annoyed with this Hitler hunting and ordered the scientists to stop, "it was a waste of resources," they said, besides it had already been established that altering history had no consequences for the present and only another timeline was established, one of an infinite number of possible timelines all different from the one leading to the OTU setting. After words they sent the time machine further back in time, sometimes to trade with the natives and sometimes to mine and extract resources. When they were ready to leave a particular time period, they'd deposit a number of criminals who would otherwise receive the death sentence and leave them stranded in the past in another time period with no way to return, they were the native's problems now.
the thing that made this time machine work was the wormhole, without it, the warp ship could still travel into the past, but it could never return to the present it left, even minor things would alter the timeline, so the only way back was through the wormhole they brought along. The time machine could only made trips further back in time and still be historical, it it mover toward the future, it would enter a parallel timeline of its own creation, simply being there in the past was enough to create a parallel timeline.
