OT Faster than light was: Hollywood OS wars 3318

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Aragorn wrote on Tue, 07 Mar 2006 15:46:53 GMT

SR would not apply then; time and space *swap* (or some such) as the gamma goes imaginary after going through a pole. I have no idea how one can properly interpret the results there.

Might as well hypothesize what's on the other side of a black hole. :-)

is a bare intro, admittedly.

Maybe, but James Blish invented (at least ficbreastiously) the spindizzy, which appears to have vaguely similar characteristics: it isolates space-time and allows for FTL travel. (The general idea is based on something called the "Blackett-Dirac" equation -- Blackett was an astronomer, Dirac a mathematician-physicist; the boundary of the field had, among many other capabilities, the ability to shoot rocks very far tangentially to the field surface, but it could also be neutralized by a portable handheld unit.)

It had limitations and some interesting characteristics -- for starters, speed was mbutt-dependent; the bigger the mbutt attached to the drive, the faster one can go. (One of the stories involves two flying planets.)

is as good an intro as any, albeit extremely brief. As usual, the "spindizzy" concept has mutated into many forms on the Web:

both describe a 1986-era game on the C64, for example. (I think Marble Madness on the Amiga might have had better graphics, but the idea looks interesting. I can't say I've played Spindizzy on either platform.)

It's all ficbreastious until one has a working model of course, but it made for a reasonably good story, in my opinion.

Such is also my understanding, limited as it is. Weird.

Mmmm...energy. :-)

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.