Ninjas vs. Pirates - 4-30-09

Okay, so can I be really geeky here? I'm curious about how the Hellcats ship's propulsion system works. Most sci-fi that uses the lingo "jump to location X" uses some sort of instantaneous system (think Battlestar Galactica). But the noticeable acceleration, and the use of a "warp factor" as a speed would seem to indicate that the ship actually has a (non-infinite) velocity, more like Star Trek.

Good question.

Fluffy is powered by an alKhafiz HyperWarp drive. It's definitely a thruster of some kind like in Star Trek or Star Wars. He definitely teleports by moving really fast in one direction and then blips into another location by folding spacetime.

The Klein ship on the other hand seems to have the ability to do a stationary "Galactica-style" jump by moving in and out of space in a fourth dimension with no obvious visual movement in the primary three, which is what occurred (albeit off-panel) in the very first web comic.

This sounds like a question for Sarah :)

damn, I should have said to ask her instead of answering it myself.

Well, she probably knows all the more technical details better than me. :-)

The interesting thing to me is that Sarah & the punching bag experience G-forces. Which would be seriously lethal when accelerating to lightspeed at the rate panel 5 implies. Fluffy's artificial gravity must be ever-so-slightly off...I wonder if he does that on purpose.

The accelerate-then-jump method (including the term "jump") is not unheard of. See the excellent and highly addictive Escape Velocity series, which I'm sure is the most accurate representation of FTL travel ever.

Damn, now I wanna go play that for about 57 hours.

Sometimes you have to get out of a local gravity well to make the jump stuff work. Or you have to get up to exactly 88 miles per hour before you travel through time...

The gravity well might have something to do with it, or maybe you just have to be going really fast to break the laws of physics.