The void drives in OA are a bit crazy in that they’re almost like little pocket dimensions: sub microscopic, maneuverable, “bigger on the inside” like a Tardis, and requiring further nested void bubbles to enter/exit them without destabilizing. They’re more like something Q would use in their civil war. The description may sound closest to ST’s “ship inside warp bubbles,” but mechanically the displacment/halo drives are closer and their attempt at “more physically consistent” ST warp drives, while void ships are at the absolute edge of what’s possibly plausible in physics, assuming all engineering issues go away.
A giant ship at 1/4c is still quite high, yes… it’s also at the point where, under normal physics, you’d have to worry about things like the exhaust plume vaporizing whatever’s behind it.
Also Q help you if the navigational deflectors wink out for even a microsecond lol. I’m not a physicist but I’m fairly certain that hitting a mote of dust at 1/4C would cause a large enough explosion to wipe out an entire planet, if not an entire solar system.
I found a fun calculator trying to research this. An object weighing 1 microgram, travelling at 0.25c, would contain nearly 3 megajoules of kinetic energy. So yeah I guess dust wouldn’t be apocalyptic but that still wouldn’t be fun to bounce into/through.
The void drives in OA are a bit crazy in that they’re almost like little pocket dimensions: sub microscopic, maneuverable, “bigger on the inside” like a Tardis, and requiring further nested void bubbles to enter/exit them without destabilizing. They’re more like something Q would use in their civil war. The description may sound closest to ST’s “ship inside warp bubbles,” but mechanically the displacment/halo drives are closer and their attempt at “more physically consistent” ST warp drives, while void ships are at the absolute edge of what’s possibly plausible in physics, assuming all engineering issues go away.
A giant ship at 1/4c is still quite high, yes… it’s also at the point where, under normal physics, you’d have to worry about things like the exhaust plume vaporizing whatever’s behind it.
Also Q help you if the navigational deflectors wink out for even a microsecond lol. I’m not a physicist but I’m fairly certain that hitting a mote of dust at 1/4C would cause a large enough explosion to wipe out an entire planet, if not an entire solar system.
A 1 gram rock would be “almost nuclear,” yeah, but not planet killing, and most micrometeoroids/cosmic dust is fortunately much smaller than that.
I found a fun calculator trying to research this. An object weighing 1 microgram, travelling at 0.25c, would contain nearly 3 megajoules of kinetic energy. So yeah I guess dust wouldn’t be apocalyptic but that still wouldn’t be fun to bounce into/through.