Newton's 1st Law

POSTED BY: Techboy
UPDATED: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 20:46
VIEWED: 1920
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TECHBOY

Sunday, October 27, 2002 5:10 AM

Not that I want to get all techy on people, nor detract from a supurb episode (the first show I wanted to watch a second and third time right away), but was Serinity still drifting, or staying put? A body in motion and all that.

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LIVINGIMPAIRED

Sunday, October 27, 2002 10:31 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Techboy:
Not that I want to get all techy on people, nor detract from a supurb episode (the first show I wanted to watch a second and third time right away), but was Serinity still drifting, or staying put? A body in motion and all that.

Yeah, I think I remember them mentioning that they would eventually drift to the planet they were aiming for, but the problem was that they wouldn't live that long.

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BULBUS

Wednesday, October 30, 2002 8:46 PM

Yeah, there's no problem with drifting in space. Technically, if you look at it in a simplistic manner, you'd only need to fire your engines once to get to top speed, and then cut them off. With no air to speak of, there's no friction to slow you down. You'd keep going off in one direction forever.

Space isn't that simplistic though, there's attractive forces from other planets, stars, and even from ships passing you by. Most of these forces would be too small to be detected, as in the case of ships, but if you were near a planet and your engines shut down, and you hadn't been going that fast to begin with, you could conceivably be locked in a orbit that would eventually result in reentry.

That's why navigation is so tricky in space, what with all the planets moving around, calculating their influences on your course, correcting your heading, aiming for where the destination will be... etc. etc.

Of course, I could be wrong about my post here, I freely admit it. I'm not a physics master or anything, so if someone corrects me, I won't take it wrong