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The problem with sleeper ships
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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If you have working FTL now, though, and can get there faster why not also intercept the sleeper ships and bring them with you?
A sleeper ship isn't going to be doing any maneuvers other than constantly accelerating before the halfway point and then constantly decelerating after the halfway point. Predicting the position of the ship at any given moment based on that is a textbook physics 101 problem that students are expected to be able to solve by hand. If you've got FTL cracked then you've got the computational power to account for any real world variables that would throw off such a prediction.
Maybe they are like people today (or Ferengis in Star Trek) and just don't care, not seeing any profit in the endeavor.
There is absolutely no way we survive if we continue like we are right now.
Surviving isn't profitable, SMH my head.
You're not quiet getting the scale of the problem.
It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Except the haystack is 100km deep and covers the entire planet. But, you know that the needle should be some where in Manhattan.
It really isn't. When you know where they started from, and what direction they were supposed to be heading in, then even without knowing how fast they're supposed to be going, it's literally as simple as dropping out of FTL at regular intervals behind the sleeper ship and pointing a telescope in the general direction you're going until you hit the sleeper ship's light cone. What other posters have suggested about potential technical limitations relating the nature of the FTL drive and/or logistical problems with actually doing a pick up make sense as blocking issues, but finding them to begin with is a solved problem. Like, this is basically "where are Voyager 1 & 2 right now", and we actually know exactly where they are right now because we're still picking up their radio signals, powered by a 249W generator (less power than used by a typical modern PC!), from over 136 AU out, and a sleeper ship is going to be way more visible than that.
Prob simpler than that. It likely had a beacon.
3000 years is a lot. You can't imagine how profoundly, unbelievably long that is. In just 65 years we went from the Wright brothers' first flight to landing on the moon. And technological progress is exponential. Assuming people don't all kill each other, in a couple hundred years, maybe a thousand, it will likely cost the humanity next to nothing to go pick them up, if they so desire.
Chemist isn't on the corner?
Is that hitchhikers?
It is.
I don't think that, because it's not the 1930's any more.
Maybe if you had FTL, but chances are you'd still be limited on fuel and supplies
You have to slow down to the sleeper ship to intercept it, and then speed up again with that extra mass, it probably wouldn't be practical unless the ship was designed for it
Pure sci-if speculation: Your FTL (or near-c) tech is reliant on a deep gravitational well or a strong radiation source (like a star) to stop. I can see a sci-go scenario where that is the case.