All Comments on 'All That Glitters Ch. 16'

Major Screw Up, I'm sure you wanted VALOR, and not VALOUR; "a plush woven fabric resembling velvet, chiefly used for soft furnishings, casual clothing, and hats".

Sorry but I hope you find & fix this before more chapters come out. A Soft and plushy material does not fit a Naval Ship on water, nor in Space.

One of the best...more please!

I do believe you mean VALOR, but your auto correct makes it Valour; "a plush woven fabric resembling velvet, chiefly used for soft furnishings, casual clothing, and hats."

VALOR, "great courage in the face of danger, especially in battle."

"the medals are awarded for acts of valor". Naval Ships are not known for their Plushness no matter how beautiful that Ship is. Wonderful series, enjoying it very much. Five Stars once again. Semper Fi.

Valour: how the British based English speaking world spells what Americans spell as VALOR. Not to be confused with VELOUR, which is a cloth.

Good stuff please continue

I discovered this story on 1 June and have read it during free time till I have caught up . It is an amazing yarn. and I am looking forward to the continued tale of Glitter. All of it is Five star material.

This is a fun series, and I'm enjoying it. This chapter left me flat because of the notion that bigger engines could push someone past light speed in conventional space.

I think of science fiction as locked into science in some sense, even if it is by positing an advance in engineering (like hyperspace transit, or local wormhole creation, or Catherine Asaro's terrific well-grounded math of inversion) that allows transits that physics simply would not allow through normal space.

Bigtddybr posits jump technology, a useful way of enabling an interstellar civilization that can conceive of creating a common culture of current events across 150 light years of human space. A good device.

But in this chapter we watch a simple acceleration through light speed just because "sublight engines" got more powerful. This doesn't sit right.

More power into conventional space engines can bring one asymptotically closer to light speed, but the power goes into mass (and distortion of distance). It cannot create acceleration past light speed, either from the point of view of the ship, or from the point of view of observers on the ground.

So when I read a simple "ha. Bigger engine, look, we're at 1.32% of C!" with no recognition of the physics being violated - it left me flat.

I don't like to be a critic without a solution, so I"m thinking about what you might have meant, bigtddybr.

You might have been just ignoring Einstein because that whole relativity thing is inconvenient, in which case honor to the greatest mind of the 20th century might require someone to say "when Dr. Aruna discovered the flaw in the Lorentz transformation.... " or something. But perhaps you just meant "on our new ship, the Valour (Fiona Marsh, nameplate), we measure conventional space speed by our relativistically dilated clock coupled with the yardstick of the surrounding "at rest with respect to Liramor Prime" universe. By this measure, we are travelling at 1.3 C." That might warn them about reaction times they might require, but it's a complicated way to do it. And when they got back to Liramor Prime, they would learn their clocks were out of synch with the planet's. The planet had watched them travel away, and back (disregarding the hyperspace jumps), at speeds always below light speed. It's not like they got back faster (from the planet's perspective) than a relay of light beams with the same turnaround point would have done.

Likewise their own measurement of their own velocity in their own reference frame would not have been 1.3 C - it would have been something below light speed still. That's true even though time itself would have gone slower. That's because the physical reality they'd be experiencing at the high relative velocity would foreshorten distance - they'd have measured the distance traveled as less, in their own reference frame.

This mixing of reference frames is the only sense I can think of in which the statement "we're at 1.3 times C because we have bigger engines" or as you say it, bigtddybr, "C.3", could make sense. Is that what you meant?

To DistantConstellation: Thank-you for your opening statement. I am aware of the ramifications of our current scientific limits, but as I already said to another reader: what is impossible today will be possible tomorrow. We once 'knew' that men could not fly, we once 'knew' of a wall that prevented men from going faster than the speed of sound, and we now 'know' that going faster than light is impossible. The time will come when we might break the light bearer. Then what? Even at light speed it would take us four years to reach the nearest star. Distances in space are so vast that we measure them in light years. The distance light travels in a year is neglegible compared to the vast distances of space itself, so going faster than light isn't the answer in SciFi, thus the need for great multiples of light speed (warp speeds) or jump drives. Jump drive allows us to have an interstellar empire with a range of 150 light years, C plus speed doesn't necessarily give us that flexibility. Besides, as indicated in this chapter, fighting at C plus speeds is difficult. One last thing, the engines in this chapter aren't just more powerful, they're more efficient, they get to C and beyond faster and with the power to do things once there. Where possible i stick to known science. However, suspension of belief is a required quality in all SciFi readers. Thus the story line. Go with the story and enjoy it, which was your first statement, thank-you.

My 2 cents

What an awesome story! I will continue reading. Thanks for your time and imagination.

That's right . And your obvious deep knowledge and wordsmithing and visions of fiction and other worlds . Has all of this " beyond possible " . Very much believeable . You are truly gifted sir .

What is a costumes agent? Anything like a customs agent?

Generally a good story.

I agree with DistantConstellation. The faster you get to the speed of light, the power requirement increases exponentially. You could use up all the power in the universe and you still couldn't accelerate a ship to match the speed of light. You would just get closer and closer and the power requirement would keep increasing faster than your speed increase. Hence the loophole science fiction writers use of hyperdrive, wormhole drive etc. to go faster than light by not travelling through normal space. Perfectly acceptable. But you can't just add more power to go faster in 'normal' space. Light speed is not like the sound barrier.

You didn't have an explanation to the reader that xyz discovery overcame Einstein's light speed limit or or xyz drive did 'blah' that enabled you to break Einstien's long standing equation or whatever. For me, you need something like that to raise the standard.

How are they dealing with the time-dilation effects? Even going a fraction of C, time dilation and relativity get messy. Magically remaining in "realspace" and *exceeding* the universal constant? Yeah, relativistic issues are gonna crop up.

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At 99.99% C, 1 second on the ship would be 19+ hours on earth. 1 minute? 49 days. 1 hour? If you travel (any direction) for 1 hour at 99.99% the speed of light, earth will have experienced ~2,940 days.

Aka 8 years.

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No "technological advancement" in engine technology can fix that. That's a huge part of why every sci-fi setting has some kind of FTL drive. Because if you're not actually "traveling" at FTL speed in realspace, time dilation isn't as big a problem. It can be handwaved away as physics behaves differently in "hyperspace" or "slipspace" or "the warp" etc.

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This series hasn't established that the characters have technology capable of changing the fundamental nature of time, other than the FTL drive. So the reader who knows a little about how clocks work on mountains vs in valleys (time dilation is an issue even on airline flights, or when two clocks have substantially different elevations) is left to believe that 8 years just passed for everyone not on board The Valour. And I'm only on page 2.

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I'm enjoying the story, but I guess, barring a textual explanation of what kind of handwavium or giant space bats make all this possible, I need to tell myself that it takes place in a different dimension, where normal physical laws, as humanity knows them, don't apply.

Sorry, I was on page 3. Misremembered the page number.

Reread the chapter again...they were (supposedly) going 130% of lightspeed in normal space. For a long time! And the moment they started going 99.99999999999999% (99 with 14 9's after the decimal point) lightspeed, their perception of time became 0.0000018250120749944284 percent of its usual value. So they could make a 4.3 light year journey in (from their perspective) 0.0419 minutes, and 4.3 years would pass for everyone not on board. Put another way? If they spent 0.0419 minutes (per a stopwatch on board the ship) at 99.99999999999999 "C" then 4.3 years went by for everyone else, if they're in a universe that works like ours. To put it in more perspective? If they spent 0.95 minutes (approx) at that speed, per the same stopwatch on board the ship...they traveled 100 light years, and 100 years passed for everyone else outside the ship. In our universe anyway. At this point I guess I just have to assume they're in a different universe, like the WH40K universe, and physics and time work different for them. But not amount of engine efficiency can erase or eliminate the problem of time dilation in our universe. Only an alternative faster than light drive, like warp drive or something similar, could do that. Because you aren't actually going faster than light, time dilation isn't necessarily as brutal. But if your space travel is limited to going really fast in realspace...time dilation is going to be a big, big problem for you in our universe. It's a pain, really.

I was reading along, putting aside all I know about time dilation for tge sake of the story, and then you go past light speed. An interesting choice, going faster than the one thing you literally can't go faster than, and then make it worse with your comment equating light speed to the sound barrier. Please please please read a science book, for this was a decent sires until this point.