
12-05-2003, 07:25 PM
[quote="The Gay Blade!":5fed2]First, I'm not Simo or whoever. I laugh at interweb detectives.
Second, inertia defined by Newtons Laws is the property of an object to resist channge in its motion. In laymans terms, you get something moving, its going to keep moving until something acts against it. In most cases, that thing is friction. All this isnt important though when we're looking at a ship in space moving at obscene speeds. Your body, is still moving at the ridiculous amount of speed, and without gravity (such as that on Earth) you're fucked. Now even if we did have artificial gravity, we'd still have things to worry about. What an inertial dampner would so is cut the mass of this huge object so that itd be like you driving in a fast car (low inertia) compared to a megaton shutle (high inertia).
And if we built a train in a a vacuum and let it go, just pushing on it would set it off thered be no gradual built up and you WOULDNT be able to slow it down unless you wanted to get on the other side of it.
Oh, and an object in orbit is still affected by the pull of gravity. Youll notice when shuttles break out of orbit, they slow down, since their INERTIA is such that they dont need thrusters. So yes right now we are spinning at an incredible speed, but gravity hooks us up there.
Theres an incredibly longer answer I could give but I'd have to break out the old physics book from highschool but the simple answer is this - to achieve and maintain high speeds, you would need both something to reduce the inertia of the object you are traveling in, and some artificial gravity to make that ride smooth.[/quote:5fed2]
bullshit biggrin:
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