Coolness. Very interesting Ship design.

Oooo, this looks like fun.

I don't know why, but this reminds me a lot of Red Dwarf for some reason.

Wow, this looks pretty cool. Will you upload more of it? : }

The first page is certainly evocative and provocative, leaving the reader hungry for more story. Nicely done.

Ugghhh, I hope there's more!

Nice start. More, please?

Hmm.... seems interesting.

Able to fly at the speed of light (by pushing lotsa blinking buttons!), yet unable to call up human bodily designs... no pictures and no memories... troubling.

I imagine he's busy piloting a ship, if he has access to pictures and such those are probably for break time. Maybe he's built to not take breaks, just been piloting for the last few hundred years.

Traveling to somewhere at the speed of light relative to the solar system must suck, due to the possibility that some distance circumventing technology like wormholes will have been invented in the dilated time you left behind on Earth, so once you get to where you're going everyone is already there saying "Sorry man, you're not going to be the first one on this planet. We've already got a Starbucks.

My favorite semi hard scifi novel, "The Forever War" deals a lot with time dilation as a metaphor for the alienation a soldier feels from the society he returns to after serving in combat.

Okay, trivia time.

He's traveling in one direction at 186,00 miles per second. What happens when he turns on the headlight on the front of his ship?

It stretches out in front of him into the blackness of space and hopefully doesn't get bounced back by anything at all, because at relativistic speed anything in front of him would make the ship go kaboom. Mind you, if he's traveling at exactly the speed of light, time would have stopped for him and he wouldn't be able to react anyway. (He must be just under it.) But yes, thanks to special relativity, his headlights would act just the way they would if the ship were at zero velocity. Weird, ain't it?

Yes, that is correct, his headlights would travel out in front of him at 186,000 mps, because of special relativity the speed of light is always a constant, and motion or speed is only a measurement that is useful in reference to another object, presumed stationary. To the photons of his headlight his ship would be the stationary frame of reference.

Also, quite right, if you were AT the speed limit of the universe you would not perceive time at all, and if the universe is finite, as I believe scientific consensus currently has it, that means you would simultaneously be everywhere in the universe.

You describe tachyons: photon particles travelling faster than the presumed speed of light ©. The photons from the vessel's headlights would be travelling at 2c. As would any other EM-type of radiation the vessel might emit (like say, radio waves).

Uh, no. The speed of light is constant, but speed is a "relative" concept as stated in Einstein's theory of special relativity. No matter what your frame of reference is a light source is always going to be emitting light that travels at the speed of light. Tachyons are fictional particles that do a lot of weird things in spacetime including travel backward through time and moving faster than the speed of light.

The speed of light is not constant.
The original c was established by measuring the time it took light to go from the emitter to a receiever, decades ago. Both points A and B were stationary, with the operation done in a vaccuum.
Light in the lowest strata of earth's atmosphere (where we live) does not travel at the established c of 186K/mps, because it is not moving through a vaccuum, but through the muck of a thick gaseous medium. Likewise, light moves even slower under water, where the medium is thicker and muckier still. It all comes down to friction. Even in the murkiest medium light still moves marvellously fast, but if science shows one consistency, it is the proving that *nothing* is consistent.
Also, to allege that photons cannot be accelerated beyond the established c is pretentious. As in the situation you posited, photons that would already travel at c in a vaccuum would also enjoy the added velocity imparted by their emitter via simple inertia. Even a vessel travelling at .5c or .3c would produce tachyons.

Hey, it's fine for you to tell me that the speed of light is not a constant regardless of your point of reference, it's Einstein and his true successors you have to convince, not some internet physics enthusiast. I swear, if I started talking about the Planck length your head might explode.

Planck Time is old news to me. That people actually sat down and calcuated such a quark-level increment is almost comical in my eyes. Talk about someone needing a life outside the lab..!
But science has had its own declared absolutes broken and disproven numerous times. There is no reason to assume that the assumption of the "absolute" speed of light cannot be broken in its own turn.

It's probably easiest to be a physics denier when you don't have a degree in it, aren't actively engaged in research in it, and don't have access to the journals where experimental data is published, or the expertise to understand said journals.

I think it's time I jump in here with another inertial reference frame.

A) The speed of light described by the constant C is the speed of light in a vacuum, which is a constant, invariable figure.

B) Light can be slowed down by traveling through a denser medium, such as an atmosphere or water, this does not affect the value of C. The speed of light in any medium is described as C/od, where od is the optical density of the medium, Which is 1.0 for vacuum and goes up from there.

C) Getting back to the headlights experiment, since the equations blow up in our faces at velocity = C we will use the standard method in Calculus and look at the limits as V approaches C.

C1) Using V=0.9C as an example, when the astronaut turns on his lights, he sees the beams shoot out at the sped of light, just as if he were standing still.

C2) When the observer on the 'stationary asteroid sees the astronaut turn on his lights, he sees the beams travel out at the speed of light, while the ship moves at 0.9C, meaning the outside observer may assume that the astronaut is seeing the beams advance from the ship at 0.1C instead of C.

Both observers see the light moving at the exact same speed, despite the different inertial frames of reference, because time is passing differently for each. for every second that the astronaut measures, the asteroid observer measures ten.

Hmm... Everywhere in the universe, or just everywhere in the path I'm following until I reach the edge of the universe?

I do believe I see a form of astrogational deflector array there in that funky dorsal assembly. Directed electrostatic beams would be enough to deflect micro-meteroids, while nested e-static fields would be needed to push aside larger objects. I would also assume that some kind of onboard astrogational suite is at work, detecting and directing the vessel around anything larger than the astrogational deflectors can handle.

Well, hopefully Karno will post more of this and we'll know.

You just gave me the perfect plot hook for an RPG adventure :>

But if you went that fast you wouldn't nearly age as fast as those left behind on earth.

Nope; time slows down for the occupant of the ship.

Yes, a long time perceived in a space craft near light speed is a very very very long time on Earth...

Cool ship design!

Ah, now this sounds like a story I'd certainly like to see to the very, probably twisty end...

I like the mood of this. Very cool, man.

Manoman, that'd drive a lesser person totally bonkers! NUTS even!

Is that exposition I smell, with the heady musk of science fiction? You have my undivided attention.

where is the rest of the story :/
I want more

actually, due to time dilation effects, if you traveled at the speed of light, from your perspective you'd arrive at your destination instantaneously, it would be the rest of the universe that ages depending on far you travel, if you traveled 4 light years then 4 years would have passed you by.

Even Mars is 20 light minutes away, Pluto - 5 HOURS....

Please sir? Can I have some more? :)..

I love hard sci-fi too. Even working on a framework of a hard sci-fi *furry* universe.

Hard to do however :\

- Shado

MOAR! I DEMAND MOAR!
Damn you, Karno, why do you have to tease me so much...

Very interesting idea and good page composition.

Looks interesting.

And hard SF means keeping as close to real world science as possible? Or something different?

Yes.

I see. Will you upload the rest of the comic here too?

There is no rest - it was a one-pager.

Awww. Too bad. I like SF stories.

Did you ever read A Fire Upon The Deep? Very enjoyable hard-ish sci-fi for me.

or the Series form the 1970's called StarLost?
there where so many that all are true now...
Well Medic by Instruction and Massive netted Archive Computers and Bio Dome

What is that new series Defying Gravity.
the British just worked out the power Requirements for a EM Shield Generator...Ok that was 2006 it think that they announced it in Canada and Plasma Drive is also a Reality of still in its Dottering Infancy
and also AI Sim systems in the UK... they are ahead of USA and CA in AI Tech

the last Episode that I watched was the new Commander speaking to the IA I don't know but this reminded me of Alien too much...