Turtledove
Register
Advertisement

Something that's sort of nagged at me for years now is an apparent goof in Homeward Bound. When the Perry first arrives in Home orbit, the crew of the Peary are confused because it just sort of appears there. They've been looking for other starships because the Soviets are supposed to be not too far behind, but they're expecting inbound starships to come into range of their sensors at the outer edge of the solar system, traveling at a fraction of lightspeed, then continuously decelerate till they're traveling slowly enough to orbit Home. But the Perry just shows up there.

However, when we get the technical explanation (such as it is) of how the Perry works, we're told that travel between temporarily adjacent superstrings is instantaneous, but the trip still takes some weeks because it's necessary to use traditional propulsion systems to get a safe distance from very massive objects such as stars. The FTL drive won't work within their gravity wells. Which should mean they can't just pop into Home's orbit; they should have to appear somewhere at the very edge of Tau Ceti's solar system and fly in the old fashioned way.

However, I notice that Tau Ceti's mass is a good deal less than the sun's. "Very massive object" is undefined, and I wonder if the inventors were able to fine tune their drive so that the sun would count as a very massive object but Tau Ceti would not. I don't believe that holds water scientifically--I think a gravity well is a function not just of a large object's mass but also of another, smaller object's distance from that mass--but I might be willing to suspend disbelief if NASA or DARPA or whoever designed this thing deliberately calibrated the drive as I've suggested for a strategic advantage. Being able to sneak up on Home (or on the Lizard colonies, which as I recall both orbit K class stars rather than G class) but not on Earth would definitely be an ideal outcome for the Big Uglies. Turtle Fan (talk) 19:05, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

The Commodore Perry (starship) article says it arrived at the outer fringes of the Tau Ceti system (paragraph 4) and then used fusion drive to approach Home. I don't see how the Perry could pop into orbit of Home using only the FTL drive especially since the crew would not have accurate information on its orbit around Tau Ceti. Remember, the Peary was the first human spaceship in the system and any info about Home's orbit would not have reach Earth yet (radio waves at the speed of light). You may be misremembering. ML4E (talk) 22:45, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
Advertisement