Lúthien
Member
Incidentally, I also posted this question on stackexchange about half a year ago, but so far without result. Since I cannot yet put URL's in my post, I cannot link to it, but it's easily found by searching for the line "Looking for a short SF story about two ultra-fast ships flying around the entire universe"
Hi, I just found sffchronicles in my search for clues about a story I read maybe fifteen or twenty years ago. I hope someone here may know it!
I am not certain how old the story is, but I'm fairly sure it's somewhere from the 1940's - 60's 'golden age of hard SF'. The plot is about a journey with two spaceships that have some sort of inertia-less drive. I think the goal of the whole endeavour was to find out if the universe is closed in 4D, so that they would eventually return where they started from.
The idea was to ensure that the ships follows a completely straight path through space by letting each ship act as the 'course target' for the other. One of the ships was called Ring because it was shaped like a ring; the other - Needle - was long and thin (I'm not sure about the names though). Ring would first take off and Needle would follow, plotting a course exactly through the central hole in Ring, accelerating and overtaking it. And next, the roles would be reversed: Ring would plot a course that would take her exactly around Needle, overtaking it in turn. Then, for the next jump, the roles would reverse.
This process was extremely fast. I don't remember the details, but maybe the ships made hundreds of these leapfrog jumps every second. This was possible because of the inertia-less drive. The crew was apparently unaffected by the choppy acceleration pattern, but there was no communication possible between the two ships during their interlocked flight. They even never saw the other ship during the mission, because they passed one another way too fast for that.
I remember that the story describes the crew of only one of the two ships. I seem to remember some discussion between crew members about a special type of inertial compass that was brought to prove a point regarding their knowledge of the nature of the geometry or topology of space(-time) - maybe something about that it should remain steadily aligned all the time, and then at a certain point in the story the ship's gyroscope (or whatever they had) revealed their course had begun to curve anyhow.
A detail that I think comes from this story is that when they are really far out on their mission, there are no galaxies or stars in sight anywhere near and the only thing visible is a kind of faraway glow of the assembled galaxies of familiar space. However, I might be conflating that particular bit a fragment of The Ethics of Madness by Larry Niven, where two people in relativistic ramscoop ships fly off, ever closer to light speed and thus eventually covering a huge distance in their subjective time as well.
I also seem to remember that the crew noticed something else; something strange and a bit spooky when they were very far from home. But what that something was keeps eluding me, and it might also have crept in from the memory of yet another story, for instance the Star Trek TNG episode The Traveller, which featured an unexpected visit to the other side of the universe because some dude in pyjamas (at least, that was what his clothes reminded me of) was fiddling with the warp-drive
Does this sound familiar to anyone? Thanks!
Hi, I just found sffchronicles in my search for clues about a story I read maybe fifteen or twenty years ago. I hope someone here may know it!
I am not certain how old the story is, but I'm fairly sure it's somewhere from the 1940's - 60's 'golden age of hard SF'. The plot is about a journey with two spaceships that have some sort of inertia-less drive. I think the goal of the whole endeavour was to find out if the universe is closed in 4D, so that they would eventually return where they started from.
The idea was to ensure that the ships follows a completely straight path through space by letting each ship act as the 'course target' for the other. One of the ships was called Ring because it was shaped like a ring; the other - Needle - was long and thin (I'm not sure about the names though). Ring would first take off and Needle would follow, plotting a course exactly through the central hole in Ring, accelerating and overtaking it. And next, the roles would be reversed: Ring would plot a course that would take her exactly around Needle, overtaking it in turn. Then, for the next jump, the roles would reverse.
This process was extremely fast. I don't remember the details, but maybe the ships made hundreds of these leapfrog jumps every second. This was possible because of the inertia-less drive. The crew was apparently unaffected by the choppy acceleration pattern, but there was no communication possible between the two ships during their interlocked flight. They even never saw the other ship during the mission, because they passed one another way too fast for that.
I remember that the story describes the crew of only one of the two ships. I seem to remember some discussion between crew members about a special type of inertial compass that was brought to prove a point regarding their knowledge of the nature of the geometry or topology of space(-time) - maybe something about that it should remain steadily aligned all the time, and then at a certain point in the story the ship's gyroscope (or whatever they had) revealed their course had begun to curve anyhow.
A detail that I think comes from this story is that when they are really far out on their mission, there are no galaxies or stars in sight anywhere near and the only thing visible is a kind of faraway glow of the assembled galaxies of familiar space. However, I might be conflating that particular bit a fragment of The Ethics of Madness by Larry Niven, where two people in relativistic ramscoop ships fly off, ever closer to light speed and thus eventually covering a huge distance in their subjective time as well.
I also seem to remember that the crew noticed something else; something strange and a bit spooky when they were very far from home. But what that something was keeps eluding me, and it might also have crept in from the memory of yet another story, for instance the Star Trek TNG episode The Traveller, which featured an unexpected visit to the other side of the universe because some dude in pyjamas (at least, that was what his clothes reminded me of) was fiddling with the warp-drive
Does this sound familiar to anyone? Thanks!
