Talk:Rocheworld

Plot Question

Shouldn't this have some actual info about the book? Plot etc?

I agree. Can we put this page in a category for clarification? JD 02:22, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Added plot section. There is some confusion over the date of publication. Some sources state 1985 and some 1990. pr3sidentspence 10:13, 24 April, 2008 (CST)

Time Dilation and Anti-Aging Drugs

This page's descriptions of the duration of the 5.9 light-year journey depicted in the book are at best vague. I have not read the book in some time. While it may well be that the astronauts were "only a decade physically older" than when they left the Solar System, the various accounts of the time their journey took are either self-contradictory or totally lacking clarity. Is the first 20-year figure in the "Plot" section the subjective time the astronauts experienced while the 20-years-accelerating plus 20-years-coasting comprise the time experienced by Mission Control? What is the actual age-retardation factor of the drugs, and how long did the journey take from the point of view of the ship? And what about deceleration? The ship couldn't just stop on a dime, even with the increased thrust from the laser system.

Forward is not the sort of author to just pull this stuff out of thin air; he did the math on this. The problem is some previous contributors to this article appear not to have, and I don't have the book with me to fix it.

65.213.77.129 (talk) 21:22, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Flouwen Symbols

In editing this page, I noticed that the Symbols associated with the Flouwen were not the ones actually depicted in the novel. I tried to correct them but I got a notice that Wikipedia could not save my edits because addition of those kinds of symbols usually is associated with spam. That was certainly not my intention, I was just trying to make the article more accurate. Should I just leave them out or is there some other way to insert them? Any feedback is welcome. Concept 111 (talk) 22:43, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

About the detachable light sail...

One of the features of the light sail is that there was an inner disk, say 333km in diameter, and an outer ring that was a 1000km disk with a 333km hole in the center where the inner light sail was originally attached. After they had coasted past the halfway point the outer sail unzipped from the outside edge of the inner sail and sped forward because even though it was more massive than the main ship, it also had a lot more surface area. After it was a little ways in front of the main ship it curved into a convex mirror (not a lens) and started reflecting concentrated laser light onto FRONT side of the main ship's lightsail. Laser light was still shining on the backside of the lightsail, but there was like eight times as much shining on the front side, providing a braking force. (Oh, I almost forgot to say that the shadow of the main sail, the perhaps 333km one, went right down the center of the doughnut hole.) Since there was nothing holding the outer ring in place, it just sped away into interstellar space. It was a robot in its own right, and it had to adjust its focus on the main sail as it got further and further away. One neat detail is that pretty early on they changed over to riding on a beam of green laser light, (I pictured it being like a giant green laser pointer.). And as the outer ring sped away everyone onboard could actually SEE it redshifting out into nothingness! They looked at how orange it was getting, then it was such a deep red that only some of them could see it. Once they were up inside the star system the inner light sail (the maybe 333km one) just rode around on the light of Barnard's star. Pretty mind bending stuff for a teenage reader! 98.200.205.163 (talk) 05:21, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

Oh, one of the subtle details that a physicist would like is that after the separation, as the inner sail slowed down it lost a little mass, but the faster the outer ring went the more massive it got, so it was actually HARDER to push it away with laser light! 98.200.205.163 (talk) 05:31, 28 September 2024 (UTC)