Dauntless (The Lost Fleet, Book 1) was the first science-fiction book I read that tried to deal with space combat with the real-world constraint that light only travels so fast. It takes light eight minutes to get from the Sun to Earth. It takes light more than a second to get from the Earth to the Moon. Depending on where they are in their orbits, it takes between three minutes and twenty-two minutes to get light from Mars to Earth.
Imagine that you’re a star-ship. You and your companions have just warped into a new star system. You see a flotilla of enemy ships about 45 light-minutes away. That means, you’ve got 45 minutes before that flotilla can possibly even know that you’re in their star system. How much can you get done in that time? Once they can see you, how much can you mislead them on your target if they’re going to be operating on data about where you were heading more than half an hour ago?
For years, I have been batting around this concept, hammering it into a game. I have finally gotten started on it.
Armed with some functions like these, I am constructing values which change at points in space-time and querying the value visible from other points in space-time.
...
(:documentation "Find the observable value of a quantity
SPACE-TIME-VALUE when observed from a given location
SPACE-TIME-POINT. This method finds the most-recent
value V0 (at location P0) for this data when viewed from
the given location. This method returns (VALUES V0 P0).
This method makes no effort to interpolate the results."))
Here are my first, visually-demonstrable results:
Hopefully, there will be plenty more coming in the near future.
“Imagine that you’re a star-ship. You and your companions have just warped into a new star system. You see a flotilla of enemy ships about 45 light-minutes away. That means, you’ve got 45 minutes before that flotilla can possibly even know that you’re in their star system.”
— ahem… you also wouldn’t know they were there until 45 minutes had elapsed.
You would if they have been in the star system for at least 45 minutes. You will be seeing where they were 45 minutes ago. Photons will have already bounced off of them 45 minutes ago and be reaching you when you arrive.
You wouldn’t be shining a light on them. If you did that, then they’d see your light 45 minutes before you saw your light reflected off of them.
I thought like pat that you should also wait for 45 minutes before you can see the flotilla, but the effect is you are suddendly appearing, assuming that the flotilla has been sitting in place or close proximity for the last 45 minutes you might be able to see where they were 45 minutes ago, but you having just warped in should have been out of range so they won’t “see” you until 45 minutes afterwards.
You should probably use relativistic doppler to understand how the flotilla is moving, because they may be closer than you think, and 45 minutes is based on where the were 45 minutes ago.
That is a great thought… I could red-shift units moving away at high speed.
That is totally awesome! I’m a big sci-fi reader, and beginning Lisper, the simulation is very interesting, and very educational.