Quote:
Quote:
One has matter transmitters limited by conservation of energy and momentum, which gets interesting over interstellar distances
this. i have been wracking my brain over this story,i remember reading it but cant remember the author title etc... well thats assuming that the problem is that the earths spin is slowing because of the transmissions.....
No, that's not actually what I had in mind - in Larry Niven's series of matter transmitter stories (collected in A Hole in Space (1974)) the main limitation on matter transmission is conservation of energy - the simplest case is something transmitted downwards a few hundred yards, so that it gains a lot of energy and becomes warmer. Since the earth is rotating there's initially a limit on transmission distance, since over long distances the receiver will be moving in a different direction to the transmitter. Eventually they find out how to compensate for both, to some extent, by dumping the energy into massive floating steel drums (don't ask me how this works!)
The fun with interstellar travel is that your ship is going to be moving at thousands of KPS compared to the transmitter, unless you use ridiculous amounts of fuel braking the ship. So the way that you use it over interstellar distances is to have a ship with an open-ended matter receiver with the open end facing aft and dump everything needed for a colony through it in self-contained landers during the few hours in which the delivery ship is passing through the target system. The pods are at rest compared to the Earth (no idea about the target system, some hand waving is needed) and once landed can presumably set up a more normal matter transmitter. Since matter transmission is limited by speed of light the planning of all this is a logistical nightmare, of course.
RE the others I mentioned:
One of the authors I named has written about a form of matter transmission that could potentially blow up the galaxy (and may have already done so) - Dave Langford,
The Space Eater
One has cities built across multiple worlds joined by matter transmission. - Dan Simmons,
Hyperion and sequels
One has matter transmission that creates a duplicate of the original. - Apologies, I was confusing Poul Anderson's
The Enemy Stars, which has interstellar matter transmission but doesn't make copies, and Budrys'
Rogue Moon, which has transmission to the moon by making copies of the original.
Register
Login
FAQ
Search
