Hi,
According to the folks on GEnie, agility works like this:
(assuming I am understanding them correctly)
Rob, Can you please forward this to them? They might be
interested.
The Inertial compensators nullify the mass of the people,
equipment, objects, cargo etc inside the ship. Therefore
a ship has a mass of zero (or near zero) and then the
ship is capable of bursts of (nearly) infinite acceleration.
{I may be reading this wrong so I will assume that we are
only nullifying the effects of inertia, not mass}
[That way we only half completely destroy Newton's laws]
Ok, Now what happens when a mechanical device is placed inside
this hypothetical mass nullifying field... Well, a mechanical
watch will instantly wind down. Any pendulum which depends
upon it's mass and inertia will instantly fail. A gyroscope
will not work at all. {It works because of it's angular momentum
but with no inertia, it will not work at all.}
What about something dear to the heart of most trav players: a
Gun? Well, no inertia... How is a bullet with no inertia
going to hurt anyone? Nope, a bullet with the inertia of a feather
thrown REALLY hard is not going to do it. ;-)
KE weapons are useless.
Well, What about the good old human body? Hmm, inertialess blood?
Bones with no inertia? Sounds worse than micro-gravity for the body.
A few days in such a field and the body will weaken from lack of
exercise worse than any crew ever exposed to micro-gravity.
What about on the moleqular level? Suddenly every atom and
molequel in the body has no inertia. Will normal chemical processes
still work? I doubt it. (I'm a physicist not a chemist) I am afraid
that if you change one physical law, all the universe will come
tumbling down around your ears. The human body is adapted to have certain
chemical reactions going on in the body constantly. If you affect the
physical world with some sort of field, you will change the chemical reactions
going on. I'm afraid if you entered the field you would probably drop dead
instantly (oops no inertia... you would float dead instantly)
How do I explain inertial compensators? Well, as I see them they are
grav plates which project a field in the opposite direction of the
ship's drive. There are auxillury ones in the other axes of the ship to
compensate for lateral and rotational movements. (the area around the
pilot's couch has a weakened field allowing the pilot to feel how the
ship is moving without getting flattened by 6G's.
Control of such plates is simple. The main drive is computer
controlled. The computer merely directs the compensators to create a field
of equal and opposite strength to the acceleration of the ship.
So when the ship is acclerating a 6G's an object in the ship will be
subjected to the acceleration and this is cancelled by the artificial grav
plates of the inertial compensators also putting out 6G's.
This is a much SIMPLER method of cancelling out the effects of the
ship's drive. It doesn't violate any new laws of physics. (other than
anti-grav) and it doesn't impose a 'field' which affects the normal
laws of physics in ways that are not well understood, but will certainly
result in the death of any and all passengers aboard.
Scott S. Kellogg
Anyone wishing to discuss this with me please send me e-mail and
I would be glad to call you telephonically (provided it is'nt TOO
long distance... I'm only an underpaid grad student after all)
Look out! The Horde!