Macross Cloning

[camk4evr Profile YIM]

Light speed isn't really a factor in Macross. The ship's don't accelerate to faster than light speeds. Normally, the ships travel at sublight speeds and then jump to new locations. Fold space is not a speed, but an alternate dimension of travel. There is a time discrepancy, but not in the way that we theorize for approaching light speed. In an episode of the original Macross series, Misa states that an hour in fold space is equal to a day in real space.

The real question is, how long do folds really take? In Macross Plus, we see Dyson sitting in his fighter waiting to get to Earth, so we know it isn't instantaneous as it appears to be in Macross7. It is my belief that they just edit out the lag time between jumps to get more story time. If the early episodes of Macross7 are an indication, though, colonization fleets don't spend alot of time in fold space. They mostly sit around in real space doing surveys with long range scanners, looking for a potentially habitable planet. Then they jump to a new position and start again.

Yes, but how fast do the fleets move (when they move) in real space? They don't have to be moving faster than light (or folding) as time on board the ships will move slower at high fractions of light speed, though I doubt colony ships would move at such high speeds to prevent overly stressing the engines (military vessels OTOH might but there's problems with that too).

One technical consideration though, is the range of a fold drive per jump. Given that the detachable fold booster has a range of less than 20 light years, it's no big stretch to presume that the capital ships also have a limit - say 10x or 100x the fold booster's range. Maybe the transit time is really a series of short and fast folds, punctuated with lengthy recharge times in real space?

It's also possible that they pop out into real space to make navigational corrections

[araruin Profile WebsiteICQ]

Yes, but how fast do the fleets move (when they move) in real space?

Another good question, which I believe wikipedia can help us with.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

In the original Macross series, the SDF-1 was forced to travel normally from Pluto back to Earth. Since all of the planets seemed to be in some sort of cosmic alignment, we'll assum the shortest distance between Earth and Pluto.

Pluto averages 39 AU from the sun. Earth average 1 AU from the sun. The currently accepted value for 1 AU is about 150 million km or 94 million miles. With 38 AU between them, this would give us a value of 5.7 billion km or 3.572 billion miles.

We know that it took about a year for the SDF to complete the journey, so if we assume 365 days, then we get a speed of 15,616,438 km or 9,786,301 miles per day. Extrapolating further, we get 650,685 km or 407,762 miles per hour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon

This means that the SDF-1 could travel from the Earth to the moon in 37 minutes.