[roter]

How do you stop so you don't go whizzing past Alpha Centauri at near light speed? :)

[dandanua]

An intelligent alien race, living there, will be able to catch you, don't you watch sci-fi movies? The real question is from what you can get 4.13e+19 Jouls, required to reach Alpha Centauri in about 9 years of traveler's time.

[aeve890]

>An intelligent alien race, living there, will be able to catch you, don't you watch sci-fi movies?

The aliens on alpha Centauri are 12 ft tall blue hunter-gatherer humanoids. Not much of a help for your parking problems.

[jdawg777]

If you use fission, Uranium 235 has 83.14 TJ/kg. So you would need about 500 metric tons of it.

[alhadrad]

I was wondering about this too—it's super interesting! Did you create this? Could you add graphs showing acceleration and deceleration? Also, this might be a dumb question, but how does mass factor into the energy calculations? I would love to see graphs that include the multiple stages of travel (acceleration and deceleration) as well as the mass of various kinds of fuel required for different propulsion systems such as chemical rocket, nucular etc.

[ANewFormation]

Relativistic mass increases are an observed effect. So if you're on the relativistic starship (as these are usually called) your mass does not change as your relative velocity does.

But for an at rest observer, your ship's mass would approach infinity as its speed approaches the speed of light. This is the reason the ship would never be observed as hitting the speed of light.

In practical terms this is also why particle accelerators can't just infinitely accelerate the particles - their apparent mass exponentially increases and so too does the amount of energy required to continue to accelerate them.

[mpclarkson]

Hey, I created this and yes I want to include charts if you want to decelerate too so you don't go flying past. I knocked out this initial version yesterday afternoon and already planned to add this. Might see if I can do it today.

[tokai]

if you can accelerate at 1g you can also decelerate at 1g

[thfuran]

Only if you can turn around or vector your thrust.

[headcanon]

yeah, I'd love to see an option to include a deceleration step and what the time debt looks like from there.