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Instead of trying to ascertain what happens if a ship in hyperspace collides with a mas shadow or if a hyperspace mass driver was used as a weapon...bothinvolving interactions between hyper and realspace...what if two ships were to collide head-on with each other in hyperspace?

What do you think?

I'd say its fairly obvious that when two large objects collide at high speed, it won't really matter where they are.

Enola Straight wrote:Instead of trying to ascertain what happens if a ship in hyperspace collides with a mas shadow or if a hyperspace mass driver was used as a weapon...bothinvolving interactions between hyper and realspace...what if two ships were to collide head-on with each other in hyperspace?

AFAIK all tachyonic objects are STL relative to each other ( whether one moves at 1,000 c and the other at 1,000,000 c in 'realspace' ) so it would not be different from a collision in 'realspace' from the ship's point of view.

Wouldn't the odds of this happening be incredibly huge?

But if it were to happen, probably complete and total destruction of both vessels.

It depends enirely on how fast they are moving relative to each other in hyperspace, and the type of collision.

Cos Dashit wrote:Wouldn't the odds of this happening be incredibly huge?

But if it were to happen, probably complete and total destruction of both vessels.

Three ISDs hit the Executor in Hyperspace and basically scratched the paint.

MRDOD wrote:

Cos Dashit wrote:Wouldn't the odds of this happening be incredibly huge?

But if it were to happen, probably complete and total destruction of both vessels.

Three ISDs hit the Executor in Hyperspace and basically scratched the paint.

They were in the process of exiting hyperspace, weren't they? And while it didn't scratch the paint, the impacts did manage to completely knock down its shields, no small feat against a dreadnaught.

MRDOD wrote:

Cos Dashit wrote:Wouldn't the odds of this happening be incredibly huge?

But if it were to happen, probably complete and total destruction of both vessels.

Three ISDs hit the Executor in Hyperspace and basically scratched the paint.

Not quite. The Executor was in realspace and the ISDs came out of hyperspace on top of it. Didn't do any major damage, but did completely wipe out the shields.

The ships are going to have imaginary momentum and kinetic energy so it's kind of hard to say what will happen when they collide. However, if I'm thinking right (and it's getting pretty late here now), that might not actually matter, if they both have imaginary momentum, because
m0 * v0 + m0' * v0' = m*v + m' * v'
means that the imaginary parts will cancel out...

Anyhow, the interesting thing is that ships going at speeds well above c will have imaginary momentum approaching m*c, but their imaginary kinetic energy will approach zero. So while a collision would probably throw the ships off course by quite a bit, there wouldn't be that much energy to transfer. And if the collision was not elastic, then the kinetic energy would decrease further and the ships would move even faster afterwards. That is, assuming the acceleration didn't break them up (in which case their constituent parts would move faster).

Dooey Jo wrote:The ships are going to have imaginary momentum and kinetic energy so it's kind of hard to say what will happen when they collide. However, if I'm thinking right (and it's getting pretty late here now), that might not actually matter, if they both have imaginary momentum, because
m0 * v0 + m0' * v0' = m*v + m' * v'
means that the imaginary parts will cancel out...

Anyhow, the interesting thing is that ships going at speeds well above c will have imaginary momentum approaching m*c, but their imaginary kinetic energy will approach zero. So while a collision would probably throw the ships off course by quite a bit, there wouldn't be that much energy to transfer. And if the collision was not elastic, then the kinetic energy would decrease further and the ships would move even faster afterwards. That is, assuming the acceleration didn't break them up (in which case their constituent parts would move faster).

I don't think so. Imaginary momentum and near-zero KE are AFAIK properties of tachyonic objects relative to bradyonic ones, but from the reference frames of two ships in hyperspace it's the rest of the Galaxy that has imaginary momentum and ->0 KE, and they have the physical properties of 'normal' objects.

The Nomad wrote:I don't think so. Imaginary momentum and near-zero KE are AFAIK properties of tachyonic objects relative to bradyonic ones, but from the reference frames of two ships in hyperspace it's the rest of the Galaxy that has imaginary momentum and ->0 KE, and they have the physical properties of 'normal' objects.

Actually, now that I think about it a little more closely, the objects need not have imaginary energy or momentum at all, if their rest masses are imaginary (which, IIRC, some ICS suggests). But of course it depends on the observer. I assumed an observer at rest. The ships themselves will probably see themselves slow down relative each other.

Their kinetic energy will approach zero though, but it might be that since they experience negative time dilation, they will think that the acceleration is negative as well, causing them to slow down, whereas a non-FTL observer would see them go faster...