Ender wrote:What are these zerotau things being mentioned.
Stasis pods from the Night's Dawn series, I'd guess.
Wikipedia wrote:A form of stasis chamber, once activated the zero-tau pod locks its contents within a certain position in the space-time-continuum and therefore actually stops time from passing within the chamber. Anything placed inside will therefore not age or decay in any way for as long as the pod is active. As the possessed are still connected to the Beyond they remain aware of their surroundings while in a zero-tau pod, experiencing something akin to utter sensory deprivation. This is described as being "even worse than the Beyond" and therefore highly unpleasant for them, so much so that the possessing soul will abandon the body rather than remain in zero-tau. Zero-tau is commonly used by starships to place passengers in stasis for long or crowded journeys or during manoeuvres with high G-forces (like an active anti-matter-drive), and most interstellar spacecraft have at least a few such pods. Zero-tau technology forms part of the Alchemist weapon.
When it come to the FTL dirves, one thing that you dont really see is how long it takes to jump from point a to point b, and also from one of the episodes where they are going back to Caprica, they needed to do it in 4 jumps, so is there a distance limitation to how far they can jump, or is it a navigation issue due to computer processing limits. Could it also be that since the jumps are in a straight line, they limit the distance so they dont hit something. Things that make you go HMMM.
I'm a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.
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This we know, but that assumes the engines are to be on all the time and then, without some decent thermal dispersion. In military ships, killing that IR signature would be a priority, though I guess not everyone has thought of cryo-arithmetic engines.
Engine exhaust would be a bigger problem. A massive, luminous beam of charged particles and other radiation coming out your backside is going to look very obvious to anyone chasing you who, on the other hand, don't have to worry about that problem.
