New page up.

I felt I should take a minute to say that in no way am I actually knowledgable about things like orbits and how to travel about the Solar System and such. I'm just going to make it up as best I can. I'm going to figure that spaceships would travel by constantly accelerating or decelerating to produce fake gravity. I have no way if this is really doable. I kinda doubt it.

I also don't know how long a ship would actually need to travel with that kind of acceleration to get to Jupiter or somewhere. I'm just guessing and making it up. Here's what I'm figuring: 1 Au = 1 day travel time. An AU (or Astronomical Unit) is the distance from Earth to the Sun, for those that may not know the term. A lot of the planets fit nicely into that unit of measurement.

For an example, Jupiter is 5 AU from the Sun. So to go from the Earth to Jupiter, it would take anywhere from 4 to 6 days to get there. Depending on where the Earth is in the Solar System compared to Jupiter (since they both orbit the Sun) the distance is anywhere from 4-6 AU.

The other part of traveling about the Solar System would be that a constant acceleration/deceleration would produce a feeling of gravity aboard the ship. That's why the Drifter's windows are placed where they are. For me, this is a better way to create gravity in space. The other ways it's done is to make the spaceship spin on an axis, or just ignore the fact and have gravity on board a ship. To me, the first way is clunky and very hard for me to draw, and the second way is just plain stupid. Both Star Trek and Star Wars ignore gravity, and honestly, both are bad sci-fi. Okay, lightsabers are cool...

I don't know how fast a ship would move about at a nice comfy Martian gravity, so if anyone with any science ability starts reading this, please e-mail me and let me know if this isn't reasonable. I basically chose all this for it's simplicity for me to write the story, but I think I'd prefer to be accurate.

One other thing: days, and time, and stuff. Again, mostly for simplicity, people in the future keep our standard ways of keeping time. Days are 24 hours and (for now) our way of counting the years will stay.

Now I know that other planets have different lengths of days. Mars' day is about 30-45 minutes longer than ours. I figure that in some circumstances I will just have to make something up, but in most places in the Solar System where people live (like any asteroid or lump of rock over a few miles long) will just keep Earth Standard Time.

On a side note, one of the things I've been having to work on lately is how people live around Jupiter. Remember, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto are all tidaly locked around Jupiter, like our Moon is around the Earth. So, from any of those moons, the position of Jupiter never changes in the sky. The Sun does rise and set, because those moons are all rotating, just keeping pace with their planet. And it doesn't look like all the movies and comics you've seen where the planet is huge. From Callisto, Jupiter is kinda small-ish.

If you'd like to get an idea of what the planets and such look like, I strongly suggest trying Celestia. It's really fun when you play with all the options.

Okay. Phew. I'm-a shut up now.