You know you're an SF reader

[ksmith]

...when you read a post in another newsgroup entitled "jump drive help" and you wonder if they need assistance figuring out the physics for their spacecraft.

Comments

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have thought that only because I've spent my entire professional adult life in positions where computers were enabling infrastructure. Therefore to me a "jump drive" is one of those things that gets plugged into a computer, rather than a not-yet-implemented interstellar craft... (though, I still remember and treasure the response to a comment I made in the back of a room at a space combat-related workship by Fred Bond, an IEEE fellow and one of the parents of satellite communications. The speaker, one in a series proposing various "technology initiatives," was talking about what I considered the stupidest one of lot, a technology initiative for a trans-cis-lunar communications system: I observed to Fred that the communications lag from the speed of light would be unacceptable, and Fred's response was, "What we need is a technology initiative for a speed of light accelerator.").

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I call "jump drives" either "flash drives" or "thumb drives". To me, "jump" brings to mind wormholes networks and all sorts of handwavium technology.

"What we need is a technology initiative for a speed of light accelerator.

Would that be an ansible?

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Nope--ansibles are fictional devices which communicate faster than light, Dr Bond was proposing an initiative to increase the speed that light propagates. That way, there would be less propagation relaying data to a "repeater" far far away and forwarding the data from there to its destination.

(If you read Bob Shaw's Slow Light stories in which there was a type of glass which light took months/years to get to the other side of the glass in, that glass was making light travel very slowly through it, effectively make lightspeed slow far far down. A speed of light accelerator would get sunlight to e.g. Earth faster than 9 minutes after leaving the surface of Sol, and signals from spacecraft out around Jupiter to Earth faster than hours, but not necessarily instantaneously.