A Wild Lurker Appears! Hyoi's Random Banter #232

[Anonymouswizard]

Aye. One of my favorite lines in a movie already stuffed to the brim with wit:
"wouldn't that be explosive in an all-oxygen environment?"
"Probably. But that's an easy fix, one line of dialogue. 'Thank god we invented the, ya know, whatever device'."

Heh. To be fair to inertial damping, while it is space magic and has a good chance of being impossible, the coreidea is generally sound in how it's applied. Unless you're using it for FTL travel, but that's besides the point.

But honestly, a handwave that shows you've thought about it is better than no handwave, especially if it's relatively minor. Although sometimes the handwave can be completely the wrong thing (I remember watching Another Life, hearing 'the crew is young because you want people who'll act instead of thinking about it in space' or something like that and immediately thinking 'no, you want the opposite').


EDIT:

I don't think it's ever really mentioned because ships hardly ever use their sublight engines--the Clear Air Turbulence does so when escaping the Ends of Invention in Consider Phlebas, but I can't remember another instance.

A culture ship uses sublight engines at the end of Matter, but it's also noted that because of the location stopping culture-level technology from working it's rearranged itself to use primitive rocket technology instead of the normal drives.