Cassie as the Ambassador's wife

Dave Tallman · 17 Sep 2009, 21:00 · from 2009-September.txt.gz

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From: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:00:16 -0600
Subject: (urth) Cassie as the Ambassador's wife
Message-ID: <1bf4dd40909171400p523df6d8q11949a1584afbab at mail.gmail.com>

James Wynn wrote:

> That's an interesting take. But the hops could be gravitationally
> influenced. As one leaves the solar system and then the galaxy, the hops
> lengthen exponentially or as a ratio of the affecting gravity.
>
>
The hop distances may not be so impossible. In Wolfe's "To the Seventh", FTL
technology is transferred to Earth by a passing alien hopper ship. The ship
in that story could do 500,000 light years on a single charge of fuel.
That's about five times the distance across the Milky Way galaxy. Say
Woldercan is in the nearest spiral galaxy, Andromeda (note the Cassiopeia
connection), which is 2.7 million light-years from the Milky Way. At the
"Seventh" rate that would be less than six full-out hops. Add ten on each
end from manuevering to and from solar systems, and you get 26 -- right on
target for Cassie's fuel.

The "To the Seventh" story is probably not in the past of "An Evil Guest."
New York was destroyed in the former, and they are still putting on Broadway
plays in the latter. But we could use this as a plausible measure for how
fast FTL should be in a Wolfe world, and how much fuel it should take. It is
likely that FTL tech was delivered by extraterrestrial explorers in "An Evil
Guest" -- and that the secret of the location of Woldercan was delivered
along with it.
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