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Originally Posted by squeak
I'm failing to understand if your ship will be in essence sliding through normal space, pushed by the "replenishment" of spacetime behind the vehicle, or if it's the ship itself that can leave normal space and then reappear again at a different location.
If the latter *is* the case, however, I don't understand why--if the vessel is capable of doing so--it doesn't just do it *once*; leaving where it starts, and ending up at it's final destination rather than only a short distance away. You could say that it's only capable of "folding space" like that over short distances, but if this is the case, the "sliding in" ideas are totally unnecessary.
That is my pseudo-scientific take on it.
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Thanks for the response. It is the latter case, so the issues you mentioned would not be there. As for the 'at once' issue, it does indeed do that. The increments mentioned related to the proposed need for the sliding of space itself - not the ship through space, or 'underneath space' - to occur in quanta. While I suppose that aspect is not necessary in terms of the theory, space - and the exit/entry 'void' - could slide in one piece from the departure point to the destination point, the intention was for that requirement to double as the solution to the 'targetting' problem, as mentioned here:
"In order for this to work (even as the insane pseudo-scientific idea it is), the ship needs to be able to have some method of control, and be able to re-emerge from wherever it was, in the exact place it was meant to travel to. This is done, in theory, because the sand of space, as it slides to fill the void left at the ship's departure point, does so in a measurable and predictable way - and while doing so, leaves a moving void of it's own, at the very top edge of the sliding 'slope of sand'. The ship 'simply' maintains the field - creating the 'size' of the hole that needs to be filled - until the void that is created at the top edge of the 'slope' is where it desires to travel to."
So the idea is that the movement of the void - as space shifts to fill it - is predictable, directly related to the amount of time the ship maintains it's field. When the ship turns the field on, it slips out of space - when it turns it back on, it slips back in - at the destination point. The orientation - the direction - of the 'slippage' would be determined by the orientation of the field when it is activated. Assuming that the field could do what it is supposed to do, and that space would behave as described, this latter aspect would provide the necessary control. In theory.
