At least we can fire up Celestia and pretend to fly to Proxima…and then turn around and see our home Sun among the stars of Cassiopeia.
I don’t know if you meant to quote me or not. My numbers came from the site Greenback linked to.
IOW, if the numbers are wrong, blame Greenback! 
Gosh, I simply don’t agree. They’re both essentially fantasy; one is fantasy with swords, the other with light sabres. One’s fantasy with spaceships, the other with smart blue-eyed horses. It’s still fantasy even if you substitute sci-fi elements for the Tolkienesque stuff.
Leave me out of this lol
Anyway, I exaggerated to make a point. It wasn’t that I was too lazy to calculate it myself. Yeah. That’s it.
I think that ST has the right idea when it comes to interstellar travel. It’s not about trying to get to c, it’s about circumventing conventional physics entirely.
Slowpokes. With a Quantum II hyperdrive, you could be there in five minutes. (But you had to be outside a star’s gravity well to use it, which gives you an inconveniently long acceleration/deceleration time at each end.)
Actually, it happens every day. And yes, the “lightic boom” is a very pretty blue.
Ah, apologies. I should have clicked on Malacandra’s post before replying. I though it referred to wormholes. My bad, he was first on this.
Photonic boom.
Photonic Flash might be better.
That’s OK, you can never have too many cites about Cerenkov radiation. I think that shade of blue is pretty darn cool - not to mention the somewhat brain-boggling realization that it’s the product of something moving faster than light.
That’s because you view Star Wars as sci-fi and I view Arthur C. Clarke as sci-fi. There is a huge difference.
It moving faster than light in that medium, not faster than c. I shall now stop nitpicking. 
You can stop telling me things I already know any time you like, too. 
Star Wars is space fantasy. Star Trek is sci-fi. Arthur C. Clarke is science fiction.
I’ll second MEBuckner on this. I think Star Trek used to be up there with the old school science fiction, but it exchanged a bit of that as the price of its phenomenal worldwide recognition.
I’m not sure that I understand the difference between sci-fi and science fiction, as I had always thought that sci-fi came from SCIence FIction… But if you are making a distinction, then I too would say that Clarke is Science Fiction in the proper sense.
No… (minor spoilers for ringworld’s children, if anybody cares…)
You can turn on your Q2 hyperdrive about as close to a star as you want. Just watch out for 'dem “Eaters of ships”
Interesting, I didn’t know this book was subtitled “Niven Jumps the Shark”. :rolleyes: