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conulywith the same speed and direction unless acted upon by another force.
What this means, science fiction authors of the world, is that if you are accelerating happily along in space and your engines suddenly cut out, you will not stop short, nor even slow down. You will merely stop accelerating, and continue at a constant speed until you bump into something else or fix your engines.
I'm willing to accept, for the sake of story, that space travel is exactly like ship travel (so no relativity) except that you're worried about explosive decompression instead of drowning/sharks. I'll even believe in space pirates, despite the fact that space is incomprehensibly vast and pirates are comparatively tiny and thus implausible. (I'll just assume you didn't comprehend that part, and anyway, the story needs pirates.) But unless you're going to technobabble at me about subspace or warp or hyperspace or whatever, I'm gonna assume you're traveling in the real, observable universe (sans relativity!) and Newton's laws of motion apply exactly as they do in the real world.
Inertia. Learn it.
Also: If it takes these two until the end of the book to kiss, I'm not buying the sequel.
Edit: Geez. Okay. Space is cold. Why is it cold? Because it is a vacuum... like your thermos bottle. If the contents of your shuttle are cold, then they will stay cold. If the contents of your shuttle are warm, and continue to produce heat, because they are mammals and that is what mammals do, then they will stay warm. If all your systems were just fried, our protagonist should not be shivering because the heating is offline, she should be sweating because there's nowhere for her body heat to go. Her shuttle is a giant thermos, and she's the soup.
Edit again: If his deceased identical twin did it, I'm not buying the sequel. (Oh, who'm I kidding? There's nothing I love more than a good nitpick. I'm definitely buying the sequel.)
Edit the third: It took them within 50 pages of the end of the book, and it was his deceased twin all along, but in an actually shocking revelation his not-so-deceased identical twin isn't evil, he's a philanthropist. It's their dad and/or the government that's operating on dubious ethics.
What this means, science fiction authors of the world, is that if you are accelerating happily along in space and your engines suddenly cut out, you will not stop short, nor even slow down. You will merely stop accelerating, and continue at a constant speed until you bump into something else or fix your engines.
I'm willing to accept, for the sake of story, that space travel is exactly like ship travel (so no relativity) except that you're worried about explosive decompression instead of drowning/sharks. I'll even believe in space pirates, despite the fact that space is incomprehensibly vast and pirates are comparatively tiny and thus implausible. (I'll just assume you didn't comprehend that part, and anyway, the story needs pirates.) But unless you're going to technobabble at me about subspace or warp or hyperspace or whatever, I'm gonna assume you're traveling in the real, observable universe (sans relativity!) and Newton's laws of motion apply exactly as they do in the real world.
Inertia. Learn it.
Also: If it takes these two until the end of the book to kiss, I'm not buying the sequel.
Edit: Geez. Okay. Space is cold. Why is it cold? Because it is a vacuum... like your thermos bottle. If the contents of your shuttle are cold, then they will stay cold. If the contents of your shuttle are warm, and continue to produce heat, because they are mammals and that is what mammals do, then they will stay warm. If all your systems were just fried, our protagonist should not be shivering because the heating is offline, she should be sweating because there's nowhere for her body heat to go. Her shuttle is a giant thermos, and she's the soup.
Edit again: If his deceased identical twin did it, I'm not buying the sequel. (Oh, who'm I kidding? There's nothing I love more than a good nitpick. I'm definitely buying the sequel.)
Edit the third: It took them within 50 pages of the end of the book, and it was his deceased twin all along, but in an actually shocking revelation his not-so-deceased identical twin isn't evil, he's a philanthropist. It's their dad and/or the government that's operating on dubious ethics.
