Re: Jump Fuel (was Re: [TML] Instant city) Tim 15 Feb 2016 01:21 UTC

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 07:28:07PM -0500, Richard Aiken wrote:
> If the inner surface of the warped-space boundary functions as a
> simple mirror reflection, after a while wouldn't you get a more or
> less even glow rather than pinpoint sources?

I wouldn't expect it to have a boundary in normal space at all, just
wrapping around so that if you go far enough in space, you end up
somewhat near your starting point again.  Something like a sphere or
torus (except with a surface of three dimensions, and that being the
cross section of a spacetime hypercylinder).

Every point within it would then look normal.  Except, if you had a
really fantastic telescope, you could see images of your own planet
repeated in many directions.  Some appearing to be "only" a few
parsecs away, but most very much more distant.

To unaided eye, it would just look like a relatively normal field of
stars with a few bright ones, more dimmer ones, and tons of really
faint ones.

If you make the simplest assumptions, they would appear to occur in a
regular grid.  There's no reason to suppose that the simplest case
applies though, and they could appear almost random if the spacetime
geometry was slightly asymmetric.

- Tim