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Speed measurement

Today’s spacecraft travel at speeds far exceeding light itself, these speeds require new units, as the traditional metrics encounter uncomfortable and imprecise magnitudes. Therefore new systems of measurement have been development to describe these higher speeds, which retain precision and that are easy to call out and interpret.

            There are many actual methods of describing ship speed, and many more units, but like the various metrics in the federation, there is one commonly used system, analogous to the new metric (the metric system shared by all federation races, based on the Planck-metre), and many other rarer systems, which are similar to the old metrics that each culture occasionally uses.

            The most common method is describing ship speed in terms of light multiples, this system is easy to understand and using standard prefixes can comfortably scale most common ship speeds. The unit is simply called ‘c’ or ‘lights’, so for a speed of 4 times the speed of light it could be interpreted as ‘4c’ or ‘4lights’. This example is a rather low speed for most cruise speeds of modern craft, the more useful speed is the ‘kilo-c’, or ‘kilo-lights’, were one kilo-c is equal to a thousand times the speed of light. Other common prefixes in this system include micro (1/1,000,000), milli (1/1,000), and centi (1/100) which are used for sub-c flight, and deca (x10), kilo (x1,000) and mega (x1,000,000) which are used for trans c flight.This system is the most common, and is nearly always used on ships, and is the unit given to other parties.

            There are other systems based on the speeds of light, most of these use light as a function in accordance to time, so other units such as light years per hour (lyph), and light days per hour (ldph), these systems generally use one particular races calendar, or use the orchestrated federation time, which is usually represented by the addition of another letter on the unit (f’ for federation time, h’ for human time etc.). This system is rarely used on craft, as it is a more clumsy unit, and hard to decipher speed in terms of other metrics, however it is used a lot by ‘stationary’ objects, such as for traffic control on planets and other facilities, as it gives them a quick idea of how long until something is due to arrive.

The last major type of system based on the speed of light, is by relative velocities. This is used for when ships are approaching each other at high speeds, say for docking or for engagement with enemies, these relative speeds are simply derived from the first common light system, and so its units still are in ‘c’, but the relative velocity of the craft are taken into account and so the approach can be easily interpreted.

Other systems use seeds other than that of light, the most common is that of gravity, and of entanglement (roughly similar), the most common of these systems uses the ‘grav’, which is 10^-33 of the speed of gravity, the roughly equates to a thousand times the speed of light. Again various prefixes are used, ‘kilo-gravs’ generally being the highest units for describing ships, other higher prefixes are useful for measuring unusual phenomena like hyperspace relative speeds. The grav system is not commonly used aboard ships, and only the Galos, who invented this system, commonly use it. However the grav does allow higher speeds to be talked about with ease, and is useful for high-speed physics such as hyperspace, wormholes and ripples in the fabric of space, for this reason it is more common to encounter this unit in science rather than in navigation and cartography. From the grav we get some other useful units, the grav-sec, which is analogous to lights per second, and the grav-length, which is used to describe curvatures of space.

The final type of measurement uses a metric as a base, these tend to become unwieldy at trans-c speeds, for example traveling at 10c is equal to 3x10^9 Earth metres per second (3x10^9ms-1 E’ or 3Gms-1 E’), or 3 million kilometers a second. But this system is fine for lower speeds, usually federation metric is used, or an old metric of one of the race worlds is used.

 
 

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