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« on: May 16, 2013, 01:55:13 PM »
So, for the YA Sci-Fi project I'm working on I have a psuedo-magic system based around the concept of gates(read portals from portal, but with more room to play.) There's quite a bit of backstory behind this, and more than a little Significantly advanced tech/life is magic.(I'm probably at a 2.5 on the Sci-Fi Hardness scale, but spaceflight itself is leaning towards a 3.5(works with physics at a basic level, but I'm not going to start throwing theoretical physics around much, just account for relativistic time dilation and the like.)
Anyway here's the situation.
Ship A(The Captain doesn't like to name ships.) is running low on fuel. They have enough to either A-Get to travelling speeds(.9C) or B, slow down from (.9C) but not both. The ship is being pursued, and is somewhat damaged from a run in with another pirate vessel. They took the attacking pirate vessel without major harm to it via sabotage and portals. Now the Pirate ship, Queenswyrd, needs to tow the other ship to travelling velocity. They'll deal with the fuel trouble of that later, but they don't have the hull integrity to pull this off(because why would you have the hull integrity to tow a ship 6 times your size to .9C) So what I want to do is put a gate on the back of the ship, fire the magnetic grapple through the gate, and then have it come out at a 180 degree angle to itself, so that the magnet hits a forward facing wall(that is involved in bracing the engines) on the Queenswyrd.)
However, depending on the perspective I take this gets really weird. If I go from Ship A's perspective it should be getting towed, but if you go from the perspective of the grapple it looks like the cable should be slackening, but then if the cable slackens the two ships will be getting closer together, but if that happens its getting towed.
I'm pretty sure I'm overthinking things, but I can't be certain and it's slowly driving me nuts.