LightSpeed Spaceships.

[RidgeTop]

Can Humans or Predators travel faster than light?  I read that they can in the books, comics, and the human ships on wikipedia.  but there is never any evidence of it shown in the films or games.

[Hankerson]

Even at 50% light speed it would take eight years to reach the nearest star outside our solar system. The outer rim is a lot farther than four light years from earth. Ripley wanted to make it home for Amanda's next birthday and the only way to do that would be to travel a lot faster than the speed of light.

[SM]

The Nostromo covers a light year in about 8.3 days (fully laden).
The Sulaco covers a light year in about 14 hours.
The Auriga's intra-system speed is in the realm of 3 times the speed of light.

Yes it's in the films.

[RidgeTop]

Well it never SHOWS it in the films, a la Star Trek or Star Wars.

[SM]

No it doesn't, but it doesn't take much thought to work it out.

Zeta 2 Reticuli (where LV-426 is) is a real star about 37 LY from Sol.  Travelling under the speed of light it's going to take more than 37 years to get back to Earth.  The Nostromo did it (or would've) in 10 months.  The Sulaco did it in 3 weeks (though the references to this were excised from the film).  And the Auriga covered 47 AU in under 3 hours.  All faster than light.

Interestingly there were passages in the script that describe the FTL red/ blue doppler for exterior shots of the Nostromo.

[Corporal Hicks]

The novels call it Einstien Space is I remember correctly.

[SM]

They call them 'gravity drives' in the old comics.  No matter what you call it, it's all FTL.

[weewing427]

well all i know is in real life you cant travle light speed, impossible, cuz when you travel at the speed of light, your spaceship will expand 300times bigger than it is due to the high heat, or something like that, lols.

[SM]

There's been various speculative theories to get around that.  One involves a drive that lowers the mass of the ship making it possible to go FTL.  FTL speed is controlled by varying the mass of the ship.

[Meathead320]

This is where physics gets real funky in all of Sci-Fi.

[Extroheal]

According to the Colonial Marins Technical Manual, the Nostromo has a speed of 0.12 light years per day. This is consistent with the fact that it would take the Nostromo 10 months to get from Zeta 2 Reticuli to Earth. It wasn't mentioned in the movie how long it took the Sulaco to get to LV-426 but according to the CMTM its speed is 0.74 light years per day so it must've taken 7 weeks to get there.

The CMTM also explains that FTL travel (called a techyon shunt) involves creating some kind of virtual mass field and turning the ships mass into techyons which are particles that cannot travel slower than light. The more mass on a ship, the slower it travels. Even the Narcissus had an FTL drive but it was slow and limited to a range of 13 parsecs. Hypersleep is used to reduce the effects of reverse relativity which causes more time to pass inside the ship than outside it.

Which novels used the term Einstein Space?

[SM]

The CMTM is mostly a trustworthy source.  Mostly.

The Sulaco's speed is actually closer to 1.7 ly per day as both the script and novelisation quote a travel time of 3 weeks.

Brimmicombe-Woode got the Sulaco's lenth wrong too, but nobody's perfect.

[Extroheal]

I prefer the CMTM's interpretation. The script and novelization are unreliable because certain details were changed in the final movie. The CMTM was written after the movie so it's fully consistent with the movie.

[SM]

Be that as it may - it's still wrong.

[Vader the White]

And the Auriga covered 47 AU in under 3 hours.  All faster than light.

Heck, that's over twice the speed of light!!
(Light would take about 6 hrs and 17 mins to get across 47 AU. How did I figure that out? I knew it takes light 8 mins to get to Earth from the Sun. Just multiply that by 47 and simplfy it.)

There is FTL tech. Otherwise, both Alien and Predator would be impossible.