POWER XTREME!

Post by **AndyThomas** » Tue Aug 20, 2002 7:24 pm

I've been dying to get this page done, but although the material from the annual I got hold of was OK it just wasn't the same as being able to get grabs from the video. So now that I have, you can see the result at:http://www.sfxb.co.uk/animated/centurions.htmlThis is one of the more extensive entries in Animated, featuring two home grown video files and images of all the original assault weapons systems. I'll be interested to hear how many of you remember the show - there was some merchandising around at the time, it was quite mid-eighties this one...

Slacker · Post by **Slacker** » Wed Aug 21, 2002 3:05 pm

Yep I remember this one, I used to like it a lot but as you say it was something that you could easily have missed. It was a good idea and I liked the way that they mixed and matched the weapons that they wore for each situation. My fave was the huge gun that was so big it had 2 walking legs to help the guy carry it.I remember one of the educational segments at the end being about time dilation, saying that if a spaceman went on a 40 year trip around the solar system at high speed he would return to Earth hundreds of years later. Which blew my mind at about 10 years old! (AFAIK its true as well).

Post by **AndyThomas** » Wed Aug 21, 2002 3:20 pm

Yes, that's accurate - for example, if a mission to Mars set off at a reasonable percentage of the speed of light then from our point of view it might take e.g. 2 years for them to get there whereas it was only 18 months for them. There's a little comment in the Star Trek Next Gen Tech Manual about it, saying that Fed ships shouldn't go too fast and can synchronise their on-board time using beacons...

Slacker · Post by **Slacker** » Wed Aug 21, 2002 4:30 pm

Apparently it even has a (very) mild effect on air travel, when you're on a flight your watch will gain a tiny fraction of a second over clocks on the ground.

Bradster · Post by **Bradster** » Sun Aug 25, 2002 11:17 am

You're quite right, Slacker. Clocks at higher altitudes do run a tiny bit faster relative to clocks at lower altitudes. Einstein's theory of relativity explains this all very well, but it was actually tested in the mid 1970s with two hydrogen maser clocks. One was on the ground and one was fired up in a rocket to a height of about 10,000 kilometers. As the rocket ascended, radio transmissions were sent back to the ground with data from the clock. Many calculations had to be made to allow for the warps caused by the rocket's changing acceleration and the decrease in gravity and the time it took for the transmission to travel, but the results proved conclusively that the clock in the rocket ran measurably faster than the clock on the ground. Measurably, in this case, means about four parts in ten billion. As for Star Trek's FTL travel, their "warp" travel eludes the dilation effect because of the way it warps space around the vessel and because of the mythical "inertial dampeners" that do some weird stuff with acceleration. I used to know how all that worked and actually participated in a few debates about the theories, but most of it was just hogwash. Bleh!