OK, So:
I'm watching this video essay from acollierastro(which is great, and you should watch it), and as you can see it's mainly about space elevators, but in the course of explaining the challenges with THAT she brings up a a point that I LOVE that NO SPACE TRAVEL FIC EVER Mentions, which is Interstellar(she calls it Galactic, which is Also a good name uwu) Navigation.
Like: stars move, and they don't move at the same rate, and they don't move in straight lines because gravity curves space. We tend to think of space travel as a straight path from point A to point B but NO! That's not what you have to do(coincidentally this is also one of the many, Many reasons why the dark forest hypothesis is bullshit)!! What you have to do is send a Leetle ship from One chaoticly moving object(the solar system), through an unknown and chaotically dynamic medium(Spess), to ANOTHER, Specific, chaoticly moving object(your destination), and you have to do that accurately, over numerous light-years, understanding that EVERY slowdown or course-change which occurs due to malfunction or for the safety of the leetle ship will DRASTICALLY change your needed course and resource requirements, oh and ALSO: the only idea you have for where the destination-star could be is where it was many MANY years(possibly centuries or millennia) in the past. Like: even if you choose a star you have a long history of observation for, and thus numerous datapoints for calculating its velocity and vector, it may not be where you expect it to be because some Event you haven't witnessed altered its trajectory, or simply because it moved through a star-dense area and all that gravity altered its course.
Interstellar navigation is SUCH a huge problem, such a COMPLEX problem Filled with unknowns and (due to the scale of the distances and speeds involved and the limitations of detection)unknowables, and so many people just ignore it! And I mean: that's fine for Star Trek and the like, it's a conceit that allows for cool stories, but when someone's trying to present themselves as talking about this IRL, or their SciFi as "Hard" and "Grounded", and they IGNORE the MASSIVE PROBLEM of navigation, I just find it really difficult to take them seriously.
And so I liked that she brought it up ^v^ ^v^ ^v^
Anyway: enough of my ranting :p :p
