Destiny never claimed to be hard sci-fi (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, November 16, 2017, 16:56 (2565 days ago) @ Robot Chickens

The Destiny universe clearly and explicitly does not stick to hard sci-fi’s strict physics. If you’ll recall, the Hive once thought of the Ecumene as “lords of matter and physical law” but after Oryx killed his siblings he was able to defeat the Ecumene through “physically illegal” means. Some of the powers of the Hive, Vex, and the Traveler itself are also referred to as paracausal since they defy the normal rules of reality.

So, yeah, a normal wave of light is limited by speed and wavelength. But this ain’t that.

I just find it hard to believe that Bungie intended to alter the Lorentz transform as part of their rules for the universe. I can buy space magic and time travel, but this seems… oddly specific.

I'm hesitant to jump into this, but it is possible that we might not be seeing the actual wave as it moves faster than light. It could be that we're seeing the effects of the wave as it interacts with matter while the actual wave is traveling FTL. Wouldn't that negate the need for worry about blue-shifts?

I say this knowing full well that artistic license is probably the answer and I'm satisfied with that.

It's totally artistic license and I only mention it because taking liberties with the rules of the game universe bugs the hell out of me. :P

But I like what you're thinking. However, were that the case, then what we'd see would be the light from the interaction, which would look less like a pulse that slowly spreads and more like the whole universe turned cloudy and white for a second there. Even more further (even furthermore?), There's still the issue that the camera observing this visible phenomenon is so far away from the Traveler that the actual return of light would have passed the camera a billion years (or very likely several billion years) before the light from that disturbance ever reached the camera (at which point our sun has naturally died anyway etc... ) so seeing the pyramid ships react to that would be a big "meh" for the universe as a LOT can change in a billion+ years.