How far from Earth did Red Dwarf get?

[Smeg4Brains]

Someone on Facebook asked this question and I’ve never really thought about it before, we’re always just told it’s “3 millions years away”, so I thought I’d try to work it out.

Obviously we can’t really know it exactly without knowing the Dwarf’s starting speed, but after 3 million years it reaches light speed which is 299792458 m/s so if it was starting from stationary, that would make it’s acceleration 0.0000031666 m/s2. According to this online calculator I found (https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/displacement) it would travel 14191095708871200000 km if it accelerated constantly at that rate for 3 million years.

According to Google that’s 1500000 lightyears. That doesn’t seem right does it? Someone correct me if I’ve done something wrong here.

Topic

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

that assumes it was flying in a straight line, or if indeed the universe is flat, or that we’re not being lied too.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

Yeah.

[Flap Jack]

Assuming we can trust the calculator, I can’t think of anything you’ve done wrong. 1.5 million light years sounds right? It just generally holds true that if you start at 0 and constantly accelerate towards a speed over a certain period of time, you’ll cover half the distance you would cover if you’d been going the target speed the whole time.

However, Red Dwarf probably wasn’t stationary at the time of the accident, for obvious reasons.

However [Part 2], is this for book canon or TV canon? Because IIRC Red Dwarf reaching lightspeed by accident just due to accelerating for 3 million years is Infinity-only. In Future Echoes, lightspeed (and FTL speed) is a deliberate plan to get back to Earth more quickly, which means that Red Dwarf would have to turn around first, which means it would need to slow down from whatever its speed was before. I interpreted Holly’s use of lightspeed in the episode as an experimental measure, more like a Star Wars style “jump to lightspeed”/hyperdrive mechanism than a natural consequence of millennia of constant acceleration. (But you could interpret it the opposite way: that Red Dwarf can go LS or near LS as part of its normal function, and Future Echoes demonstrates it can get there very quickly after slowing to turn, therefore Red Dwarf might have been going just below LS for most of the 3 million years.)

Unfortunatelty I think we’d need an idea of Red Dwarf’s “normal” maximum speed and average speed to work out the TV distance. I don’t suppose it’s in the Survival Manual or Log No. 1996 or something?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

> In Future Echoes, lightspeed (and FTL speed) is a deliberate plan to get back to Earth more quickly,

Where in the episode are you getting that from?  I thought the implication was they always reached it by accident.

If they need to turn around, they’d have done it before accelerating to light speed.  They can’t turn around as they’re so close to light speed (from millions of years of acceleration) they’re can’t manoeuvre. It’s “going to take 4000 years to turn around” is relative because they’re approaching light speed.  By the time they’ve 180ed they’d have lost another 4000 years.  

It wouldn’t make any sense at any other normal speeds to say it would take RD that long to manoeuvre.  It’s a big ship but it could swing around fairly easily.  If nothing else just go into orbit around a planet and other the other side.

[Dave]

Where in the episode are you getting that from?  I thought the implication was they always reached it by accident.

Yeah, it’s just treated as something that’s going to happen to them rather than something they’ve done intentionally. Lister mentions that he was initially going to go into stasis just to get through it, and then decides to stay in there for the whole trip.

[Flap Jack]

Oh. Good point. I was misremembering/misunderstanding the cause and effect. “Our best chance is to go towards Earth fast as possible while you go back into stasis, so I’ll do that” instead of “Oh look we’re going into lightspeed, better get into stasis just in case.” Whoops. Disregard 95% of what I just said then.

I think what cemented this misunderstanding through numerous rewatches is how matter-of-factly Holly states they’re a day away from going to lightspeed, as the first thing he does in the first episode after the “get back to Earth” goal was stated. It seemed purposeful, that on their way back they’d go max speed for as long as it was sustainable, at least until they realised Holly couldn’t manage it. He never says that Red Dwarf is constantly accelerating and there’s nothing he can do to stop or slow it, and that can’t actually be true either, because obviously he does slow it down to sub-lightspeed eventually. It taking 4,000 years to turn around should have been a clue, but, when if it’s not a moment where I forget that line happened, I must have just thought that they were so far away from Earth that turning at lightspeed was still quicker than slowing down, turning, and then speeding up again.

Honestly having this detail confirmed makes me like Future Echoes a bit less, because (A) the fact this happens right after Lister gets released from stasis is an absurd coincidence, on top of the existing absurd coincidence that his awakening is perfectly timed for there to be just 2 Cats on board, and (B) it makes it bizarre that there’s no line of dialogue acknowledging that going to lightspeed while facing the wrong direction is inherently a fuckup that Holly should be using his time to prevent, not just “prepare for”.

Back on the original topic though, it is interesting that Rimmer expects to be switched off for 3 million years if Lister is in stasis for the entire journey back to Earth. Not counting the 4 thousand years turning time (which at this scale is margin of error anyway) that means he thinks that Red Dwarf’s average speed on the journey back will be the same as the journey out, which suggests that it got up to near lightspeed very quickly or started close to that, not that it started much slower and accelerated at a constant rate.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

If nothing else just go into orbit around a planet and other the other side.

Which indeed they do in IWCD, as soon as they slow down enough to see what they’re doing.

[International Debris]

It’s worth remembering that, from an original creative perspective, Future Echoes was never intended to go out second, and had it been written as such, it might possibly have felt less jarring. It’s a great attention grabber as the first proper post-accident episode, but I think narratively it works a lot better later on, with the slower normal life on board ship episodes up first. I would even go so far as to say it would work really well as episode 6, other than the obvious Rimmer development in Me2.

[Author]

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