Time travel thing - a small preview

[ffutures]

Forthcoming Cruises: Triassic-Cretaceous TS Corinthic, Captain Richard Thorne RNVR, White Star Line: Departs for a four-week cruise to the Triassic-Cretaceous oceans, calling in at London (1588 AD), Vinland (1000 AD), Herculaneum (75 AD; day trip to Pompeii available), Africa (500,000 BC; hunting trips available), Triassic-Cretaceous (circa 150 Million BC). Launched in 1902, the Corinthic is a luxurious new liner of 12,251 tons capable of 14 knots and equipped with the latest Ferguson Chronatron® time displacer and a Babbage-Williamson navigational engine. Excluding stops en-route and any delays to manoeuvre the journey to the Triassic-Cretaceous seas will take approximately a week, with a week spent sight-seeing and hunting in this period before the return journey. Currently all first-class accommodation is reserved, but second and third-class cabins are still available and may be booked via Thomas Cook & Sons and other reputable agents. Corinthic will depart from pier 7, Southampton, at 2.00 PM on Tuesday 11th May.

Okay - showing my crappy maths here. What I need here is a SIMPLE mathematical formula that'll relate the distance travelled in time to the distance at sea, possibly an exponential curve or close to it. The way I want it to work is that you start off slowly but accelerate. A few months in the first few miles, a few years in the next few, and so forth, say 200 million years in a week, and the beginning of the universe in a month or two (assuming you could keep sailing). I can simply give figures that suit me, but it'd be better if I could give a formula that can be used without too much messing around. Any suggestions?

Comments

[drplokta]

Exponential will increase too fast, you're probably better off with cubes or squares.

How about:
1 mile = 1 day
8 miles = 512 days = 1.5 years
16 miles = 4096 days = 12 years
32 miles = 30,000 days = 100 years
64 miles = 750 years
128 miles = 6000 years
256 miles = 50,000 years
512 miles = 400,000 years
1024 miles = 3 million years
2048 miles = 25 million years
4096 miles = 400 million years
8192 miles = 3.2 billion years
16536 miles = 25 billion years -- so back before the big bang.

Time in days is the cube of distance in miles (or kilometres if you want a slightly faster progression).

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That's actually the first relationship I tried! It's a bit arbitrary, but I agree it's dead easy to calculate.

Okay, let's say I go with that - would the RPG people reading this think that the relationship sounded a bit artificial, or would you be willing to suspend your disbelief?

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

The direct relationship between miles and days is too neat for me, but toss in an arbitrary constant (so you get days = constant * miles^3) and it'll look pretty much like stuff you actually find in physics.