it’s actually impossible to have an unarmed interstellar spaceship
Since this subthread had already stepped into the realm of sidetracked internet debate, I’d like to challenge that claim.
I understand that the reasoning behind this statement is that interstellar travel requires some properties that disqualify the ship from being considered “unarmed”:
Interstellar travel requires ridiculous speed, which makes the ship itself a kinetic weapon.
The ship will need formidable defensive mechanism to survive cosmic radiation and impact with particles at the speed it is traveling.
I see two problems with this argument:
The spaceship could use some sort of FTL travel, which may or may not bypass these requirements entirely.
Regular cars have enough kinetic energy to kill people, and they are reinforced to a certain degree so that they won’t break from the strains of the speeds they travel in. Would you also say that it is impossible to have an unarmed car? One could certainly make such a claim, but that kind of drains the meaning out of the term “unarmed”…
My point about the FTL thing is that this question is in the realm of science fiction. Sci-fi authors can come up with whatever physics they want, and in real life we are so far from being able to do it that we can’t tell how it’d look like. So I wouldn’t rule out that it’d be based on some physical principles that allow a non-weaponizable spaceships.
Regarding the comparison to cars - I agree that it all depends on definition, but while there is some merit to the philosophy that “there are no wrong definitions” - bad definitions are certainly a thing. And a definition of “weapon” that includes regular cars is a bad one, because it misses out the important distinction between regular cars and armored vehicles with mounted guns.
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Since this subthread had already stepped into the realm of sidetracked internet debate, I’d like to challenge that claim.
I understand that the reasoning behind this statement is that interstellar travel requires some properties that disqualify the ship from being considered “unarmed”:
I see two problems with this argument:
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My point about the FTL thing is that this question is in the realm of science fiction. Sci-fi authors can come up with whatever physics they want, and in real life we are so far from being able to do it that we can’t tell how it’d look like. So I wouldn’t rule out that it’d be based on some physical principles that allow a non-weaponizable spaceships.
Regarding the comparison to cars - I agree that it all depends on definition, but while there is some merit to the philosophy that “there are no wrong definitions” - bad definitions are certainly a thing. And a definition of “weapon” that includes regular cars is a bad one, because it misses out the important distinction between regular cars and armored vehicles with mounted guns.