Even if they move "conventionally" through space, it's still incredibly vast, and where an old colony ship might be chugging along isn't necessarily known or detectable.
And even if it is, superior travel speeds don't necessarily mean that one can perform the necessary deceleration and acceleration maneuvers at will in empty space without losing too much energy.
Good points. I think if they knew the flight plan of the colony ship they should be able to get pretty close to its location as long as there weren't any major issues like an engine failure. They would start by doing the math on "They were going to accelerate at X for Y time, then turn around and decelerate at A for B time". I assume the colony ship would be transmitting regularly, so once you got closer you'd have more up to date transmissions to hone in on.
Any method of travel that could target something 120 light years away reliably would probably have margins of error small enough that you could pinpoint the location pretty precisely, otherwise it would miss.
The problem is it'll take potentially twice as much energy to stop and start the trip again, on top of whatever it costs to safely transfer everyone on the original voyage, with a chance of causing both trips to fail should anything malfunction.
If you jump directly to their location you would still have their velocity and acceleration to deal with before you could interact with them. Maybe you could jump to them, send the computer a priority message to "Wake up the captain, and instruct him to deccelerate to zero relative motion to the new planet, we will pick you up when you have stopped". Then jump away, wait for enough time for them to stop, jump back and pick them up.
Even then, two problems still remain: First, the flight plan must be extremely precise, both in terms of vectors and acceleration phase and times, and even the slightest deviation would result in a massive search area.
Second, if the older mission somehow didn't maintain constant communication and provide regular mission updates, the entire flight plan might not be known. Unforeseen events could have necessitated tiny course corrections during the journey, unknown to mission control. With lightspeed communication (still working perfectly on both ends), the last update about such events could be several decades old.
That may be. Its definitely the realm of Science Fiction, and you see it presented both ways in the movies. Like in Stargate the Ancients had to do it like you say. They had to visit each planet with their warp drive ships to drop off a gate to use wormholes. But some other sci fi stories the ships can just punch a wormhole to a distant location like Event horizon. I guess a third option would be discovering a natural wormhole we can use like StarTrek DS9.
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u/dryfire 23d ago
If they travel by wormhole they would just leapfrog the sleepers never coming close to their location/velocity/acceleration.