Weyland has FTL?

[i]LONG SHOT[/i], [b]faster than light travel[/b]. 'nuf sed. ;)

28.5 months to go 34.6 light years... (some rounding there) about 14.56 times the speed of light, 3095.1 light years at 14.56 x Light speed, would take in the region of 212 years, and it's supposed to predate the mission to LV 223. They'd have to depart Earth in an FTL ship, about a decade before Wilbur Wright was born. Odd alright. Someone's got some explaining to do. If Weyland corp is capable of such speeds, and presumably their smaller ships can produce similar speeds to their larger engined ones, Prometheus wasn't in the hurry that one would expect it to be in. Long shot... robot crews... able to withstand much greater accelerations, but still sounds like a huge discrepancy.

I wondered about this too. Now first I need to correct a few things. When we first see the ship in space, it is 3.27 x 10^14 km from Earth. A quick calculation places this in the neighborhood of 34.5 Light-Years. But I just watched a BBC interview where Ridley Scott says that LV 223 is a planet or moon in orbit around Zeta II Reticuli. According to Wikipedia, this star system is 39 Light-years from Earth. So in the time that we are first introduced to David until the time where the proximity alarm goes off, the ship travels another 4.5 LY. Now if this ship only had an impulse engine it would need to be already decelerating (in order to be captured by the star system's gravity) and would not be able to go that last bit so fast. But we also know two of the people were on Earth only a few years earlier in 2089 and probably left on or after 2090 so it seems at the very minimum, that the ship can go at least 10-15 times the speed-of-light. Now I'm wondering why Ridley didn't add any faster-than-light graphics as we saw in Babylon 5 or Star Trek.

ONE HUNDRED TIMES the speed of light. A light beam would travel ONE LIGHT YEAR (distance) in one year. Weyland can manage 100 LIGHT YEARS in that same year, that's one hundred times faster then Herr Einstein's absolute means of momentum gain - unless it's a Momentumless Drive Mechamism? Anyone?

Not sure if the other web page (with distances of 3000 LY) is official stuff from the movie writers or just the web-content designer's freedom of expression so I will just stick to facts from the movie (or Ridley Scott interviews) Zeta II Retiuli (home of LV 223) is 39 LY from Earth. At the speed of light they would require 39 years to get there; At 10 times the speed of light, they would require 3.9 years. AT 20 times the speed of light, they would require 1.9 years. speculation: If the 3000 LY figures are official, then we must assume that some cost must be incurred to get longer distances faster. In the case of traditional impulse drives, you spend half your time getting up to some fraction of the speed-of-light then need to spend the other half dropping back down in order to be captured by gravity. I just don't see how a 1-3 year mission to a destination 39 LY would be possible with an impulse drive. While faster-than-light travel is a stretch for sci-fi, a Momentumless Drive seems an even wilder stretch (Momentum is defined a "mass x velocity" so the only way to have both "zero momentum" and "zero inertia" would be to have "zero mass". Now the latest hypothesis says particles get their mass by interacting with the Higgs Field. (there is an LHC announcement scheduled for July 1, 2012 about the possible discovery of the Higgs Particle; If scientists could tell engineers how to turn off the Higgs Field (even locally) then FTL travel might be possible)