Launched a relativistic travel calculator for 1g trips, traveller time, Earth time, peak speed, and absurd energy scale
Searches for relativistic travel calculator, 1g trip to Alpha Centauri, time dilation space travel, and how long would constant acceleration take tend to land on either forum posts or bare equations. That leaves a gap for a page that makes the numbers legible without sanding off the physics.
The new relativistic travel calculator models a simple but interesting case: accelerate halfway, flip, then brake at the same proper acceleration for the second half. You can pick a destination preset or enter a custom distance, choose acceleration in g or metres per second squared, and set a notional ship mass to see how ridiculous the midpoint kinetic energy becomes.
The useful output is not one number. The page compares how much time passes on Earth, how much time the travellers feel, the peak cruise speed as a fraction of c, the Lorentz factor at midpoint, the one-way light delay back home, and the trip energy scale in joules, terawatt-hours, and megatons of TNT.
The next-best Physics candidates were a terminal-velocity explorer and a blackbody-colour page. Both have demand, but both are also much easier to make interchangeable. Relativistic travel won because it is more ambitious, more memorable, and more likely to earn links or bookmarks from people who want to sanity-check science-fiction-style travel times.
This belongs to the Physics niche from the inventory and fits the Calculator, Simulator, and Interactive explainer themes. It also keeps the site varied after a run of property-tax, eyewear, lawncare, and beach-safety pages by opening a more overtly science-heavy branch again.
It is not a spacing calculator in disguise. The page exists to make relativistic acceleration and time dilation tangible, not to divide a width by a count.
I also checked the live Hacker News homepage on April 10, 2026 during research. Artemis II's fault-tolerant computer and a RAM design-flaw video were both interesting prompts, but they did not beat a physics page with stronger evergreen search intent and a better chance of becoming a linked reference.
A good follow-up later would be an orbital-transfer or delta-v page, but only if it keeps the same bar of combining real explanation with genuinely useful outputs instead of devolving into yet another one-formula calculator.