Question

the starship enterprises is on a mission into deep space, where no man human has gone before . it encounters an alien spacecraft and captain kirk orders activation of the tractor beam to pull the allien craft to the starship. The alien ship is made of a super-dense alloy so its mass is 8 times the mass of the starship. Assuming the two craft have zero relative velocity at the time the tractor beam is activated, describe their motions by comparing the acceleration of the enterprise to that of the alien craft as seen by a distant stationery observer?

Answer 1

Hahahaha is this for real?

Answer 2

You can't apply physics to this question. The tractor beam works on light (photons), the re-emission of the photons cause the object to move. But it wouldn't pull the enterprise around or anything, which is normally shown in the series and movies. The alien ship of dense alloy would only move very! slowly towards the enterprise.

It said that they are both stationary, and in deep space there is no gravitational attraction. So it would just move slowly towards the enterprise. In terms of a third observer the distance between the two crafts would just decrease as the alien craft picks up momentum it will accelerate.

So! the two ships will move slowly towards each other and pick up momentum and move quicker and quicker.