Wouldn't that require the ships to travel backward in time? If a ship could go back into a wormhole, wouldn't time continue to flow forward?cim wrote:If this wasn't the case, a ship could jump from A to B, then from B to A, then use its own wormhole to return to B again. Bearing in mind that only the initiating ship uses fuel, this could be combined with sufficient "dumb" mass to create permanent semi-stable wormholes between the two systems.
I thought of the wormhole exit point as the outlet of a pipe gushing water that somehow self seals, too difficult to go back up the pipe and not enough time to do it anyway, but the outflow effect persists for as long as the start point is open (and that is defined by the ship that generated it). One can imagine massive ships, whose wormholes stay open for minutes, could be well off the radar by the time the commander who just scrapes into the hole before it closes pops out the other end.