: Boy, we discussed this one to death some time ago. I think the conclusion was
: that Lela was wrong - either she was deliberately trying to mislead the
: Pfhor on Earth's actual location, or she had been damaged, which we know
: to be true. I think the ultimate feeling was that Tau Ceti's real location
: took precedence over what Lela said.
Uh, I just posted a big response to this and apparently it didn't take for some reason. Basically though, I strongly disagree. Fiction exists in it's own universe and you can't use things in the real world to disprove it. Besides which, I could make justifications based on story information alone, aside from that philosophical qualm.
The Marathon uses a Bussard Ramjet which is supposed to propel a ship at speeds eventually reaching a good portion of the speed of light, so taking 300 years to travel 92 lightyears for an average speed around 1/3 the speed of light seems reasonable to me.
There's also, as already mentioned, the poetic timing that Leela sends this message, Durandal has his adventures at Lh'owon, the S'pht'Kr return, Blake goes back to Earth, Man and S'pht together sack the Pfhor empire utterly... and THEN the warning reaches Earth. That beautifully poetic timing is one of the plot points that all of Eternal is based off of so I'm rather stalwart in my defense of this. (That's actually what brought the whole thing up).
