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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Not directly related, but .5c is going to be slooooooooooow for interstellar travel. Proxima Centauri is roughly 268,770 AU away, and 1 AU is about 8.3 light-minutes. That works out to be 2.23M light minutes, or 4.2 light years. If someone is traveling at .5c, that's 8.4 years to get from our solar system to the very closest star system. And of course it's all at relativistic speeds, so while it may not feel long to the people on the ship, it's still the better part of a decade.
Right now, the closest earth-like planet we know of (similar size, similar star, similar orbital period) is Kepler-452b. Kepler-452b is 1800 light years away, or 3200 years for the people observing the craft that was traveling there. This is getting solidly into Joel Haldeman's "The Forever War" territory.
IMO, unless you want to do a lot of math to figure out the effects of time dilation, you might want to have some kind of science-magic that allows your characters to sidestep relativity.
(I believe it was Charles Stross that worked relativity into a galactic cryptocurrency economic system. He got around relativity by assuming that almost all people were inorganic, and able to copy and back up their consciousness, or sleep through the decades that interstellar travel required.)
Perhaps I should have given a bit more context about the setting as you said that 0.5c is pretty slow.
The empire is local to one single star system and the scene in question happens at an equal distance between Mars and Neptune.
Ah, got it. So you're still going to have to worry about relativity, but to a much lesser extent.