Ooh, I have another (unrelated) geeky question.
Why, in God Fellas, can't the Planet Express ship catch up to Bender after he's been fired out of the torpedo tube?
i) If the ship needs the power of its engines just to maintain its current speed than what 'maintains' Bender at the speed he is going at? Or, to put it another way, if cutting the engines would cause the ship would slow down then why doesn't Bender, who has no engines, also slow down?
(Note: On earth, gravity drags projectiles into the ground long before air resistance brings them to a halt but if we could somehow have air without gravity (or a curved earth) we would see that bullets (etc.) would behave like they did at the end of the Matrix; they would slow down and eventually just stop, (much like they do when fired into water) 'hanging' in the air where they are. So if there's something that acts like friction when you're travelling at Planet Express ship-like speeds which requires powerful engines just to prevent you from always slowing down then why doesn't it act on Bender the same way it seems to act on the ship?)
ii) If things in space retain their current speed and direction unless they are acted on by some force (causing acceleration or deceleration, i.e., the way things work in the universe according to our current understanding) then why can't the ship run the engines a bit longer to get a bit faster and (eventually) catch up with Bender?
All of this has already been answered in previous posts. But what I wonder is why they didn't keep trying to get to Bender? Sooner or later he would either
i) hit a meteor / planet / moon / garbage / whatever,
ii) stop as his speed goes by a negative acceleration; as space isn't a complete vacuum he is constantly slowed down, even if this only is 1 *10^-10000 m/s^2 or whatever. Sooner or later he would either stop, or have slowed down enough for them to get to him. As they are his best friends, what were they thinking simply to stop the ship?!
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