1977ub said:
If I am accelerating, and if I will not be able to determine in a straightforward way which particular times and distances particular events have happened, not able to use any methods which operate in an IRF, how will I then be able to construct the Minkowski metric which describes the view from *any* IRF? It's all well and good for us *outside* of the situation, analyzing the motion from the perspective of a perfectly flat spacetime, and at rest.
This is easy in a thought experiment... And important, because I'm not sure you have fully understood what it means to say that a frame of reference is nothing more than a way of assigning coordinates to events:
Before you turn on your rocket engines or whatever to start accelerating, construct a three-dimensional rigid lattice of one-meter rods that fills the entire space that you'll be flying through. At each intersection of the rods, place an observer equipped with a synchronized clock, a pad of paper, and a pencil; these observers are of course all at rest relative to one another and not accelerating. Whenever any observer sees something interesting happen right exactly where he is, he writes down what happened and when according to his clock it happened.
Now you can go ahead and do your accelerating, or conduct any other experiment you please, involving any number of spaceships flying in whatever directions at whatever speeds are interesting.
At some later time, we will go back and at our leisure collect each observers' paper record of what happened at various times at his point in space and correlate them to form a complete description of what happened when and who moved where how fast according to this particular lattice of observers.
The collection of paper records is an inertial frame of reference.
1) Anyone can set up a lattice of rods, synchronized clocks, and observers moving at any speed they please; the only thing that we require is that they all be at rest relative to one another and not accelerating.
2) There is nothing special to me about the lattice of rods, synchronized clocks, and observers that happens to be at rest relative to me. I can use their paper records to figure out what was happening in the region of space covered by the lattice, but I could just as easily choose to collect the paper records from some other lattice of rods, synchronized clocks, and observers.
3) It is not possible (and this is the point of the thread you referenced in #106) to construct a such a lattice of rods, synchronized clocks, and observers that is accelerating.
4) Even if you are accelerating, at any given moment you are traveling at some speed, and we can construct a lattice of rods, synchronized clocks, and observers all at rest relative to you at that moment. This is a "momentarily comoving inertial frame" or MCIF, and the first step in understanding any scenario involving acceleration and special relativity is to find an MCIF.