Frontier have just released an updated in-system travel proposal. You can read all about The Frame Shift Drive if you have DDF access, or wait a few weeks for it to go in the archives. It's about twice the length of a normal proposal, so this post will try to paint some broad brushstrokes to prepare you for the fine detail.
Ships in Elite: Dangerous can use three distinct modes of travel, for travelling exponentially different distances:
Real-life technical considerations mean players can only interact with a small set of other people at a time, usually called an "instance" (although this particular proposal uses the word "session"). Switching gears also punts you into a different instance, and there are three ways to try and follow someone into a new instance:
Although you can plot any route at any time, players will usually aim at a point in space, shift up to middle gear to get in position, up to top for a the long haul, down to middle gear to get to their approximate destination, then finally down to first gear to interact with the world.
But no matter how fast your top gear is, a straight line journey to the dark side of the moon is still going to leave a pancake-shaped splodge on the moon's near side. If your ship was a snooker ball, you would need to bounce it off the cushion to make a shot like that. So what does a cushion look like in space?
Well, super-cruise travel works by warping space, which means it warps gravity too. That will make a ship that normally handles like a bumble bee fly like more like a whale in tornado, but it also means a careful commander can do a real-time gravitational slingshot - making a hyperspace jump to Mars, a quick half an orbit around to line themselves up for the moon shot, then a hyperspace jump back to the part of the moon they were aiming for.
The Three Modes of Travel
Ships in Elite: Dangerous can use three distinct modes of travel, for travelling exponentially different distances:
- Hyperspace jumps - hopping around within or between systems in near-instantaneous jumps, but with limited control of exactly where you end up
- Super-cruise travel - roaming about at high speed within a system
- Conventional flight - moving, fighting, docking and mining in a smallish area of space
Meeting other players
Real-life technical considerations mean players can only interact with a small set of other people at a time, usually called an "instance" (although this particular proposal uses the word "session"). Switching gears also punts you into a different instance, and there are three ways to try and follow someone into a new instance:
- Flight control - friends can let each other "slave" their drives together so they all change gear at the same time (and in middle gear they can all travel in formation)
- Follow the trail - switching up into middle gear leaves a Back to the Future-style flame trail you can follow, and switching into top gear leaves a residual opening that can be analysed (or in extreme cases tailgated)
- Pray to the matchmaking algorithm - the game will generally try to put you in an instance with other players you would enjoy playing against, so you might bump into your target without doing anything special
Interstellar snooker
Although you can plot any route at any time, players will usually aim at a point in space, shift up to middle gear to get in position, up to top for a the long haul, down to middle gear to get to their approximate destination, then finally down to first gear to interact with the world.
But no matter how fast your top gear is, a straight line journey to the dark side of the moon is still going to leave a pancake-shaped splodge on the moon's near side. If your ship was a snooker ball, you would need to bounce it off the cushion to make a shot like that. So what does a cushion look like in space?
Well, super-cruise travel works by warping space, which means it warps gravity too. That will make a ship that normally handles like a bumble bee fly like more like a whale in tornado, but it also means a careful commander can do a real-time gravitational slingshot - making a hyperspace jump to Mars, a quick half an orbit around to line themselves up for the moon shot, then a hyperspace jump back to the part of the moon they were aiming for.
