Maximum Cruise Speed - How fast is really fast ?

Kitty

Kitty
I wonder how many of you have wondered just how fast your ship will go whilst in cruise. Gravity wells always affect the speed, but if you could just fly without that effect, how fast could you get up to ? Does the type of ship affect this ?

Well for starters I decided whilst watching tele, I would try and find out in my Cobra Mk III. So in a pure binary system, no other planets or other objects I decided to fly perpendicular to the axis between the 2 suns. This is what I discovered.

The maximum cruise speed for my Cobra with my particular setup is 2,001c

If you check the image you can see that between the upper and lower sections, the speed didn't change, but the distance from one of the suns changed by 0.02Ly

I did wonder if I would ever reach the sky box, or sky sphere, but I suspect I would have ran out of fuel before that limit was reached. I wonder if you would simply slam into a brick wall, crash, or maybe even enter "Witch Space".

I am not sure how many Trillion/Million metres per sec my top speed was but if anybody can do the math in parts of speed of light, I would be interested :D

max_cruise.jpg
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Kitty
 

777Driver

777Driver
2,001c is the max limit for any ship, doesn't matter about weight or configuration. Have always wondered if they chose that limit as a nod to Space Odyssey
 
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Sergio Smegolia

Sergio Smegolia
2,001c is the max limit for any ship, doesn't matter about weight or configuration. Have always wondered if they chose that limit as a nod to Space Odyssey
Click to expand...

Apparently they did indeed. Or it's an urban myth, I forgot which.
 
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Yaffle

Volunteer Moderator
Yaffle
Kitty said:
I did wonder if I would ever reach the sky box, or sky sphere, but I suspect I would have ran out of fuel before that limit was reached. I wonder if you would simply slam into a brick wall, crash, or maybe even enter "Witch Space".
Click to expand...

You can supercruise between systems if you really want to without hitting the skybox a-la Truman Burbank, but it won't load the assets until you hyperspace.
 

Kristov

K
2001c, which is a nod to the novel and movie of the same name(David's a fan) is 599,884,708,458 m/s which means you are seriously hauling ass.

As for how far you can fly at that rate, well, until you run out of fuel. There's no skybox to hit, but due to how the game is all instanced, you can't actually fly TO another star in supercruise, despite being able to cover the distance between them while in supercruise. People have done it, you'd be amazed how far a single tank of fuel on an Asp will get you, 64 tons, and you can knock fuel consumption down to 1.19t/hr(lower possibly), so that's a very long way you can fly at 2001c. When people flew from 1 star to another in supercruise, they didn't 'reach' the star system however, they still had to use hyperspace to get into the instance for that system. Too bad, as that would make for some great Buckyball racing I bet...
 

Kitty

Kitty
Yaffle said:
You can supercruise between systems if you really want to without hitting the skybox a-la Truman Burbank, but it won't load the assets until you hyperspace.
Click to expand...

Wow! and there was me thinking that they had created a sky box/sphere. Ok, now I am well impressed!

Understood about the instance thing; that makes perfect sense to me.

I am surprised that folks have attempted to fly between systems manually. Maybe I am not as mad as I thought I was!

The more I get into ED the more impressed I am :cool:
 

shambles1980

shambles1980
1.0c seems to be the speed of light btw, if im traveling at 1.0c then i get closer to the object at the rate of 1ls per second making it the speed of light.
 

Kristov

K
Kitty said:
Wow! and there was me thinking that they had created a sky box/sphere. Ok, now I am well impressed!

Understood about the instance thing; that makes perfect sense to me.

I am surprised that folks have attempted to fly between systems manually. Maybe I am not as mad as I thought I was!

The more I get into ED the more impressed I am :cool:
Click to expand...

I've let my Asp fly for 10 hours straight away from a system with a single star and nothing else in it, lets just say, she traveled a very very long way at 2001c. And I've made the Hutton Orbital run around 40 times, that's a 0.22ly run in supercruise, right at almost 90 minutes, Alpha Centauri system, give it a shot sometime, it's one of those rights of passage, like visiting Sagittarius A* at the center of the galaxy.
 

Lightspeed

Lightspeed
One fact of physics that has impressed me since flying in ED is how slow the speed of light really is relative to the size of star systems, let alone the Galaxy or even the Universe.

Throttling down to 1c seems really slow !
 

SirAdelaide

SirAdelaide
Kitty said:
I am not sure how many Trillion/Million metres per sec my top speed was but if anybody can do the math in parts of speed of light, I would be interested :D


Kitty
Click to expand...

Doing the math in parts of speed of light, you were travelling 2001 x the speed of light.
 

Gold Coins for Cats

Gold Coins for Cats
For additional fun, the maximum factory rated speed for a Galaxy class starship is Warp 9.6, which translates into 1906c. Which means, depending on the writer, you can travel faster then the TNG Enterprise, assuming they don't modify the phase variance and reverse the polarity.

(I know warp values are all over the place don't flame meeeee)
 

Hellhawk666

Hellhawk666
Kitty said:
Wow! and there was me thinking that they had created a sky box/sphere. Ok, now I am well impressed!
Click to expand...

A lot of folks assume it's just a skybox for eyecandy, but no - everything you see at any time really is there in correct position relative to you. Pretty darn cool, really :)

Lightspeed said:
One fact of physics that has impressed me since flying in ED is how slow the speed of light really is relative to the size of star systems, let alone the Galaxy or even the Universe. Throttling down to 1c seems really slow !
Click to expand...

If David Braben read this he'd probably be well pleased that his game has conveyed that feeling to players.
 
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Billexista

Banned
Billexista
Well my math is failing me today, i had to fix this a lot. :(
2001c

599 884 Mm/s
599 884 708 km/s
599 884 708 458 m/s

2 159 584 950 448 km/h

14 436 AU/hr

4.01 AU/s (Sun - Jupiter trip in 1,3s)

0,228 Ly/hr

0,0699 parsec/hr (Han Yolo Kessel run would take around 7 days)

To all the imperial units lovers:

1 341 903 875 398 mph

1 968 125 746 897 ft/s

1 166 082 587 642 knots


This is result when i post number directly from calc.exe (default windows 7 calculator)

2:)159:)584:)950:)448,8
 
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Kitty

Kitty
Hellhawk666 said:
A lot of folks assume it's just a skybox for eyecandy, but no - everything you see at any time really is there in correct position relative to you. Pretty darn cool, really :)

If David Braben read this he'd probably be well pleased that his game has conveyed that feeling to players.
Click to expand...

I have been recognising various constellations albeit a little distorted owing to my position in relation to them. Where I live, there is so much light pollution, the only celestial object I can usually see, is the moon. So ED has been a great tool to discover much more about the night sky :D Even if you look at photos taken of the night sky by astronomers, some of them could have been taken by us in ED. I wonder what Sir Patrick Moore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Moore) would have made of it. I suspect he too would have been impressed.

Even when I go into the Galaxy Map, zoom out and pick a position that displays the galaxy in all it's glory is always astonishingly amazing.

My FB pages has a new album and it is being flooded with pictures taken from ED. Probably not as good as some of the guys have made, but they are all stunning to me and I think some of my friends believe I have become obsessed with "a game".

I am grateful for all of the math that you boffins have posted :D Maths was never my strong point, and each I need to work something out I have to re-learn how to do things. As they say, "Use it or Loose it".

I have been reading the thread on Space Realism Issues, which I find terribly interesting and have learnt so much about astronomy from it. I find these forums a great source of information, not just about ED, but astronomy in general. I don't think any other game has had such an impact like this.


I have been a big fan of Arthur C. Clarke and I have to admit when I first saw 2001 I was under age having been smuggled in to our local cinema by my cousin. I remember spending a lot of time in the loos as I was so scared, and I didn't understand a thing about the film. Now though, a lot more makes sense, and if it ever gets shown on tele, I will always take time out and watch it again. I think it was great that they honoured it with the top speed of the ships. It does make me wonder if they have hidden a monolith on some planet somewhere for one of us to discover.

I hope David Braben does read this, and that he finds out that we do appreciate what he has created.

Kitty
 
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