Maximum Cruise Speed - How fast is really fast ?

paulca

P
At least we don't have to consider relativistic effects within the game. I'm pretty sure that one FSD hyperspace jump would offset you many hundreds or thousands of years into the (relatively stationary observer's) future.

I didn't even begin to look up how to work it out as Einstein was adamant nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Not because he 'believed' this, but because none of the equations work >1c. In fact at 1c relativistic effects have such a bizarre and profound effect involving infinities of space time that going to 1.1c simply doesn't make any sense at all. Besides there would be no point.

Consider that a photon leaving the sun, takes 8 minutes to get to your eyes, where it is absorbed and 'destroyed'. From it's 'point of view' however it never left the sun, was at every point in space along the way and was being destroyed at your eye all at the same time instantaneously. At 1c the whole universe exists at one point in time and space from the point of view of the entity travelling at 1c. You could effectively go anywhere in the universe instantaneously. The only down side is that from anyone else's perspective you might take 14.8 billion years to do it.

Disclaimer: If you can't travel through space/time faster than 1c, make space/time come to you, or... just go around it instead. ;)
 

paulca

P
BTW, if you are really bored you can actually work out time dilation due to speed alone quite easily.

Here's how it works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHjpBjgIMVk

You can use good old Pythagoras to work it out for you.

I'll delete my working out, which I had here, not to bore you but try it yourself, but based purely on the geometric premise of the theory in that video (I can't remember it's real name)....

A 10 year hyperspace jump takes roughly 10 seconds, so your average speed is: 10 light years divided by 10 seconds * c = 31536000c, time dilation factor: x5615. Time past for relatively stationary observers: 15.4 hours

So a hyperspace jump would not be all that bad, purely because the time you spend at high speed is relatively small. Even though the time dilation is very high, you only spend 10 seconds at that speed.
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
Kitty said:
I am surprised that folks have attempted to fly between systems manually. Maybe I am not as mad as I thought I was!
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The main motivation people have historically had for trying to do this was to try to get around the permit restrictions. "What, I need a permit for Sol? Can't be bothered getting one, I'll just go to Alpha Centauri and fly there in Supercruise." It takes days to fly to Sol in Supercruise, and when you get there, it's a big disappointment - it says "range zero", but there's no Sun, no Earth - just empty space where they should be.
 

GeneralIdea1964

G
shambles1980 said:
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.
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I'm probably the 3,000,000th person to confirm it ;) but yes 'C' is the unit for the speed of light.
It's all Einstein's equation's fault E = MC^2 with C for speed of light and M for mass and E is the amount of energy.
ED keeps with real physics where it can while keeping the game playable.
:)
 

GeneralIdea1964

G
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 !
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Apparently we should have got here a few billion years earlier it was all closer together :D

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Macy said:
2001c. Thats about the same speed my Dog moves when I throw a piece of Turkey for him. LOL
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or possibly a small child running after an Ice Cream van. ;)
 

ChaosCloud

ChaosCloud
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 !
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The real issue is more how long it takes to get up to speed and back down from it when going 30k+ Ls or not.
Makes you wonder what their idea is of what we are supposed to do on these flights that can easily last 15min or more of nothingness.
 

S. Belmont

S. Belmont
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 :)
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Yeah, and I was even further impressed, when I saw timelapsed video, where in the center was a star, possibly system main star, and video was captured from a body orbitting that star. So other stars much further away seemed like moveing very fast behind this star in the center.But what was cool, was that starfield BENT around this closer center star, so stars mass actually bent light! Astonishing.
 

Kitty

Kitty
It is like travelling in beautiful country side, the faster you go, the more you miss! More can be noticed if you just drop out of cruise and look at a planet taking in it's beauty, especially the gas giants with rings.

I think if more folks did some time lapse videos in ED, we may discover a lot more.

With regards to speed, gravity both pushes and pulls at the same time. When travelling between the two suns in a pure binary system, say for exploring, you speed up the further away you are from the first sun, so I guess gravity is holding you back. But then as you approach the next sun, your speed diminishes, so gravity pushes you away ?????? :S:S

When you get too close gravity sucks you in again and you speed up. So I am not 100% sure how this all hangs together.

I know gravity does suck.... trust me... Although ironically, my hoover sucks, and would suck if it didn't suck :rolleyes:
 

S. Belmont

S. Belmont
Kitty said:
It is like travelling in beautiful country side, the faster you go, the more you miss! More can be noticed if you just drop out of cruise and look at a planet taking in it's beauty, especially the gas giants with rings.

I think if more folks did some time lapse videos in ED, we may discover a lot more.

With regards to speed, gravity both pushes and pulls at the same time. When travelling between the two suns in a pure binary system, say for exploring, you speed up the further away you are from the first sun, so I guess gravity is holding you back. But then as you approach the next sun, your speed diminishes, so gravity pushes you away ?????? :S:S

When you get too close gravity sucks you in again and you speed up. So I am not 100% sure how this all hangs together.

I know gravity does suck.... trust me... Although ironically, my hoover sucks, and would suck if it didn't suck :rolleyes:
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well, ED actually sucks a bit when talking about how gravity wells affect your ship. In ED, computer takes actually lots of control over your speed when in supercruise. Ship slowing down near celestial body is "safety system" kicking in. Ships would be much harder to fly if we had full control over them. And I'm not talking about flight assist just to make sure.
 

Kitty

Kitty
S. Belmont said:
well, ED actually sucks a bit when talking about how gravity wells affect your ship. In ED, computer takes actually lots of control over your speed when in supercruise. Ship slowing down near celestial body is "safety system" kicking in. Ships would be much harder to fly if we had full control over them. And I'm not talking about flight assist just to make sure.
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Which is a shame in a way. When exploring some systems, and there are celestial bodies over 1.5m ls away, it would have been nice to have had a slingshot from other bodies to get a speed boost. On the other hand the safety system goes horribly wrong and if you want a fast approach to an outpost we have to dump off speed by spiralling in. FAOFF could be rather interesting in cruise if they allowed it. Perhaps we should ask for consideration for a future release...
 

ChaosCloud

ChaosCloud
Kitty said:
It is like travelling in beautiful country side, the faster you go, the more you miss! More can be noticed if you just drop out of cruise and look at a planet taking in it's beauty, especially the gas giants with rings.
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You have a point there, but you are not forced to go full speed and miss these.
What I'm complaining about is being forced to take my time, actually waste it, by staring at the void for ages when I don't feel like staring at it.

I used to enjoy exploring, for a while was it the rank that was ahead of the others by miles, then I started coming across 20k Ls' and up, and that made me lose interest after a while because sitting there, having nothing to do but stare at the void just waiting to finally come into scan range of that pixel far in the distance gets old very fast.

It's also the reason I keep putting the game down when I feel like playing it. Always the same: "I think I'll go some places this time, oh yeah supercruise..." and then I don't feel like playing anymore.

Guess few will agree on that one with me but by having even fullspeed in SC be such an extreme timesink makes me feel that I'm mostly wasting time while playing ED because I spend most of the time just going from A to B.
And before someone suggests that I then should simply not go to these long distance destinations: 1st would we then be back at limiting content, which there's already little enough and 2nd did I rarely choose to go there by choice, most often was it a trademission to an unmapped system and since the from-jump distance is not listed there have I more often than I'd liked to taken a mission that cost me way more time than the payout was worth.
Should've probably just abandoned them but meh, I don't like doing that.

I admit that a few times I did actually get a nice sight at the end, but most of the time not.
 
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