Elite and Newtonian physics - I'm confused

[Kuroshio]

The weak official explanations is often used so they don't have to explain complex physics to the masses. The sounds is actually not unreasonable in elite, some of it is definitely generated but most of it is simply amplified for convenience.

DID YOU KNOW: The Pilots federation has a quantum particle link to each of it's pilots, forming a network, this is why a given two CMDRs can communicate instantly and securely with each other regardless of distance but still need the land at stations to hand in data and bounties as they do not have a link with the stations. Telepresence also uses this network.

Quantum particle links are expensive and strictly between two parties which is why only the Pilots Federation and galactic powers can afford them.

There is a lot of background science which is simply deemed to complicated to be explained in every update.

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Test it out, you can only hear reasonably close (>3km) explosions in elite and thursters are explosions.

To be honest, I never thought of the official explanation for sound as weak, because my own PC running Elite does the exact same thing: It simulates sound in vacuum. No need to go any further or deeper or to multiply entities beyond necessity. Relying on expanding gas clouds and other media is a bit too much of an unnecessary complication that only works in a very limited number of situations: What if I move faster than the cloud? What about the inverse square law? How dense must an expanding gas cloud be to still transmit waves over 2 kilometers? Why is there a constant speed of sound if the medium is variable? Et cetera. The official explanation isn't weak, on the contrary: It can ignore all these questions and still produce sound.

And no, I didn't know and don't want to know, because I don't believe that information transfer via quantum entanglement is possible. The simple fact that every science-fiction author and her mother uses it these days is, from a narrative point of view, the surest indication that it doesn't work, and will be, at some point in the future, probably one of the the best way to date late 20th and early 21th century fiction.

 

[Soopyyy]

To be honest, I never thought of the official explanation for sound as weak, because my own PC running Elite does the exact same thing: It simulates sound in vacuum. No need to go any further or deeper or to multiply entities beyond necessity. Relying on expanding gas clouds and other media is a bit too much of an unnecessary complication that only works in a very limited number of situations: What if I move faster than the cloud? What about the inverse square law? How dense must an expanding gas cloud be to still transmit waves over 2 kilometers? Why is there a constant speed of sound if the medium is variable? Et cetera. The official explanation isn't weak, on the contrary: It can ignore all these questions and still produce sound.

And no, I didn't know and don't want to know, because I don't believe that information transfer via quantum entanglement is possible. The simple fact that every science-fiction author and her mother uses it these days is, from a narrative point of view, the surest indication that it doesn't work, and will be, at some point in the future, probably one of the the best way to date late 20th and early 21th century fiction.

The boldened text is somewhat irrelevant. The hows and why's of the finer details are irrelevant. The fact is, it can happen, it doesn't require space magic or synthetic sound to happen. The peccussive blast from an explosion impacts the hull of your ship and and the atmosphere inside it transmits the vibration to your ear drums via the gas that makes up said atmosphere.
It is infact, the simplest explantion.

To draw light the logical inconsistency in your own argument. How does a computer accurately simulate all of the synthetic sounds that we can visually link with actions physically taking place in an unscripted scenario? This requires more contrivances than the irrelevant (so far as game mechanics are concerned) "how fast does the gas/debris have to move" questions you pose about authentic sound generation.

 

[Kastor]

Relying on expanding gas clouds and other media is a bit too much of an unnecessary complication that only works in a very limited number of situations: What if I move faster than the cloud? What about the inverse square law? How dense must an expanding gas cloud be to still transmit waves over 2 kilometers? Why is there a constant speed of sound if the medium is variable?

You miss the point... the gas doesn't transmit the waves. Rather the gas physically hits your ship and that creates the sound, like a sudden and violent blast of wind. As for the speed of it... VERY FAST. The detonation velocities of explosive can exceed 10000m/s (ten thousand, I did not add extra zeros for the hell of it), this makes the tradition speed of sound marginal at best.

 

[Kuroshio]

The boldened text is somewhat irrelevant. The hows and why's of the finer details are irrelevant. The fact is, it can happen, it doesn't require space magic or synthetic sound to happen. The peccussive blast from an explosion impacts the hull of your ship and and the atmosphere inside it transmits the vibration to your ear drums via the gas that makes up said atmosphere.
It is infact, the simplest explantion.

To draw light the logical inconsistency in your own argument. How does a computer accurately simulate all of the synthetic sounds that we can visually link with actions physically taking place in an unscripted scenario? This requires more contrivances than the irrelevant (so far as game mechanics are concerned) "how fast does the gas/debris have to move" questions you pose about authentic sound generation.

Sorry, but any explanation that relies on "it can happen" is not a satisfying explanation because it can't explain all the cases where it can't. (What about thrusters pointing away from me, in a ship moving towards me? Why can't I hear sound when the canopy is broken? (There's still air in my helmet, I'm sitting in a chair connected to the hull of the ship, surely I should hear it?)

As for how a computer can accurately simulate that: The game already does it right now - it simulates sound of unscripted events as they would sound on sea-level Earth. (Basically, the ship just needs good sensors - no wonder they are so heavy -, a copy of Elite: Dangerous, and Dolby 5.1.)

 

[Cwini]

Again, this is wrong. You are correct that "Only physical objects hitting the hull would cause actually sound" but you then forget the gaseous blast waves from explosions, thrusters and weapons fire are all physical objects.

As are you.

Sound requires a medium to travel through and in space [near vacuum] any particles from said thrusters / explosions would dissipate well before reaching you, and your ears are not sensitive enough for the resultant "sound"

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/ab...ons/918-can-you-hear-sounds-in-space-beginner

 

[bootsam]

Its Science 'Fiction'.

 

[CMDR Ofan]

All i know is that if the game had proper Newtonian physics then the complaints on the forums about it would be 1000x the complaints we get at the moment about the lack of it, and the game might have sold not even half the units it did because most people don't want to be shooting at a tiny dot thousands of km away or making constant course corrections, they want something exciting and visceral.

Not saying this is good or bad, just how things are.

Most would never get to a shooting stage tbh, they would get to a res site around a gas giant, drop in, boost, radically change their orbit and realise they are not in fact travelling in straight lines like they imagine (no matter how much they point their nose at their target) watch their target boost and vanish as relative speeds and prograde directions got well out of hand and realise the error of their ways!

 

[Besensec]

Its Science 'Fiction'.

That was already acknowledged at the beginning of the thread. People is not objecting game design here nor complaining about it, but simply analyzing if, when and how it departs from science. You could at least try to expand on your point instead of pretending to have an argument that is already part of the assumptions of the entire debate.

 

[Lily from anim.o.v.e]

This. Scott Manley tried it and shown the physics in Elite is pretty accurate. I love DCS and realism too- but space is so vast I accept the gampleay limitations pretty nicely.
Let's just enjoy the game.

that may be ok, but then they shouldn't talk about how their game does the newtonian (science applied except supecruise) thing right when it actually doesn't.

 

[Besensec]

Sound is in space, the explosive gases of a nearby cannon shell landing and the wayward plasma of a fusion drive flaring up would hit your ship and generate sound. You'll notice that all ships making sound in elite are very close to you while ships further than 1km away make no sound to you. If elites sound was as wrong as you suggest then surely that explosion's sound a mere three KM away would to you like it does on earth /sarcasm

I have entertained different versions of this idea, but I dismissed it since I can hear the multi cannon bullets hitting the ships regardless of how far away they are, and regardless of the lack of activity in the surroundings that could leave gasses all over the place. This could be explained with some sort of smart bullet that sends some feedback to the ship. And that seems to be consistent with the idea of engineered cannons that self destruct before hitting friendlies. But then we have to think about why the discovery scanner sound doesn't seem to be distorted when you compare it to how it sounds when it comes from your ship and how it sounds when it comes from another. Whether your scanner honk travels through your ship's atmosphere and structure, or the honk from another ship travels from another medium hypothetically distorting the waves, the honk sounds the same. Last but not least, when we use the SRV, nothing of this seems to change, we can still hear almost everything from our surroundings.

Brightness of stars: Corrective polarizing glass on windscreens, helmets and cameras, we don't want to go blind.

This one is more persuasive, since we can guess some sort of smart selective glass polarization. This would explain why the background doesn't fade out when you look directly onto a star, and it would explain why the objects nearby doesn't get obscured by the polarization. If the canopy is breached, I guess the helmet start doing it. But if this is the case, why do ships in supercruise look so nefariously bright? Since I don't want to be a nitpicker, we can argue that this effect is more of a oversight in the effect implementation, rather than a scientific inaccuracy in game design.

Lasers: Only the visual beam and near miss sounds are wrong but easily explained by onboard simulation. The degrading range is correct as lasers need to be focused for a certain range to be effective, the low damage vs hull is correct as light is an awful means of damaging metal, the sound of firing or being hit by them is correct as this would transfer via your ship, the sound of a nearby ship being hit is correct as the plasma generated by the laser hitting metal would hit your ship and make sound.

But how do you cut a laser? Why doesn't the laser keep going on and on? I can accept the ship simulation though, to give the pilot broader awareness.

However, I think there is some vague limit to the amount of nitpicking or ad hoc explanations we can make to make sense of all of this before we start being silly, and doing so is too charitable towards the idea of Elite being scientifically accurate, or a scientific simulation. It doesn't need to be, and there is nothing wrong with being less scientific, but to say that SC is the only science breaking aspect of the game is an overstatement.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

Oh look yet another realism/newtonian thread. We had one of those last week

Op, been there done that, got the scars from 2014 onwards to prove it.

tl;dr : Yes there's newtonian physics, but ship flight is deliberately limited in terms of relative speed in normal space, to allow close quarters dogfighting. That's it really.

As to realism itself - FDEV decided this was less of a simulation and more of a 'quick fix' pewpew game. It is what it is, and no amount of wishing it was more sim-like will make that happen. The galaxy simulation is superb of course. But at the end of the day - and it took me a long time to accept this - gameplay trumps realism, for this game.

It is what it is, so just relax and enjoy what you have

 

[Sapyx]

Things in the game which break the laws of physics, and for which there is no logical, rational explanation:
- "Selective space friction". By which I mean, some things come to a complete stop in space, all by themselves (e.g. debris and materials from a ship that's just exploded - they eventually stop moving and stop rotating) while other things (e.g. spaceships with FA-off, space stations in orbit, planets, etc) don't have magic space-brakes. Either space has friction, or it does not - the universe shouldn't have the ability to decide which things the laws of physics apply to, and which don't.

- "Laser beams visible in space". Laser beams of the power allegedly used by ED weaponry are barely visible even on Earth, and that's with 1 atmosphere pressure. In space, you shouldn't see them at all, because there's no gas for the beams to hit and ionize. Now, maybe it's your ship's computer detecting weapons fire and simulating where the laser beams should be and projecting that onto your canopy... but (a) you can still see laser beams through a shattered canopy, and (b) if you're seeing lasers flying around from a distant firefight 10km away, and your sensors can't even resolve what kind of ships they are from 10km away, how on Earth are your sensors managing to accurately predict the source and direction of laser beams from 10km away? Frankly, I think we'd all be happier if FD had taken the usual sci-fi course and called them "blasters" or "phasers" or something other than "lasers". Because, as with Supercruise, no-one can argue about the physics of a completely fictitious weapon.

- Denial of the "Many Body Problem". Calculating orbital trajectories when more than two objects are contributing to the local gravitational field is not easy. Even our best supercomputers can't do it very well, because fundamentally, such orbital motions are chaotic. And most of us aren't playing this game on supercomputers. So, orbital mechanics in the game follows a simplified, two-body version of Newtonian laws: planets orbit stars, they are never affected by other planets or stars unless they are deemed to be "co-orbiting" around a barycentre, in which case only that co-orbiting object ever has any effect on the orbital path. Moons orbit planets, they never affect each other's orbit unless they, too, orbit around a barycentre. And so forth. It makes everything "predictable" (so our wimpy little gaming computers can predict where the planets and space stations will be) but not chaotically dynamic (and therefore less realistic). Further, objects have "gravitational Zones of influence" - cross the line from the Zone of one object and into another Zone, and the gravity from that first object suddenly disappears.

- "Stars in fixed positions" - the stars on the galaxy map have fixed, immutable co-ordinates from Sol that never change. Never. It's like all the stars in the galaxy are trapped in amber. In the real galaxy, they'd slowly change. Sure, you usually wouldn't notice stars right next to each other moving very fast, but stars at extreme distances should be - especially stars orbiting at much closer or further distances to the Core than Sol. And everything within a few LYs of Sag A should have visibly moved on the galmap by now.

Things in the game which "break the laws of physics", but which do have an actual in-game explanation:
- "Sound in space". It is, as others have said, generated by those little speakers you can see to the left and right of every single cockpit in the game. It is why the sounds are acutely muffled when the canopy breaks: any sounds you can still hear with a broken canopy (like your ship's computer helpfully telling you that all the air is gone) have to be transmitted from the speakers, through the superstructure of the ship's hull, up into your chair and into your flight suit and helmet - which is a very inefficient mode of transmission of sound waves, but if your ship's computer automatically pumps up the speaker volume, it should still work. I actually consider this particular aspect of the game to be very accurate and realistic.

- "Ship maximum speeds". There is an in-game reason for this: if you fly above your rated top speed, your ship automatically fires its retrothrusters, stopping you from accelerating further. You can clearly see this in the cockpit, if you have a ship like an Asp where you can clearly see the retro-thruster flares. Hit boost, and the retro-rockets start firing as soon as you hit over "top speed". So, ships having such a low top speed is a cultural-engineering problem, not a laws-of-physics problem. The question you need to be asking is, why would a spaceship manufacturer deliberately program such a ridiculously low "top speed" into the flight control computer, when going faster would be highly advantageous to survival in many circumstances? It's like a gazelle (or a cheetah) voluntarily restricting itself to 5 km/hour.

 

[fennster]

- "Ship maximum speeds". There is an in-game reason for this: if you fly above your rated top speed, your ship automatically fires its retrothrusters, stopping you from accelerating further. You can clearly see this in the cockpit, if you have a ship like an Asp where you can clearly see the retro-thruster flares. Hit boost, and the retro-rockets start firing as soon as you hit over "top speed". So, ships having such a low top speed is a cultural-engineering problem, not a laws-of-physics problem. The question you need to be asking is, why would a spaceship manufacturer deliberately program such a ridiculously low "top speed" into the flight control computer, when going faster would be highly advantageous to survival in many circumstances? It's like a gazelle (or a cheetah) voluntarily restricting itself to 5 km/hour.

One thing about this is if you boost and immediately disable you thrusters you still decelerate to maximum flight speed. Would be nice if the theory of retro thrusters was provable by maintaining constant velocity whilst they were turned off.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

Things in the game which break the laws of physics, and for which there is no logical, rational explanation:
- "Selective space friction". By which I mean, some things come to a complete stop in space, all by themselves (e.g. debris and materials from a ship that's just exploded - they eventually stop moving and stop rotating) while other things (e.g. spaceships with FA-off, space stations in orbit, planets, etc) don't have magic space-brakes. Either space has friction, or it does not - the universe shouldn't have the ability to decide which things the laws of physics apply to, and which don't.

- "Laser beams visible in space". Laser beams of the power allegedly used by ED weaponry are barely visible even on Earth, and that's with 1 atmosphere pressure. In space, you shouldn't see them at all, because there's no gas for the beams to hit and ionize. Now, maybe it's your ship's computer detecting weapons fire and simulating where the laser beams should be and projecting that onto your canopy... but (a) you can still see laser beams through a shattered canopy, and (b) if you're seeing lasers flying around from a distant firefight 10km away, and your sensors can't even resolve what kind of ships they are from 10km away, how on Earth are your sensors managing to accurately predict the source and direction of laser beams from 10km away? Frankly, I think we'd all be happier if FD had taken the usual sci-fi course and called them "blasters" or "phasers" or something other than "lasers". Because, as with Supercruise, no-one can argue about the physics of a completely fictitious weapon.

- Denial of the "Many Body Problem". Calculating orbital trajectories when more than two objects are contributing to the local gravitational field is not easy. Even our best supercomputers can't do it very well, because fundamentally, such orbital motions are chaotic. And most of us aren't playing this game on supercomputers. So, orbital mechanics in the game follows a simplified, two-body version of Newtonian laws: planets orbit stars, they are never affected by other planets or stars unless they are deemed to be "co-orbiting" around a barycentre, in which case only that co-orbiting object ever has any effect on the orbital path. Moons orbit planets, they never affect each other's orbit unless they, too, orbit around a barycentre. And so forth. It makes everything "predictable" (so our wimpy little gaming computers can predict where the planets and space stations will be) but not chaotically dynamic (and therefore less realistic). Further, objects have "gravitational Zones of influence" - cross the line from the Zone of one object and into another Zone, and the gravity from that first object suddenly disappears.

- "Stars in fixed positions" - the stars on the galaxy map have fixed, immutable co-ordinates from Sol that never change. Never. It's like all the stars in the galaxy are trapped in amber. In the real galaxy, they'd slowly change. Sure, you usually wouldn't notice stars right next to each other moving very fast, but stars at extreme distances should be - especially stars orbiting at much closer or further distances to the Core than Sol. And everything within a few LYs of Sag A should have visibly moved on the galmap by now.

Things in the game which "break the laws of physics", but which do have an actual in-game explanation:
- "Sound in space". It is, as others have said, generated by those little speakers you can see to the left and right of every single cockpit in the game. It is why the sounds are acutely muffled when the canopy breaks: any sounds you can still hear with a broken canopy (like your ship's computer helpfully telling you that all the air is gone) have to be transmitted from the speakers, through the superstructure of the ship's hull, up into your chair and into your flight suit and helmet - which is a very inefficient mode of transmission of sound waves, but if your ship's computer automatically pumps up the speaker volume, it should still work. I actually consider this particular aspect of the game to be very accurate and realistic.

- "Ship maximum speeds". There is an in-game reason for this: if you fly above your rated top speed, your ship automatically fires its retrothrusters, stopping you from accelerating further. You can clearly see this in the cockpit, if you have a ship like an Asp where you can clearly see the retro-thruster flares. Hit boost, and the retro-rockets start firing as soon as you hit over "top speed". So, ships having such a low top speed is a cultural-engineering problem, not a laws-of-physics problem. The question you need to be asking is, why would a spaceship manufacturer deliberately program such a ridiculously low "top speed" into the flight control computer, when going faster would be highly advantageous to survival in many circumstances? It's like a gazelle (or a cheetah) voluntarily restricting itself to 5 km/hour.

Whilst all this is true - it's for good reason.

For example - 400 billion star systems in the ED galaxy - tell me how you would go about calculating 400 billion XYZ coordinates in any sensible amount of time, which took in how far and fast each of those 400 billion star systems would rotate around the galactic core?

You truly have to draw the line at some point.

 

[GraXXoR]

Indeed, if trapped in a box with no windows, you wouldn't be able to tell if you were: 1) On a planet with 1 g of gravity, 2) in a spacship constantly accelerating at 1g or 3) on the end of a centrifuge arm generating 1g of centrifugal force. All would feel exactly the same to you.

1 and 2 are true but
3 is not true...

Please read up on the coriolis effect. If you tried to drive along the base (the surface on the outside edge of the curve) of the "box" in the direction of the spin of the box, you would begin to feel heavier as you accelerate. But if you drove in the opposite direction to the spin and keep accelerating, you would eventually be at a standstill relative to the axis and thus start feeling weightless.

If you tried to drive in any other direction, you'd likely feel like barfing.

 

[CMDR Ofan]

Whilst all this is true - it's for good reason.

For example - 400 billion star systems in the ED galaxy - tell me how you would go about calculating 400 billion XYZ coordinates in any sensible amount of time, which took in how far and fast each of those 400 billion star systems would rotate around the galactic core?

You truly have to draw the line at some point.

Can't keep repping you I'm afraid.

The amount of processing required to accurately map out, in exacting detail, a whole galaxy is prodigous! On top of that you would need to have detailed orbital mechanics, plus an 'accurate' flight model, the playerside tools required to crunch all that data accurately, then a way to make it accessible and user friendly (look at how many folk struggle with stuff like KSP as a game). Never mind plotting jumps to systems that aren't there any more because the system has moved substantially from its eyeball location (180 years old) when you use an fsd boost.

It's a game, it has to be fun - whilst it would be fascinating playing a real sim of the galaxy (on some kind of future tech quantum computer?) it would not really be 'fun'. It would be an incomprehensible mess of advanced maths, straining the ability of even the best pilots to fly in a "straight line".

 

[Sapyx]

Yes. As stated above, it's certainly not a complaint, or a demand that FD "fix it". Because some of them, like the many-body problem, are literally unfixable. While others, such as proper stellar motions, would add an awful lot of complication for an effect that would be barely noticeable in 99.999999% of the galaxy over the lifetime of the game.

It's just some observations of how things are different between ED and IRL.

 

[GraXXoR]

Again, this is wrong. You are correct that "Only physical objects hitting the hull would cause actually sound" but you then forget the gaseous blast waves from explosions, thrusters and weapons fire are all physical objects.

By your statement then, you wouldn't be able to hear a ship until it had passed since the thruster gasses of most ships come out their rear-end. This is clearly not the case... ergo: incorrect assessment.

 

[GraXXoR]

First off you WOULD NOT just keep accelerating in FA-off mode. Thrust just does not work that way unless you developed a full reaction-less drive, similar to the so called EM drive that has been in the news recently.
A reaction based drive (current world 'thrusters') would only accelerate you to a certain speed at which point you will not go faster as you can only throw stuff out the back of the drive at a set max speed.

Physics is not your strong point, I take it? I'm really sorry, but if you're going to state stuff as fact, please make sure you're using real facts rather than "alternative" ones...

You would always keep accelerating in a Newtonian fashion in space until you were a sizeable fraction of the velocity of light when relativistic physics come into play...
even then, you wouldn't stop accelerating, ever... you'd just reach velocities asymptotic to C and never reach it, gradually getting heavier and heavier.
Conversely, the "speed" [sic] (you mean velocity) of the reaction mass ejected from the ship has no bearing on top speed (velocity) in a system with arbitrary energy capacity but does have a bearing on the acceleration and thrust efficiency (Ns / kg) of the reaction mass.

 

[Sapyx]

One thing about this is if you boost and immediately disable you thrusters you still decelerate to maximum flight speed. Would be nice if the theory of retro thrusters was provable by maintaining constant velocity whilst they were turned off.

That's because nothing you can do can actually switch off the "decelerate to maximum speed" programming - "turning off the thrusters" doesn't actually turn them off, any more than switching FA Off actually deactivates the FA.

But I'm told that if your thrusters are actually destroyed by weapons fire (so that they absolutely, definitely no longer work), you can be rammed or force-shelled to speeds far exceeding your rated maximum, and that you never slow down in such cases. I have no idea if this is still true, or if FD "fixed" this.