supernova event

[Old Duck]

Elite operates in an instant-light* universe. All nebulae look the same from any distance and sight does not distort above 1c. So if FDev decides to blow up a star, it will be difficult to keep the universe consistent.

*edit: that travels at infinite speed

When playing Elite, I often forget that the real galaxy does NOT work this way. Recently I looked back at the Bubble and wondered what my friends were up to, but had I tried to see them with a huge telescope, I would have instead seen Khufu building a pyramid.

I can't imagine what it would be like playing ED if it took "light time" into consideration. It hurts the head to think about [wacky]

 

[Snowymonk]

The idea of a supernova may be a stellar forge tweak too far.
A solar flare impacting an orbiting star might be possible though.

Turn it into a Community Goal.
I know the current trend is to have two CGs going at a time so how about:

CG1 - Commanders must ship all goods OUT of a station, landing them at a specific station in an adjoining system.
CG2 - Scan mission of nav beacon to gain the latest data on the potential flare.

Base the CG in a system that has a station very close to the main star and put the system into Anarchy so that there is an element of danger to the nav beacon scanning.

 

[Omgzzwtf]

Might be nice, but are any of the known stars expected to go Supernova in the ED Universe time setting based on scientific reasoning?

Current astronomical projection put the rate of super nova stars in the milky way galaxy at around one every fifty years or so, a quick google search was all it took to find this article, which is a pretty interesting read if you have the time, it's not too long.

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/milky-way-supernova-rate-confirmed/

I agree with the OP, it would be spectacular to be able to witness something like this! Of course, you wouldn't be able to see it directly without being destroyed, but perhaps the star could be inside the bubble somewhere, and you could jump into the system and see the aftermath, though it might still be too hot to enter the system for some time. Something like this would probably be seen long in advance, so a complete evacuation of the system would have to take place, so it could offer some great search and rescue missions or perhaps a cool passenger mission community goal to take refugees of the system to nearby systems to escape the devastation before it happens.

Also, a scientific community goal could occur to place special monitoring equipment around the system to observe the supernova first hand and send a live transmission to a specific station in another system where players could view the data, in infrared, VLS, as well as other wavelengths.

I'm super excited for this idea, lol

 

[Omgzzwtf]

Please do hire me!



I have plenty of other skills that are completely useless for game development !

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

"who's that guy?"

"Oh him? That's CMDR Cosmic Spacehead, the janitor / random ideas guy"

 

[cosmo-genesis]

There is a star that currently is in the process Eta Carinae

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae

if this was in ED i would be camped out to watch it go through its death throes

 

[Omgzzwtf]

HERE is a list of possible candidates for a supernova event in our galaxy. In the time-frame of stars, 1 thousand years is nothing, an eye blink. So I would assume all of these would still be candidates during the games time period.
I was thinking a type 2 supernova to begin with but I saw a comment about a type 1 (which is less massive but MUCH more common) and that would be cool too, but really, we want accretion disks too for that!

I would think that the overall effects on the stella forge would be minimal for a supernova event, it would only effect one star system if it wasn't too massive (the shockwave would take YEARS to reach even the nearest star travelling at the speed of light!) but I am no expert. otherwise I would be working for frontier

and finally.. I believe I once crossed paths with a wolf-rayet class star in a whole sector that was 'locked', not too far from the bubble, and after a quick google I discovered that this body was also a candidate for a supernova event. (this was quite a while ago now). maybe frontier already have this idea on their To Do list.
I guess we can only live in hope

They could always cheese the heck out of it, do some community goals to clear the system and set up monitoring equipment, then upon completion of both lock the system, about a month later, put a video up on galnet that shows the point at which the star actually implodes upon itself, then violently ejects all it's matter into the surrounding space. While it would be cool to see something like this first hand, I don't know how feasible it would be to model a one-off event of this scale, in which literally EVERY CMDR would want to see. So in lieu of spending God knows how many hours modeling, stabilizing, and syncing all of this together, it would be easier, while still being cool in it's own way, to be able to view it in the context of a video created by the communities placing of the monitoring equipment.

 

[Omgzzwtf]

When playing Elite, I often forget that the real galaxy does NOT work this way. Recently I looked back at the Bubble and wondered what my friends were up to, but had I tried to see them with a huge telescope, I would have instead seen Khufu building a pyramid.

I can't imagine what it would be like playing ED if it took "light time" into consideration. It hurts the head to think about [wacky]

This. +rep.

Communication would be a major problem, If you've ever read the Warship series of books by Joshua Dalzelle, I think that the way inter-stellar communication is handled is a good example of what it might actually be like, uploading messages into automated comms drones that zip between systems, picking up and depositing messages between them, kind of like a mail man.

I'm fine with how Elite represents interstellar travel, it's gamey for sure, but to accurately portray what it, theoretically, would look like to human eyes would essentially be kinda lame, as visual navigation would pretty much be out of the question, we would have to plot a course for the computer to initiate and follow, then just sit and wait until we were there and move back into real space-time.

Speaking of time, all of this FTL travel we do every day would advance the clock to each player individually, moving at different rates depending on the speed at which we are flying. A fifteen minute supercruise to us might be as much as two hours to everyone else, which would suck for gameplay.

Off topic, I know, so I'll bring it back, supernovae are pretty sweet.

 

[Omgzzwtf]

Unless you're talking something like a Thargoid energy weapon to just outright blow up a star, you'd have to otherwise find a way to introduce elements the star can't properly process into its cycle, namely Iron if I remember right, once it starts making Iron its own pressure can't sustain it's fusion reaction which is what kills the star off.

The star itself creates iron after it uses up all of its other gasses, hydrogen, helium, etc. Iron is the last element a star generally produces before it starts to not be able to sustain the pressures keeping it in one piece.

As a star burns, it creates massive amounts of pressure pushing gasses toward the outside, but the shear mass of the star is constantly pushing everything tightly together, which is how the star creates new elements through fusion in it's inner layers, which are immediately burned and pushed back out to be recycled in a process that can last upwards of 5-10 billion years. After it uses most of it's gasses, it starts creating and burning heavier materials like iron, which do not provide enough outward pressure to counter-act the inward pressure of the stars mass. Causing a cataclysmic implosion, followed immediately by an even greater ejection of all of the stars remaining gasses, as well a good portion of plasma, into the surrounding space.

 

[Winterwalker]

Causing a cataclysmic implosion, followed immediately by an even greater ejection of all of the stars remaining gasses, as well a good portion of plasma, into the surrounding space.

.. and in a shockbounce (?) ex-plosion ...

.. powerful enough to fuse anything under Iron (26) into all the heavier elements, from Cobalt (27) ALL the way up to Plutonium? (94 !!!!!!). And you thought a star was hot. That really is going to be .. quite a bang.

would be a great community goal to provide disaster relief, and security in the collapse of local power.

hehe.

So for 'collapse' of the local Faction Economy .. I think we might have to read, vapourisation?
Still, quite good fun to go salvaging the debris field. That should raise a tidy sum.

 

[znôrt]

I can't imagine what it would be like playing ED if it took "light time" into consideration. It hurts the head to think about [wacky]

simple: you could roam normal space around sol enjoying the view (which wouldn't change much). you could probably get as far as voyager in your lifetime.

you mean taking 'light time' into consideration while still indulging in the fantasy of superluminal flight? same thing. you would need your private stellar forge to adjust star positions to your current point in space time. that would need to be a monster pc, i'm afraid a console wouldn't cut it (and prepare for really long loading screens). everything else much the same as now, just stars in different positions.

 

[Old Duck]

you mean taking 'light time' into consideration while still indulging in the fantasy of superluminal flight?

This. The galaxy map would be either be a fluid thing that places stars based on their apparent position in the sky from your current location, or it would be a static thing that places stars based on where they are in actual spacetime, which is different than what we see in any given spot. Bringing this back to the OP, any supernova that explodes tomorrow won't be seen for years in the closest star systems, and I'm assuming we're not blowing up a star in the Bubble, so it would take players hundreds if not thousands of years to see a supernova from the Bubble.

Another example is the Crab Nebula, the result of a supernova observed in China about 1000 years ago, yet this means the star actually exploded about 7000 years ago, so when I visit it, it should be way bigger "close up", and I'm not just talking FOV.

One final fun example - I should be able to sit outside the station I just arrived at and watch myself (using a strong telescope) jump into the system and scan the Nav beacon n minutes after the fact.

 

[znôrt]

One final fun example - I should be able to sit outside the station I just arrived at and watch myself (using a strong telescope) jump into the system and scan the Nav beacon n minutes after the fact.

yes, but there are no such telescopes in game. for that matter there aren't any evolving celestial bodies either (that we know of). thus the only observable effect (apart from needing supercomputers) would be the different position of the stars.

close proximity supercruise would be funny, though. imagine chasing someone for interdiction just to discover he's only light, and high waked half a minute ago

 

[Winterwalker]

close proximity supercruise would be funny, though. imagine chasing someone for interdiction just to discover he's only light, and high waked half a minute ago

lol ^^^^^

Time dilation and future echoes I thought .. either that or someone's been putting aspirin in my tea again!

 

[howmanymexicans]

What about a supernova being triggered when a body is scanned for the first time and giving a detailed time when the event would be due to happen in the system description.
All sorts of cataclysms and stellar events could be coded into the stellar forge.
Uploaded to galnet and given the option to follow the event,rng the times to the events so some could happen months away,others days,hours.
The first discovery of the event could remembered by a tourist beacon.

this is a brill idea! + rep for you

 

[Sapyx]

Supernovae have been discussed many times before. Some issues:

- In the 20th century, we've got a pretty good idea of what a star is supposed to look like before it goes supernova. There was an announcement a few months ago about a certain star that scientists found that they added to the "about to go supernova" category. One should easily imagine that after living in space for over a millennium, the human race of the ED galaxy would have a much more advanced body of knowledge about stellar evolution and therefore a very, very good idea of what pre-supernova stars would look like - and they'd be able to avoid building permanent colonies anywhere near them. Supernovas aren't like earthquakes or tropical storms or other natural disasters we find on Earth - they're much more predictable. So having a situation where we go "Oh noes! A star is about to explode and we've only got a week to get everybody out!" is very improbable.

- Even our limited 20th century knowledge of stars means we are reasonably sure that there aren't many stars within 1000 LY that are about to explode. They can't just pick a star at random and say "righto, that one's gonna blow next week". Only certain types of star can go supernova. Sol, for example, cannot - it's too small. Even the large blue stars Achenar and Alioth are too small. The OP posted earlier the Wikipedia list of supernova candidates. There's only one star in that list that's within the Bubble and inhabited: IK Pegasi. In-game, this star is known as "HR 8210". IK Pegasi is a Type 1a supernova candidate; this is where a red giant star has matter sucked off it by a close-orbiting white dwarf companion star until the white dwarf star's mass increases past the Chandrashekar Limit, at which point it will explode - but the process can't begin until the star enters the red giant stage. In ED, the primary star is not yet at the red giant stage, and the companion star is erroneously entered as a K-class main sequence star instead of a white dwarf, so HR 8210 can't even explode in the expected in-real-life fashion. Which is unfortunate, as HR 8210 would be a simple system to evacuate: no planetary bases, just a single Ocellus-class station. Slap some engines back on that baby and hey presto, instant evacuation ship. A single CG could have done it.

- As stated, a supernova event couldn't be realistically depicted in ED, because the in-game speed of light is infinite - blow up a star on the other side of the galaxy, and the whole galaxy sees it, instantly, rather than having to wait 65,000 years for the light to reach us. So you can't have an exploding star threatening entire sectors, at least not all at once forcing people to choose which planets to save. The next-nearest inhabited star to IK Pegasi is 10 light-years away; that means the moving-at-nearly-speed-of-light shockwave from an exploding IK Pegasi wouldn't threaten anyone else for at least ten years.

Science: ruining perfectly good sci-fi plots since 1687.

Now, all that being said, there's nothing to stop FD from having the evil Thargoids (or whoever it is the Thargoids are supposed to be running away from) go around blowing up stars using their evil star-breaking technography. That could be both unpredictable and sudden.

 

[yolomcbobbinz]

I'd love to witness a supernova. Lol

It would be hilarious.
If I was running it, it'd be on galnet for weeks that a distant star is going supernova.
Over the course of a few days, the star grows and whatnot.

On the supernova day, gravity in the whole system is so unstable, supercruise isn't possible (so you can't wizz around making time go backwards. Lol - although, I wouldn't care if supercruise changed nothing)
You would be alerted when jumping in.
All you can do is hyperspace in or out, or faff around in normal space at the entry point.

Then boom!

And you can watch, either Hyperspacing out at the last second, or stay and die for the lolz (it would take several hours, even days, for the shockwave to reach you anyway).
You'd get paid loads for scanning the various stages of a supernova with a DSS, or ADS, more for the very late stages, but lose it on death. Risk/reward.
The System then gets closed off by a permit, until it's remodelled by FD to reflect what's happened.

Then it's a tourist destination. Lol

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

wouldn't it create a nebula, then what will we call it

 

[howmanymexicans]

a couple of posts above, commander Sapyx makes some very interesting points, especially regarding the superluminal Elite universe. And I understand that this game walks the line between science reality simulator and online mass multiplayer game, and I am sure that the developers are also VERY aware of this distinction. Yes we live in a strange alternate dimension, a Newtonian universe, devoid of relativity, but certain concessions must be made so that the game functions as an MMO and is still fun. It is probably in every ones interests not to pick at these things, otherwise if we started questioning everything we might arrive at "why do we even have ships if we can just pilot drones through telepresence". Now I am a scientist at heart, but I also understand that I am playing a game that must function consistently online.

So to that end I come at this from a gamers perspective, with the scientist in a close second.
There was another post a while back saying quite rightly that a supernova might break elite as literally EVERY SINGLE commander in the game would want to be in the same system at once.
well to that i say that the FDEV team seemed to have shown on multiple occasions in the past that they want this kind of thing, I remember CG events where they were asking commanders to test the limits of their servers. Well.. if they REALLY wanted to test the limits, here is how to do it.

finally in answer to the problems about seeing the supernova from literally everywhere in the galaxy simultaneously. I say, if your not in the right place to see the cut-scene (lets say it is an epic cut-scene), then you dont get to see it. period. the galaxy map simply changes the star type. even if your right next door.. maybe even if your IN the system but not in the correct place. And before you all get your jiffies in a fix, remember, its a game, and certain concessions MUST be made.

How about this:
stage 1) outfit 4 explorer class mega ships with uber shields with a CG event in the bubble. maybe each tier in the event = 1 ship outfitted.
stage 2) the mega ships journey out to a star outside of the bubble (but not too far) that is going to go supernova... outside = unihabited and thus no evacuation etc...
stage 3) the megaships take up positions in the same system.. and commanders can rendezvous with any one of them... staying inside the no-fire zone will grant commanders protection from the blastwave
-having multiple megaships will spread out the attending population of players so not EVERYONE is in the same place-
stage 4) at a specific time that has been advertised heavily way in advance.. BOOM.. if your in the system but outside of the no-fire zone or not in one of the megaship servers then u get the cut-scene followed by an instant re-buy screen. If you are not in the system then no cut-scene at all.. just an update to the galaxy map.

 

[JetsonRING]

Say FDev announces such-and-such star is going to nova on such-and-such date and time. You go there, jump in-system and watch the star explode. Seconds later, your ship is destroyed by the expanding shock-front of the nova. Then FDev gets to clean up the salt from CMDRs who did not realize that a nova means pretty much everything in the system gets destroyed . . . o7

 

[Bryan K]

Celestial events in general would be a good idea. Supernovae and hypernovae would obviously be the most spectacular, but there are other things like planetary or lunar breakups, black holes swallowing up asteroid fields, major asteroid impacts, etc. Personally I always wanted to see Mitterand Hollow finally get shredded by tidal forces.

 

[howmanymexicans]

CelestialPersonally I always wanted to see Mitterand Hollow finally get shredded by tidal forces.

I would watch that, wheres the popcorn!