I just don't understand the gravity of the situation

[MadDogMurdock]

Except that planets aren't hills. They're valleys. If you think about it this way, the SC speed drain when leaving a valley makes a little more sense. Planets only slow you down when you're trying to escape their space-time valley. You can hit a planet going full speed. The reason why we slow down when heading towards planets is because of automated safety features in the FSD that make accurate arrival easier for humans to control. The same automated slow down happens if we Target a station or USS, and this goes away if we de-select that Target. Planets do the same thing on approach, but this is more automated and doesn't require you to select the planet as a Target. Presumably this is because you are much more likely to hit a planet than a relatively tiny space station.

Picture the scene...

Spacetime is a giant sponge.
The FSD moves your ship through this sponge.
Large masses compress the sponge, making it 'denser' in the vicinity of the mass.
The larger the mass, the denser the sponge, and the further out the density effect happens.

Pushing through the denser sponge is harder, so the FSD is slower.

 

[philngraves]

sigh... your ships computer thinks things... Try to justify it with psudo-science via game canon all you want. In the end, the game behaves in a way that is simple for you, the player, to control.

Proof? You slow down from boosting...

 

[GG7]

You speed up as you "crawl" your way out of the planet's gravity well. You also speed up when falling into it.

Think of a trampoline with a bowling ball sitting in the middle of it. See the big dent where the bowling ball is pulling down the trampoline's normally flat and uniform surface? That's basically what a gravity well looks like as it curves space time.

Its not an attractive force in the way of a Star Trek Tractor Beam is an attractor. Doesn't work that way.

 

[Darth Ender]

Dont try and apply logic or science to how the FSD in the game works.

Like everything in Elite Dangerous, just look at it in terms of game mechanics, leave all attempts of science fiction at the door. Fdev did.

The ship's engines work all the time with a sort of safety system in place on top of stellar objects acting as drag to your FSD. This drag is arbitrary and has nothing to do with gravity but it's modeled to fall off like gravity does. eg, the FSD is impacted by proximity to larger ships which have effectively no measurable gravity of their own the same as it's impacted by being near the surface of a large planet when activating the FSD. The safety mechanism that you can't turn off + this drag coefficient is why the FSD behaves the way it does depending on the direction your ship is facing.

so in essence, your FSD behaves the way it does because they needed to slow you down near stellar objects, for 3 reasons
1. for your own safety so you didn't constantly crash into objects at high speed and die and then complain
2. because the game engine needs things to move at certain speeds based on their size to do proper collision detection - otherwise you can easily have ships passing thru objects at high speed and the game engine would never be able to detect it because it would check for the collision in 1 frame and not find it and the next frame it wouldn't find it if your distance moved is greater than the size of the object you're moving thru between the frames.
3. gameplay reasons. It gives an excuse to keep players from quickly running away.

As for an in-universe explanation for why it behaves the way it does....why care? There's no point when you have everything else they're doing going on that can't be properly explained. like telepresence in some situations but not in others, Jump distances reducing travel time so that the political/economical makeup of the entire bubble doesn't make any sense anymore, galnet is accessible anywhere in the galaxy instantly but data on explored systems must be hand delivered, engineered components get re-created and purchased by your insurance, you can rank up in both navy's simultaneously, cold dead Y-dwarf stars that are colder than water ice cause your ship to heat up and take heat damage, cold dead stars give off a glow, engines in a ship sound like they are working harder based on speed rather than acceleration, factions ...etc etc.

You'll be frustrated _all_ the time if you start trying to role play this game.

 

[Stealthie]

You speed up as you "crawl" your way out of the planet's gravity well. You also speed up when falling into it.

Except that you don't speed up as you move toward a planet.

You slow down.


I dunno if all this stuff is intended to be the result of gravity-induced shenanigans but it's probably better to assume it's your ship's on-board computer that's responsible because that's the only explanation that, erm, explains why, say, a nav-buoy (something the size of a trash-can, with no gravitational field) has the same effect on your ship as a planet.

 

[Hellakitty]

I believe the slowing down the closer you get to an object thing is the game trying to emulate some half-baked weird-asp version of a brachistochrone trajectory.

But yea, as other people have said, don't expect any real-world astrophysics and such in ED. It's a game, with gamey physics and gamey mechanics, explained away with handwavium lore.

 

[krylite]

You can "slam" into a planet or sun occasionally if you're chasing a target in interdiction and veer off into the path of the planet. Which then "pops" you out into as if you hit the proximity emergency fsd dropout threshold. Of course ED didn't want to go back to the FFE days where you often smashed your ship at high velocity with mistimed navigation.

Yes, ED's FSD seems to have some governor function as you approach massive objects. Then it lets you accelerate much faster the farther away the ship is from plantery bodies although still under some autoshifiting control and limitations. It also seems to be based on different internal princples than Star Trek's warp drive where the Enterprise seems to be able to leave orbit accelerating to warp speed ( > 1c) much faster and ED's FSD seems to only need fusion power and just some megawatts to operate.

 

[Lily from anim.o.v.e]

And yet, if your speed to the blue area where the ship autohandles spee,d i recentley see a lot issues with stations close to planets as the ship deosn't seems to be able to properly handle the breaking as often comes to "too fast" issues sniping past the station. Strange that the computer in many cases cannot properly take gravity into mind.

 

[Toumal]

Nope. Don't forget you are not moving through space. Your FSD compresses the space in front and stretches the space behind you. (A warp drive in ST terminology) and inside this ever-compressing space bubble you are moving at "normal" speed.
And as it turns out, compressing the spacetime seems to be harder in the gravitational field. I.e. The stronger the gravitational field, the less your FSD is able to compress the space in front of you, resulting in lower supercruise speed.

This. Also note that the FSD in the game is, well, just an FSD in a game. If you played the alpha you might remember that the FSD behaved quite a bit differently back then. It was a lot easier to overshoot too.

 

[GraXXoR]

But that's mixing two things together. One is FSD affected by gravity and the other is the flight computer which is programmed to accelerate the first half and decelerate the second half of the journey. Try flying without the target selected.

I did. Made no difference, still slowed down, even when pointing slightly away from the station...

Makes a lot of sense, but then the ship must warp an awful lot of space.... just head out to Hutton Orbital to see my point... once you're past the half way point, you start to slow down even though you're still 1/8 Ly away from anything...

I've prolly been ninja'd, but basically:

Hutton Orbital is orbiting a distant star. As you fly towards it, you are leaving the main star's gravity well (getting faster) and entering the second one's well (Slowing down again)... Thus it's nothing to do with the computer, more to do with the distance from the star in front vs the star behind.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

Here's a totally scientific diagram.

The red line is your max SC speed based on where you are in the gravity well of a large and small object.

 

[Abigor]

ask Elon.......hahaha........gravity.....lol

 

[[VR] scipio_77]

That's your ship systems doing their thing, not gravity.

But this was actually one of the things that was modelled a bit more elegantly in the predecessor Frontier than in ED. In that game you didn't have supercruise, you sped up time... so travel in system was affected normally by gravity. Your ship would actually twist and turn to get its biggest boosters in the opposite direction of acceleration. So in the braking process your ship (or you, if you decided to do it manually) would do a 180 and burn the main engines. You could even slingshot past large gravitational objects.

Supercruise just makes up its own rules basically, since time dilation would be impossible in a multiplayer game and you need some form of "ease of access".

 

[GraXXoR]

But that's mixing two things together. One is FSD affected by gravity and the other is the flight computer which is programmed to accelerate the first half and decelerate the second half of the journey. Try flying without the target selected.

I did. Made no difference, still slowed down, even when pointing slightly away from the station...

Makes a lot of sense, but then the ship must warp an awful lot of space.... just head out to Hutton Orbital to see my point... once you're past the half way point, you start to slow down even though you're still 1/8 Ly away from anything...

Picture the scene...

Spacetime is a giant sponge.
The FSD moves your ship through this sponge.
Large masses compress the sponge, making it 'denser' in the vicinity of the mass.
The larger the mass, the denser the sponge, and the further out the density effect happens.

Pushing through the denser sponge is harder, so the FSD is slower.

This works for me:
Considering the Alcubierre Drive (the "physics" on which SC is based) requires the ship to compress space in front and expend space behind to affect faster than light motion without actually breaking light "barrier." Space that was already stressed or compressed would be less amenable to further compression sounds plausible enough.

 

[Harley Quinn]

The theoretical science behind an FSD supports slow down. Think of it more as the planets mass interfering with your FSD trying to alter M in E=MC2. Your energy output is constant but as the planet increases the mass being effected, the C (which is your speed in this context) will drop accordingly.

 

[GraXXoR]

The theoretical science behind an FSD supports slow down. Think of it more as the planets mass interfering with your FSD trying to alter M in E=MC2. Your energy output is constant but as the planet increases the mass being effected, the C (which is your speed in this context) will drop accordingly.

I don't think that's how E=mc² works... but... Hey ho... why not.... LOL.

 

[philngraves]

Good lord, why are people still trying to apply physics to this games mechanics. Its for ease of use. Period. If we had real physics no one would play the game, supercruise would be nigh impossible to control, and all combat would be BVR and Beyond would be short for Beyond Boring.

Sorry to spoil the 'I R astrophysics smart cuz this...' monolouges, but I'm sure we can all find something more interesting to talk about.

 

[verminstar]

Well your fsd doesnt want to crash into a planet at 30000000000 km a second, so I can understand it slowing down. and I guess gravity gets weaker with distance.

That doesnt work and heres why. Yer FSD making any decision at all would require some limited form of artificial intelliegence...which is banned throughout human space and has been banned fer some time. Therefore everyone with an FSD that overrules their human controller can now turn themselves and their ships over to the relevant authorities fer having illegal mods fitted.

If ye aim directly at a planet and speed up, one would expect not to live...physics be damned because its common sense really. Gravity, even light gravity requires a ship to boost to slow down...in this game, boosting isnt even possible as the ships inbuilt safety mechanisms overrules the players wishes.

Kills the mershun every time...feels like frontier just wanna remove all the fun risk and replace it with wrapping us up in cotton wool...cant even faceplant if we try from space...we gotta be 50m from terra firma on a high G planet to have a fun faceplant ^

 

[GraXXoR]

That doesnt work and heres why. Yer FSD making any decision at all would require some limited form of artificial intelliegence...which is banned throughout human space and has been banned fer some time. Therefore everyone with an FSD that overrules their human controller can now turn themselves and their ships over to the relevant authorities fer having illegal mods fitted.

If ye aim directly at a planet and speed up, one would expect not to live...physics be damned because its common sense really. Gravity, even light gravity requires a ship to boost to slow down...in this game, boosting isnt even possible as the ships inbuilt safety mechanisms overrules the players wishes.

Kills the mershun every time...feels like frontier just wanna remove all the fun risk and replace it with wrapping us up in cotton wool...cant even faceplant if we try from space...we gotta be 50m from terra firma on a high G planet to have a fun faceplant ^

I always think Vstar's posts belong in the RP thread...

 

[verminstar]

I always think Vstar's posts belong in the RP thread...

I role played fer 8 years once upon a time...Im all role play burnt out just havin some fun with it nowadays ^