How do you know you RP'd for 8 years... maybe that was the 'real' you, and the rest your life, both before and now... is actually RP?!?!
I just don't understand the gravity of the situation
- Thread starter Skatez69
- Start date
If the topic bores you, jog on - there's plenty of other threads on the forum. Personally I'm really enjoying hearing all the different theories
It’s the constant you are looking to game to break LS. You either cheat energy, mass or speed. FSD cheats speed by compression of space. Warp drive cheats mass. But it all needs to fit within the constant.
If they were theories, sure. It's more like kids trying to put the square peg in the round hole... then beating it with a mallet when it won't fit. All it takes to understand the why's of physics in ED is to have played the older games. They put real physics in one of them... was not well recieved.
Hard truth is real physics don't a good game make.
I do thing incrementally applying actual physics to certain areas would be pretty awesome though... 800m/s courier launched torps? Tickle me now.
The Frame Shift Drive works similar to an Alcubierre Drive, which warps space to move you at faster than light speeds. How effective it is depends upon the curvature of space. The flatter the curvature of space to begin with, the more it can be warped. Mass warps space (gravity describes the motion of objects following the curvature of space), the larger the mass, greater the effect, which limits the effectiveness of the FSD.
Interestingly, many aspects about how the Supercruise operates is similar to how the hyperspace jumps operate, both in ED and in previous games like Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier First Encounters. In fact, the top speed of Supercruise is almost identical to the top speeds of the most efficient hyperdrives from previous games. I don't know if this was deliberate or not, but it is one of the reasons why I felt ED, at least at first, was absolutely brilliant when it came to verisimilitude. Sadly, the current development team doesn't seem very interested in making sure the Elite universe remains internally consistent.
You also have to accept that this is their first multiplayer game, and you have to change the rules if you want to let a bunch of folk play together. It already takes considerable time investment to play with your friends when you log in. Keeping the old systems in play would make the game extremely tedious and would be the definition of what not to do for future game developers.
To be more succinct, if they kept the game internally consistent, ED never would have made it out of Kickstarter/GPP. No one wants to spend that much time trying to play with their friends, they want to spend that time actually playing with their friends.
I miss the old gameplay often, but I also understand why it changed.
verminstar
Banned
How do you know you RP'd for 8 years... maybe that was the 'real' you, and the rest your life, both before and now... is actually RP?!?!
One and the same perhaps...I was an ilfiltration player in eve...Id use alt accounts to infiltrate corps and then steal everything they have, destroy their blueprints and then vanish without a trace. I took contracts from the big alliances to target problem corps who were based in high security space, so it was purely business, never personal.
Then a few years as a cylon hell bent on the annihilation of all organic life...I did enjoy that one but the salt from other players...oh my...
Ye really dont want someone like me role playing in a game like this...trust me on this if nothing else...I never ever play a good guy ^
So that was you in SAO that ran the Laughing Coffins...
verminstar
Banned
I never reveal my sources...this name was never used in eve...theres a reason fer that. But ye have a nice day all the same ^
Ish, when your in a gravity well, you will slow down the closer you get to the center of that well, regardless of what you tell your computer you are doing (as per the warp drive handwavium explanation detailed above), but if you are approaching a selected target that's not near an astronomical body, your computer slows you down so you don't skip past it at 5C on 1% throttle.
You can use this to quickly get to targets in deep space by approaching at full speed until 4sec distance then zeroing throttle until you're about to pass it then unselect target, which will bring you to a dead stop.
Then just reselect the target and approach again at full speed, safe disengage message should appear shortly after.
It's both.
The distance to bodies and the masses of those bodies dictates the hard limit on supercruise speed (as in it's effectively a property of space, rather than being something controlled by your ship). When you approach a body, that hard limit decreases. As you move away from it, it increases. It's as MadDogMurdock says for why. The ship's computer has no control over this. (Consequently, there's effectively two kinds of acceleration in supercruise - changing speed within that hard limit (which is under your / the ship's computer control, & the changing of the hard limit, which is purely set by where you are.)
The ships computer simulates this for a non-massive target, but it's only a soft limit - if you untarget it, you return to the hard limit which always applies.
If you go a long long way from any massive bodies you eventually reach a universal hard limit for supercruise. Acceleration at those places is ridiculously high - like from 0-600c in a second.
As a first approximation, the hard limit is effectively modelled as limit = a/(1+gr) where 'a' is a constant (the universal hard limit), and gr is the total gravitational influence at that point. (The game uses a modified version where the gravitational influence drops off with distance quicker than in real life to give a more player friendly effective rate of acceleration/deceleration when leaving/approaching bodies.)
IMHO it's a pretty decent physical model, as even though it's dealing with a non-real world scenario it's still rooted in some real world physics. I'd say that's not bad given the context.
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Mass shadows work the same way irrespective of throttle setting. You get closer to a massive object, you slow down. You get further away, you speed up. Changing throttle will cap your speed at a fraction of what's possible given your distance, but the hard cap is dependent on that distance.
Navigation targeting can skew things as well (having something selected can slow or increase SC speed/responsiveness, depending on situation), but again, the velocity cap is ultimately based on distance.
In normal space, yes. Not in SC.
Your FSD works by warping spacetime around your ship. Mass also warps spacetime, so the proximity of a massive object disrupts your FSD's spacetime bubble-warp field, causing you to slow down as you approach a planet or star. As you move away from the planet/star whatever, its mass hass les and less effect on the surrounding spacetime, thus unencumbering your FSD of the extra warpage, so you speed up.
Simples!
Here is how supercruise works.
Imagine the three dimensional space being embedded into four dimensional space time, the same way a two dimensional flat surface is embedded into three dimentional space.
Got that?
Ok. Now, as wel know (or pretend to know), gravity distorts space time. When you project that into our dimension-reduced visualization you get what is known as ta "gravity well", basically a funnel that dives down into the space underneath that flat surface, and at the bottom you find the body odf mass which cxreated this gravity well by means of distorting space time.
Now, as you travel in supercruise you move at a constant speed along the distorted "surface" of space time, but the closer you are to a body of mass the more of your momentum is used up by the effort of climbing the wall of the gravity well, and less is used for actually travelling towards your destination.
Corrollary: the further you are from any body of mass the faster you travel at the same throttle setting. Point in case: halfway from the navpoint towards hudson orbital.
Imagine the three dimensional space being embedded into four dimensional space time, the same way a two dimensional flat surface is embedded into three dimentional space.
Got that?
Ok. Now, as wel know (or pretend to know), gravity distorts space time. When you project that into our dimension-reduced visualization you get what is known as ta "gravity well", basically a funnel that dives down into the space underneath that flat surface, and at the bottom you find the body odf mass which cxreated this gravity well by means of distorting space time.
Now, as you travel in supercruise you move at a constant speed along the distorted "surface" of space time, but the closer you are to a body of mass the more of your momentum is used up by the effort of climbing the wall of the gravity well, and less is used for actually travelling towards your destination.
Corrollary: the further you are from any body of mass the faster you travel at the same throttle setting. Point in case: halfway from the navpoint towards hudson orbital.
Here is how it works:
Your eating dinner, and someone comes by and hits you with a hammer.
You wake up in a video game.
It does gamey crap so you don't die all the time, or complain even more on the forums.
Your eating dinner, and someone comes by and hits you with a hammer.
You wake up in a video game.
It does gamey crap so you don't die all the time, or complain even more on the forums.
[video=youtube;ogAqgkkTV5U]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogAqgkkTV5U[/video]
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I hate posts like this... now I need to go watch the movie because I can't get it out of my brain. You did that on purpose, didn't you?
Oh yeah, I realise there's some implemetation of gravity-wells in place.
I'm just saying that it doesn't explain all of the changes-of-speed that your ship will make.
Fundamentally, we're flying ships that can do >1,500c and, if the throttle covered that range of speed, it'd be impossible to slow down enough to land on a planet or visit a USS or Nav Buoy so the game adjusts the range of your throttle to suit (usually) the circumstances.
And, from an in-game POV, that would be explained as your nav' computer twiddling the throttle range to suit what it thinks you might want to do.
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