Scientific discripancies

[Piwo]

Hi Commanders!

I'm not sure whether this is the correct subforum for my topic, but Ill try nevertheless:

One aspect I absolutely love about ED and its lore is that it is mostly based on actual science as far as possible. With that in mind, I was wondering that there are some extreme violations of basic science in the game, espacially boosting: After boosting your ship to a specific velocity it starts to slow down quite harshly (even with FA off)... There ain't no friction, no gravity or anything else in empty space explaining that harsh break. I totally understand the gameplay-reason for this, but nevertheless it bothers me in a game that tries to simulate real science as close as possible.

Another minor aspect I noticed are the cockpits; Although it's stated that there is nothing like artificial gravitiy in ships, nearly each cockpit is designed for earth-like gravity... Think for example of the coffee-machines in several ships.

How do you feel about these, does it annoy you or are you more like 'screw it bro, its just a game'? Have you discovered more discripancies or maybe some lore that would explain them plausibly?

 

[Robert Maynard]

When the flight model was discussed early on, Mike Evans was quite clear in his statement that E: D is a game first and foremost rather than a simulation.

 

[Redden Alt-Mer]

How do you feel about these, does it annoy you or are you more like 'screw it bro, its just a game'? Have you discovered more discripancies or maybe some lore that would explain them plausibly?

About the boost issue, it's easy to think it this way: even with FA off, the computer systems of the ship limit your maximum velocity for safety reasons. These policies are hard coded in the ship firmware and cannot be removed, not even with the help of an engineer. The best you can do is dirty tune your drives at Palin's, but you're still limited.

Coffee machines do not bother me particularly, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISSpresso, it's the cups that do. Slow down fast enough, and those cups become bullets in the cockpit ;-)

 

[Hanerib]

It is quite simple really. You see, in upper atmospheric, Absolute Space there exists Luminiferous Aether in undisturbed, pure form, whence light particles can flow freely without regard to inertial forces, time particles or rude observers with their sense-organs. Closer to the sea-level however, Luminiferous Aether becomes more elastic, mixed with common air-particles, causing the flow of light particles to slow down, and which also erases all purple light particles from travelling in the atmosphere, hence the sky is blue. In Absolute Space, being obedient to it's immovable nature, the Optickall spectre is full, with purple light particles, and it is these very same purple light particles that cause an external intruder, like that of a hull of a space ship, to slow down to some degree eventually.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Another minor aspect I noticed are the cockpits; Although it's stated that there is nothing like artificial gravitiy in ships, nearly each cockpit is designed for earth-like gravity... Think for example of the coffee-machines in several ships.

This one doesn't bother me because the ships do spend a fair bit of time in gravity - whether on a planet's surface, or in the pseudo-gravity of a rotating station - where building around an agreed "down" is helpful.

Ship velocity is certainly "gameplay first", but since no interesting space combat is possible with realistic drives (fuel consumption rates being the biggest issue) then it's inevitable.

As far as some other discrepancies go:
... there's some interesting breaches of conservation of energy if you look at the numbers on the power plant, power distributor and laser weapons
... the spin axis of stations is wrong (they always face a fixed point relative to the planet, but the spin axis means that they should instead face a consistent direction relative to the system)
... space pirates have never made any economic sense, which is even more obvious in this game than in the previous three
... in the interests of running on consumer hardware rather than supercomputer clusters, orbital mechanics are simplified to nested two-body problems, and ring systems are modelled as infinitely rigid disks
... the way temperature works around stars is incredibly inconsistent - you can overheat your ship next to a room-temperature brown dwarf, while having no problems on the surface of a planet close enough to a bright star to have a 900K mean temperature
... a Coriolis-style station probably has a practical docking rate of ~1500 ships/day in ideal conditions - even assuming they're all big cargo ships, and they're not, that's only about 1 million tonnes of cargo a day, which isn't all that much for the populations some of them support. (Fortunately instancing means this doesn't break CGs)

Most of it's "you have to go looking for it" stuff, of course.

 

[Sapyx]

Slowing down after boosting isn't hard to explain: you can see it happening in your ship if you're flying a ship where you can see the retrorockets firing (like the AspX): whenever you exceed your rated maximum speed, the retro thrusters fire to slow you back down again, even when you're FA-Off. You have to actually destroy your thrusters to stop them from auto-firing to slow you back down.

So the true mystery here is why a ship designer would deliberately make their ships go slower - especially when going faster would make their customers survive, and effectively destroy the concept of piracy and other unwanted combat. It's as if the ship manufacturers want their customers to die and are encouraging the dystopian-ness of the universe.

So no, that one's not a laws-of-physics-breaker. There are, of course, plenty of other laws-breaking stuff in ED, as Ian has pointed out. Like space debris that eventually stops spinning, and stops moving, all by itself - as if invisible space ghosts have grabbed onto it to make it break Newton's laws. Then of course there's Mitterand Hollow, the moon of New Africa in the Epsilon Indi system that, thanks to an error in hand-coding its parameters, zips around it's planet in a mere 86 seconds.

...Think for example of the coffee-machines in several ships...

The "coffee machines" you see in certain ships are not coffee machines. They can't possibly be coffee machines because the cups that appear to be hanging off them would simply fly off in zero-G or while under the 30+G manoeuvers the ships undergo in combat. Their presence on the bridge, where they take up valuable space and constitute an obstacle hazard in zero-G, rather than being buried in the superstructure where such delicate-looking things ought to be kept (or in the ship's galley, if they really were coffee machines), means that their presence there in the cockpit is totally necessary. Therefore, they must be horrifyingly inexplicable hyperscientific doohickies, that just happen to look like 20th century coffee machines.

So again, the "real mystery" here is not the presence of "coffee machines" on certain ships, but that all the coffee-machine-less ships seem to operate perfectly fine, despite not having any "coffee machines" on the bridge.

 

[Hanerib]

invisible space ghosts have grabbed onto it to make it break Newton's laws

Suppose you have never heard of ghost particles and beta decay? The Naturall Chymistry in Newton's Great Work was only a step towards greater revelations of the Nature as organized by the Holy Monad, that is: nuclear alchemy able to produce vast quantities of gold. This is why the Philosophicall Stone, also called The Lucifer device, is a physical manifestation of the Morning star, a true alkahest, that will radiate enlightenment as well as a lot of gold.

 

[Thwarptide]

There's more than a few discrepancies of physics in the game.
I saw a GAS GIANT the other day, some 455x the size of the earth in the bubble. Huge amount of atmospheric pressure & gravity of course. In the system map information it said "human 1". Curiously I scanned and FSS revealed the same thing. DSS also revealed the location.
The problem is that there's no surface on a gas giant. There's no structure that can sustain itself, no way a human presence can exist there, but there it is just the same. EVEN IF you wish to defy the laws of physics, THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE even in the real galaxy.

I've seen moons so close to high gravity worlds, you'd swear you can reach out and touch the other, tital forces should rip em apart. But there they are.
A great many mysterious things exist in the real galaxy that we don't know about and should not defy the laws of physics, but I'm sure they're out there and there's no reason why they can't exist in game. But a human presence on a gas giant.......... Puhleeeeze.

 

[Sapyx]

I saw a GAS GIANT the other day, some 455x the size of the earth in the bubble. Huge amount of atmospheric pressure & gravity of course. In the system map information it said "human 1". Curiously I scanned and FSS revealed the same thing. DSS also revealed the location.
The problem is that there's no surface on a gas giant. There's no structure that can sustain itself, no way a human presence can exist there, but there it is just the same. EVEN IF you wish to defy the laws of physics, THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE even in the real galaxy.

I've seen moons so close to high gravity worlds, you'd swear you can reach out and touch the other, tital forces should rip em apart. But there they are.
A great many mysterious things exist in the real galaxy that we don't know about and should not defy the laws of physics, but I'm sure they're out there and there's no reason why they can't exist in game. But a human presence on a gas giant.......... Puhleeeeze.

Those tags also reflect objects in orbit of the planet, as well as on or within the planet itself. That "human" tag was probably a space station, tourist beacon or some such structure, in orbit.

 

[ObsoleteRobot]

The two that bother me the most, well maybe bother isn't the right word because this a game and we have to suspend our disbelief somewhere, so the two that stick out in my mind the most are :
- The causality violations from FTL travel (c is really the speed of causality, photons being a massless particle just travel as fast as it's possible to go).
- Heat venting. In a vacuum you can only emit through radiation. I know the Wiki explains the heat venting systems as "fins that radiate the heat out into space", but radiation isn't nearly as effective a means of transferring heat as convection or conduction.

 

[Vetinari]

Coffee machines do not bother me particularly, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISSpresso, it's the cups that do. Slow down fast enough, and those cups become bullets in the cockpit ;-)

Someone's gonna be disappointed when they find out the coffee machine and all the cosmetics are just holograms

 

[Redden Alt-Mer]

Someone's gonna be disappointed when they find out the coffee machine and all the cosmetics are just holograms

Nah, I don't expect to be able to walk around the cockpit at all - no disappointment ahead

 

[Thwarptide]

Those tags also reflect objects in orbit of the planet, as well as on or within the planet itself. That "human" tag was probably a space station, tourist beacon or some such structure, in orbit.

You didn't read close enough Cmdr, after a detailed investigation....... there was nothing in orbit. Dss revealed nothing either.

 

[Hanerib]

Heat venting. In a vacuum you can only emit through radiation.

A-ha! But if there really was such a thing as a vacuum, how could any forces interact with each other? Imagine an Athenian day-runner, delivering an important letter, helplessly kicking around his feet in a void, there would be no motion at all, and the letter would forever remain undelivered. Or the opposite, jumping across the vacuum with no element to resist his movement, truly his speed would reach infinity. Do not believe atomists and their strange natural philosophy, morally ambiguous lot they are, and they drink sour wine or so I have heard.

In reality all celestial spheres gently swim across the aether according to their cosmic harmony, and there is no air or water up there, for they are Earthly elements and positioned in their own spheres accordingly. Now if you grabbed a thermometer and went into the Celestial Heavens with it, you would notice no heat would exist at all, as there would not exist any air or water to expand or contract, rendering such device utterly useless in those conditions, and the entire question of heat venting quite absurd.

 

[Thwarptide]

But if there really was such a thing as a vacuum

True, since a vacuum is a space void of matter. There is no such thing.

truly his speed would reach infinity

.... if there was such a thing. But infinity only exist in the mind and books of Douglas Adam's with his infinite Improbability drive and tea.

 

[Piwo]

The causality violations from FTL travel

Technically your ship never exceeds the speed of light/causality, doesn't get even close to it. Just the space "bends" in front of the ship so the "relative speed" to a resting observer in "normal" space seems to be above light speed, which it physically never is

 

[Hanerib]

How can the speed of light be connected to causality? Think of Troglodytes, in their subterranean caves there is no light, and yet they manage to do all sorts of unpleasant things only cave-dwellers can think of.

Indeed, there exists four forms of causality, that are: material, formal, moving and teleological. In the case of subterranean peoples, to truly understand them and their habits, one must consider thus: Subterranean caves are carved into rock often under the sea-level, so it is their nature to habit dark and wet places, for sunlight cannot penetrate rock and underground spheres belong to the element water. Troglodytes either live very long, or steal their offspring from nearby villages, and the purpose of their existence is to steal sheep during the night, when there is not light. This is why study of the Natural world is called physics, and this is how it is to be studied.

 

[ObsoleteRobot]

Technically your ship never exceeds the speed of light/causality, doesn't get even close to it. Just the space "bends" in front of the ship so the "relative speed" to a resting observer in "normal" space seems to be above light speed, which it physically never is

It never exceeds light in it's own reference frame, instead residing within a bubble that compress space in front, expanding it behind. Even Miguel Albucierre stated that "two observers at the same point cannot have a relative velocity greater than c". He then conjectured that using similar techniques you could create a closed causal loop and travel backwards in time.