The ship, that's how rockets work.
Confused, missing the obvious I guess
- Thread starter Phantom Mark
- Start date
The ship, that's how rockets work.
In the old system, I think speed bled off to the top speed with the current pips (and 0-pip speed when drives are off), and I think that is how it is going to work.
Try playing Kerbal Space Program! Then when you have, come back here and explain to me how I intercept an object in orbit, because it's doing my head in!
That should be either ‘magical Wankel engine’, or ‘magical ****el engine’, if the FD censorship filter had a sense of humour. (don't mind me, it's roasting here and it's almost 2am. Saps the IQ)
On topic: thrusters work on conservation of momentum, not pushing against a medium. You can throw a large mass really slowly, or a tiny mass really quickly to get the same momentum. Momentum is mass times velocity.
Although these drives aren't behaving like thrusters, I suspect that behaviour's buggy and it's not FD's intention to create a handwavium drive.
The maximum speed thing is purely for technical reasons, nothing to do with physics (you'd need an impossibly fast network to allow impossibly fast speeds).
Ahem slight bone of contention there... suffice to say you'd need a different networking model..
There is something called "ground effect" that does apply when thrust is pushing against something, however the vehicle needs to be very close to the ground before it will work. Hovercraft take advantage of this.
As for a space ship? Maybe when it is within a 1/4 meter of the ground or landing pad, but outside that, it's all the reaction mass that moves the space ship.
+1 I was in a discussion of orion on You Tube recently with people who insisted it wouldn't work
I had to give up - they just couldn't wrap their head around the idea.
Thrusters? How quaint. We stopped using thrusters hundreds of years ago except for attitude adjustment, pretty much since the introduction of the frame shift drive. Now movement through space is performed by manipulation of space time around the ship, without actually engaging frameshift.
It's a bit like the way magnetic fields generate currents in metal, but not.
Not going to go into heavy technical details, but suffice it to say that:
A) There's a top speed and
B) Space/Time resists manipulation which essentially acts like friction.
Happy?
+1 I was in a discussion of orion on You Tube recently with people who insisted it wouldn't work
Somewhere, there is a video of them proving the concept using conventional explosives. It was like an explosion machine gun shooting out the back of the payload :smilie:
+1 I was in a discussion of orion on You Tube recently with people who insisted it wouldn't work
It's a sad state that so many leave schools with such a lack of understanding about how things work. And the crap that people do believe! <sigh>
Which prompts another "That reminds me off" moment. In the novel "King Davids spaceship" a planet needed to achieve space flight to prove they were worthy of joining the Empire as a sovereign planet instead of just being annexed. They were under a deadline and they weren't quite up to building a step rocket to do the job. Instead they fired conventional explosives with a machine gun facing aft to launch a very primitive spacecraft into orbit.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_mechanics
I'm not going to waste anybodies time, it's simple physics just research it, the game doesn't use a real physics system so this question isn't related but just use wikipedia.
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what exactly are the thrusters pushing against in space
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Basic physics:
The thrusters are not pushing "against" anything, they don't need to. They create a force in one direction...and any force/action creates a re-action as per physics.
Thruster fires to the left, ship is accelerated to the right because of the reactive force. Or your ship would de-celerate/break by having thrusters firing forward.
what exactly are the thrusters pushing against in space
>>
Basic physics:
The thrusters are not pushing "against" anything, they don't need to. They create a force in one direction...and any force/action creates a re-action as per physics.
Thruster fires to the left, ship is accelerated to the right because of the reactive force. Or your ship would de-celerate/break by having thrusters firing forward.