Gravity Well

z993126

z993126
Thought occurred to me: the Gravity Well slowdown is more than just a gamey mechanic...it's an implementation of relativity, representing spacetime distortion in (probably) the only way possible in a multiplayer game. The 'shortest' path from moon A and moon B on opposite sides of a gas giant is taking an arc along the line of orbit.

Question is...how accurate a representation is it? Have any player-experiments been done or info provided by the devs? Wouldn't surprise me terribly if it turned out to be based on real values.
 

Nidoboros

N
You can zoom by in FSD as long as you don't slam inyo the atmosphere, no idea if the dip in speed going in and out of it is right according to bending space/time. My understanding of the lore is that the FSD puts an artificial gravity well in front of the ship that you 'fall' into to speed up, and that 'real' gravity wells affect that.
 
Last edited:

SlickPBW

S
So we’ll suspend concern about the acceleration that would turn bodies into mush, and also the top speeds >> c, because of course humans have figured these out in the future. So regarding gravity wells, yeah it’s just as realistic to believe that too.
 

DjVortex

DjVortex
Yeah, normally one would think that as you approach a gravity well, you would accelerate. And, in fact, when you are in normal space that's actually what happens: If you are within a certain distance of a planet/moon and disable your thrusters, your ship will start slowly falling towards the surface.

However, in the in-game lore the FSD technology works in a manner that a closeby gravity well kind of hinders it and slows it down. (From an outside-of-the-game meta perspective it's a game mechanic, of course, probably chosen and fine-tuned for various gameplay and usability reasons.)

The SCO mode ignores gravity wells, though, so that's quite a significant recent change, and a quite bold one.
 

Ashnak

Ashnak
z993126 said:
Thought occurred to me: the Gravity Well slowdown is more than just a gamey mechanic...it's an implementation of relativity, representing spacetime distortion in (probably) the only way possible in a multiplayer game. The 'shortest' path from moon A and moon B on opposite sides of a gas giant is taking an arc along the line of orbit.

Question is...how accurate a representation is it? Have any player-experiments been done or info provided by the devs? Wouldn't surprise me terribly if it turned out to be based on real values.
Click to expand...
You're probably looking for this:

canonn.science

Optimal Supercruise Flight Paths | Canonn Research Group

We are privileged to have been asked to host Cmdr Heisenberg6626's study of the Optimal Supercruise Flight Paths, which examines this key element of space travel in detail
canonn.science canonn.science

;)
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
z993126 said:
Question is...how accurate a representation is it? Have any player-experiments been done or info provided by the devs? Wouldn't surprise me terribly if it turned out to be based on real values.
Click to expand...
It's not exactly relativistic - and it behaves in the opposite way to gravity even in a simplified Newtonian system, because you get slowed down the closer you get to a gravity well, whereas in reality an object falling in an eccentric orbit around a gravity well will move at its fastest closest to the object (which is why gravitational slingshots work in real life and don't in supercruise)

As you can see from the Canonn paper, the speed limiting in supercruise is not an inverse-square rule either, so is presumably not linearly related to the gravitational field strength at a particular point.
 

Frankymole

Frankymole
Nidoboros said:
You can zoom by in FSD as long as you don't slam inyo the atmosphere, no idea if the dip in speed going in and out of it is right according to bending space/time. My understanding of the lore is that the FSD puts an artificial gravity well in front of the ship that you 'fall' into to speed up, and that 'real' gravity wells affect that.
Click to expand...
Aside from the fact they've stated artificial gravity doesn't exist in the ED Loreverse... nor does AI.
 

Ashnak

Ashnak
Nidoboros said:
You can zoom by in FSD as long as you don't slam inyo the atmosphere, no idea if the dip in speed going in and out of it is right according to bending space/time. My understanding of the lore is that the FSD puts an artificial gravity well in front of the ship that you 'fall' into to speed up, and that 'real' gravity wells affect that.
Click to expand...
I believe the usual understanding is that ED's frameshift drive is a variant on the Alcubierre Drive. What you describe is the drive from Alan Dean Foster's Homanx series, if my memory serves.
 

z993126

z993126
Ian Doncaster said:
It's not exactly relativistic - and it behaves in the opposite way to gravity even in a simplified Newtonian system, because you get slowed down the closer you get to a gravity well, whereas in reality an object falling in an eccentric orbit around a gravity well will move at its fastest closest to the object (which is why gravitational slingshots work in real life and don't in supercruise)
Click to expand...
That's probably the best way to approximate the temporal effects of increased speed...it'd be moving faster in reality, but it'd experience time-compression. So maybe split the difference, since you can't directly do that and have it make sense multiplayer-wise.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom