Headlights in FTL

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Panticus

Banned
You know whats the saddest thing here, it's not that your life left you to be so lonely that this is the only way you can get your kicks, the saddest thing is that 2 days of free lessons and you still haven't learned a god damn thing

That is very harsh. Don't attack people. Attack me - I'm the one telling you that you are off target. I'm sure he's a fine chap. Steady your words or you will hurt someone.
 
In a game where FTL travel is possible, and, when travelling FTL, you can see perfectly out the windscreen, worrying about how headlights behave seems like a minor 'realism' point. :D

Still, this thread wins the forum for today. :)
 
You know whats the saddest thing here, it's not that your life left you to be so lonely that this is the only way you can get your kicks, the saddest thing is that 2 days of free lessons and you still haven't learned a god damn thing.

In this time we could have tought a flat-earth believer that the earth is round, and tought science to a teologist

however, against all odds, you do you my son

Who hurt you MassiveD?... who hurt you? :(
 
Who hurt you MassiveD?... who hurt you? :(

"I'm sorry, the database would not be able to handle the load
That (thing that is done in many other games) can't be done. Trust me, I'm a programmer
The Lore says no.
It's David Braben's game. He decides the direction of the game. Not the paying customers.
I don't care how other wildly successful games do it...this is Elite.
If you have suggestions to improve the gameplay then this isn't the game for you.
Back in 1984 we didn't .....
Go play EVE
One of us... One of us...."

Who hurt you buddy?

The big bad community?

Awwwwwwwwwwwwww.

That's quite an impressive portfolio of all the time's you were proven wrong tho
 
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Yup it is an insane thing, and it might just work, the question is though how would you represent a '3d' wave to someone perceiving it with 3 dimensions.
Waves as we know them and as they are represented on the picture is for people to be able to understand the concept, but are only representing a 2d wave of a plane.

The biggest problem of all is how much energy is needed to produce that "bubble"! For a normal airliner like a 737 you need the energy of half the universe to move it.
If you find such thinks interesting i can recommend this talk at the SETI institut:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b7y_rdHAYc
Very funny but very intereting too! :)
 
Hey! While we have some really smart people here, can someone explain time dilation to me (As a physical concept, not in game)? I've taken enough astronomy to have an idea about what's supposed to be happening, but never really understood it. My error could be in coming from too much of an anthropomorphic angle.

Say I were travelling at a speed where time dilation is a factor. Would I observe my actions and the actions of those around me as normal speed? Or does the time dilation come from a 3rd party observer seeing our actions appear to be slower?

Like the clocks in our satellites have to be calibrated to account for time dilation. Is this because they're meant to communicate with us, who, as earthlings, would be in a different frame of reference? Like would they be fine if they only had to talk to one another locally?

I have hundreds, if not thousands of esoteric (if not utterly inane) questions. I promise you're not teaching a troll, just an idiot who's sense of wonder far exceeds his mental competence.
 

Panticus

Banned
Hey! While we have some really smart people here, can someone explain time dilation to me (As a physical concept, not in game)? I've taken enough astronomy to have an idea about what's supposed to be happening, but never really understood it. My error could be in coming from too much of an anthropomorphic angle.

Say I were travelling at a speed where time dilation is a factor. Would I observe my actions and the actions of those around me as normal speed? Or does the time dilation come from a 3rd party observer seeing our actions appear to be slower?

Like the clocks in our satellites have to be calibrated to account for time dilation. Is this because they're meant to communicate with us, who, as earthlings, would be in a different frame of reference? Like would they be fine if they only had to talk to one another locally?

I have hundreds, if not thousands of esoteric (if not utterly inane) questions. I promise you're not teaching a troll, just an idiot who's sense of wonder far exceeds his mental competence.

Time dilation is observed by someone not travelling at your speed. At close to the speed of light, if I observed you, for example, boiling an egg at that speed, to you it would take 3 minutes. To me it might take a thousand years. For this reason, in my books I prefer to call it time contraction - because mathematically that is what is happening.

There must be symmetry in this, so, somewhat bizarrely, you will also see time dilation in those you are moving with respect to.

Time dilation allows time travel - but only into the future.

EDIT: In 1916 I think, Einstein published the General Theory - he had realised that gravity must have an effect upon time also. So clocks in a gravity well (like Earth) run a little slower than those that are not. For GPS to work properly, there is a small time adjustment, because a clock in space will run a little faster than one on Earth.

EDIT 2: If you spoke to someone over radio, with them moving at a very high speed, there wouldn't just be a time delay - there would be some stretching of the signal. In audio terms, their voice would sound slowed down - I'd never thought about this!

EDIT 3: I have to admit that, at superluminal speeds, FTL, there is no theory. Not even a hypothesis, because at the present time it is regarded as impossible. You end up trying to obtain square roots of negative physical quantities etc., and it just doesn't seem to work.
 
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So there I was, playing the game, minding my own business in super cruise... I had a very long supercruise trip to a nearby star. The ETA display in this game doesn't really work so even tho I didn't know exactly how much time to the other star, I knew it was going to be a while.

Anyways, I decided to use the 'classified camera' and watch my ship warping around from the outside... when I was 'in front' of my ship looking back into the cockpit I realized my headlights were on.

Wait a minute... headlights?
My ship was traveling at roughy 50c and climbing at this point, how the heck is the light from my headlights accelerating faster than my ship to reach my 'classified camera'?

It was at this moment that my immersion was shattered. FD can't even get basic physics right. Please fix this so I can play the game.

Thanks.

How would your ship be visible to the camera at all? Not just the headlights :D
(see 2nd answer ... the bubble)
 

Panticus

Banned
How would your ship be visible to the camera at all? Not just the headlights :D
(see 2nd answer ... the bubble)

Although there is no FTL theory, your camera is in the same reference frame as the ship. I can't think of any sensible reason why you couldn't see it. Think about it.

Also consider that if your camera can't see the ship, then nothing can be seen on board the ship either, by anyone. That is illogical.

I'm pretty confident that relativistic principles would still apply - everything would appear normal within that reference frame - whatever its speed.

Relative to very distant parts of the universe - beyond the light horizon - we are moving at superluminal speeds right now, and everything seems normal to me. So I think that's your best answer.
 
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Time dilation is observed by someone not travelling at your speed. At close to the speed of light, if I observed you, for example, boiling an egg at that speed, to you it would take 3 minutes. To me it might take a thousand years. For this reason, in my books I prefer to call it time contraction - because mathematically that is what is happening.

There must be symmetry in this, so, somewhat bizarrely, you will also see time dilation in those you are moving with respect to.

Time dilation allows time travel - but only into the future.

EDIT: In 1916 I think, Einstein published the General Theory - he had realised that gravity must have an effect upon time also. So clocks in a gravity well (like Earth) run a little slower than those that are not. For GPS to work properly, there is a small time adjustment, because a clock in space will run a little faster than one on Earth.

EDIT 2: If you spoke to someone over radio, with them moving at a very high speed, there wouldn't just be a time delay - there would be some stretching of the signal. In audio terms, their voice would sound slowed down - I'd never thought about this!

EDIT 3: I have to admit that, at superluminal speeds, FTL, there is no theory. Not even a hypothesis, because at the present time it is regarded as impossible. You end up trying to obtain square roots of negative physical quantities etc., and it just doesn't seem to work.


Hold on a second, time dilation does not allow time travel, it's just special relativity, most well explained in Albert Einsteins famous twin paradox, where 1 twin stays on Earth, the other flies in a spaceship around the solar system at the speed of light and comes back to earth to find that the first twin aged approximatly by 50 years.

It's not time travel though, it's just difference in frames of reference, as "time" is a man made concept, and not a constant, but in fact relative.

This can be observed while messuring atomic clocks on earth and comparing them with the ones on sattelites orbiting earth.

On avarage orbital clocks develop a 7 microsecond difference per day.


So time is very much different everywhere accross the universe, and yes it's possible that 1 hour on earth is 50 years in a planet that's for example orbiting a black hole.
 
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The true scientific explanation for this is that since it's not possible to move faster than light it's pointless to ask this question. This phenomenon simply does not exist so it can't be determined or explained how it "should" happen.

The in-game explanation is that the Frame Shift Drive warps space around the ship so physically the ship is not moving through all the space. That's why you can't collide with another ship in supercruise, for example. And since you're not actually moving faster than light it's perfectly possible for the light to leave your headlights. And since the exterior camera's speed is the same as the ship it can observe the ship as it was standing still in 3D space.
 
So there I was, playing the game, minding my own business in super cruise... I had a very long supercruise trip to a nearby star. The ETA display in this game doesn't really work so even tho I didn't know exactly how much time to the other star, I knew it was going to be a while.

Anyways, I decided to use the 'classified camera' and watch my ship warping around from the outside... when I was 'in front' of my ship looking back into the cockpit I realized my headlights were on.


Wait a minute... headlights?
My ship was traveling at roughy 50c and climbing at this point, how the heck is the light from my headlights accelerating faster than my ship to reach my 'classified camera'?

It was at this moment that my immersion was shattered. FD can't even get basic physics right. Please fix this so I can play the game.

Thanks.

So, the initial "immersion breaker" is actually the part where you're going 50 times the speed of light...

But beyond that, did you stop to consider that at those speeds, the photos coming from the direction you're traveling in would blue-shift into the gamma radiation wavelengths? The fact that you're seeing any visible light at all is farcical if you want to talk about broken physics.

Furthermore, once you've exceeded the speed of light, anything behind you would simply be void. The light could not catch up to you and you'd see, literally, nothing.

So, to sum it up, the only light you'd be able to see as "normal" would be light coming in at or very near perpendicular to your direction of travel and that would appear really odd, kind of a line that circumscribes your direction of travel. You'd not see anything in front of you because you can't detect gamma rays with your eyes and you'd see nothing behind you because light can't catch you. If the visuals where "true" to physics in super-cruise you'd just be in a weird, dark bubble with a flickering thin line of indistinct light encircling you. You'd also be dead from radiation poisoning in about 30 seconds.

I'd recommend taking it as a "suspend belief" moment and just enjoy the game.
 

Panticus

Banned
Hold on a second, time dilation does not allow time travel, it's just special relativity, most well explained in Albert Einsteins famous twin paradox, where 1 twin stays on Earth, the other flies in a spaceship around the solar system at the speed of light and comes back to earth to find that the first twin aged approximatly by 50 years.

It's not time travel though, it's just difference in frames of reference, as "time" is a man made concept, and not a constant, but in fact relative.

This can be observed while messuring atomic clocks on earth and comparing them with the ones on sattelites orbiting earth.

On avarage orbital clocks develop a 7 microsecond difference per day.


So time is very much different everywhere accross the universe, and yes it's possible that 1 hour on earth is 50 years in a planet that's for example orbiting a black hole.

It is time travel into the future. If you travel at luminal speeds and return to Earth, you will arrive - relatively - in the future. There is no doubt or confusion about this, although it seems paradoxical. It means that, for example, you might physically age by a year during your high speed trip, but return in a thousand years. Science fact - not fiction.

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The true scientific explanation for this is that since it's not possible to move faster than light it's pointless to ask this question. This phenomenon simply does not exist so it can't be determined or explained how it "should" happen.

The in-game explanation is that the Frame Shift Drive warps space around the ship so physically the ship is not moving through all the space. That's why you can't collide with another ship in supercruise, for example. And since you're not actually moving faster than light it's perfectly possible for the light to leave your headlights. And since the exterior camera's speed is the same as the ship it can observe the ship as it was standing still in 3D space.

er, wasn't that my point? And tachyons?
 
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It is time travel into the future. If you travel at luminal speeds and return to Earth, you will arrive - relatively - in the future. There is no doubt or confusion about this, although it seems paradoxical. It means that, for example, you might physically age by a year during your high speed trip, but return in a thousand years. Science fact - not fiction.

That's incorrect, if you travel at luminal speeds and return to Earth, YOU will arive - relatively - in the future, YOU yes, based on YOUR POINT OF REFERENCE its the future, however to your twin that was left behind you simply went away and came back some decades later.

This is in no way shape or form time travel, as it is explainable by special relitivity combined with doppler effect.

Or in the words of Hermann Bondi. - "Time must never be thought of as pre-existing in any sense; it is a manufactured quantity."
 
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Panticus

Banned
That's incorrect, if you travel at luminal speeds and return to Earth, YOU will arive - relatively - in the future, YOU yes, based on YOUR POINT OF REFERENCE its the future, however to your twin that was left behind you simply went away and came back some decades later.

This is in now way shape or form time travel, as it is explainable by special relitivity combined with doppler effect

Ho ho! So you come back in a thousand years, your twin is long dead, but he has left a message for you saying - 'you're still not a time traveller brother.'

Get your degrees, then come back and argue with me.

p.s. There should be an autopilot.
 
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