If everything inside Elite is too scale, does that mean ships are really moving FTL?

[Zenicetus]

Is that what is happening though? If I am moving at 30km/s in supercruise and another player is moving at 100c are we in different sized playing areas whilst simultaneously in the same playing area?

The speeds shown in your ship like 100C are the speed you would be traveling, if you were actually traveling faster than light (C).

But you're not actually doing that. You're not "traveling" from Point A in space to Point B in space. Instead, your Frame Shift Drive is folding space around you, so you drop out at the same point as if you were traveling FTL, but it's done through a trick of space-folding. The speed readout is just a convenient reference for how much space is being folded at a given FSD throttle setting.

Or something like that. I'm not up on the exact lore here, but I think that's the rough idea.

I assume that's why it's called the "Frame Shift Drive": because it changes your relativistic reference frame.

Right, and that also explains why you never actually have to move into an orbital trajectory when approaching a station orbiting a planet. With the FSD you don't worry about that, you just pop into the station's local rest frame.

 

[DhuAlan]

Thanks to the discovery of handwaveium, the energy produce with hydrogen allows for a bibble to be formed in a pocket dimension just touching normal space time, this bubble is shaped such that what we consider normal space time flows around it, plunging the contained entity in the desired direction that to an outside perspective would seem to be FTL.

 

[Mikeck]

The ships arent moving FTL. The space around the craft is folding.

This

Physics prevent you from moving across through space faster than light...but space can be warped so that you actually "fold" it and bring it closer to you. So YOU aren't moving through space very fast, space is being warped to bring the destination closer to you

 

[Vim]

Inside the game - our virtual ships are moving faster than the speed of light - right in the here and now today! So as our in-game galaxy is to scale - have our virtual game ships literally broken the light barrier?! If so - how have Frontier achieved this?!

Oh, I see! It must be some kind of trick! Electrons flicking across your computer's memory addresses as if they were laser photons flicking across the surface of the moon? (http://www.universetoday.com/109147...ove-faster-than-light-and-why-it-really-isnt/)

Or possibly Frontier is engaged in a vast conspiracy with alien lifeforms to dominate the earth and has gained access to advanced technology for that purpose? You know that theory has never really been disproven... Be careful where you park your sidewinder...

 

[Memnoch]

Presumably then the trick is, as you are folding and expanding space, you don't start doing this to the ship itself and its crew. How do you perform this feat at a distance and protect the vehicle?

 

[Dr Zachary Smith]

Thanks to the discovery of handwaveium, the energy produce with hydrogen allows for a bibble to be formed in a pocket dimension just touching normal space time, this bubble is shaped such that what we consider normal space time flows around it, plunging the contained entity in the desired direction that to an outside perspective would seem to be FTL.

That's the official Coast to Coast AM explanation

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Presumably then the trick is, as you are folding and expanding space, you don't start doing this to the ship itself and its crew. How do you perform this feat at a distance and protect the vehicle?

With an equally proportionate negative field of course Or perhaps wait for it to stabilise then travel through like a tunnel

 

[Ortikon]

I believe they use a combination of translation and scaling to change the perceived distance of an object. So as you approach a planet it will change size as well as approach you. This is much easier to deal with for render distance. I believe Star Citizen was explaining that is how they intend to do it as well. You are approaching much slower than it seems; It is a good and efficient trick. CG is the art of cheating. A lot of people call these things "fake" or "lies' and want some sort of purity in their content but one of the most important things we learn is how to cheat an effect and how to let go of elitist realism mentalities.
-
I remember people (including myself for a time) wanting to render everything in one pass for their showcase character model rather than using passes, comp and 2d glow effects to get the final look. Fine tuning it all to work like real life is almost less likely to look like real life unless you are literally simulating the real world. For art, its all well done smoke and mirrors, and I applaud it.

edit: wait we are talking about traveling in game right? not about the science fiction of it?
-
-
ALSO! Any Eve players that still have an active account? Try this:
Know that weird mouse combo that changes the FOV? (I cant remember it)
-Go to a gas giant
-Scroll your camera out so far that you can barely see your ship.
-now use the FOV trick to make your ship fill the screen again.
-This will make the planet look MASSIVE and your ship properly proportionate, the added "handy-cam" shake that is amplified by such a zoom makes it look like you are trying very hard to pin-point this little ship above a massive celestial object.

 

[Iskariot]

So if everything in the game is modelled to scale...and ships are travelling faster than light...does that mean the information inside the game which represents our ships, is actually breaking current laws of physics and moving beyond the light barrier?

Yes, and FD is planning to sell this technology to NASA shortly. Will make them a few Billion I suppose.

 

[Memnoch]

With an equally proportionate negative field of course

Of course! Reverse the polarity of the Neutron flow. Why didn't I think of it before?!

Yes, and FD is planning to sell this technology to NASA shortly. Will make them a few Billion I suppose.

Thereby taking one small step towards the funding Chris Roberts is enjoying!

 

[MacArthur]

Hmm, I take your point, it's obviously utter testicles . . . and yet . . . I can't quite put my finger on why

 

[bitstorm]

Of course! Reverse the polarity of the Neutron flow. Why didn't I think of it before?!

Voyager, every bloomin' week, that used to really annoy the hell out of me. It's not as though neutrons even have a charge anyway.

....Ugh but actually just Googled it, apparently it originated with the third Dr Who, John Pertwee?

 

[Memnoch]

That's the man, the Dandy Doctor! +rep for the research!

 

[Pentallion]

Warp, hyperspace, whatever you want to call it, NASA is working on it now. You don't move FTL, you bend space.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/12/tech/innovation/warp-speed-spaceship/

http://news.discovery.com/space/pri...pace-engine-may-actually-work-nasa-140802.htm

 

[GHDW]

Miguel Alcubierre came up with a nice work-around to bending space that required less energy than originally computed, but we still haven't been able to create negative energy fields beyond two barely separated pieces of metal. Some theorize that an exotic material is needed that will help sustain a negative energy field, if so I hope they call it Negatronium, or Negatron.

 

[Obsidian Ant]

I believe they use a combination of translation and scaling to change the perceived distance of an object. So as you approach a planet it will change size as well as approach you. This is much easier to deal with for render distance. I believe Star Citizen was explaining that is how they intend to do it as well. You are approaching much slower than it seems; It is a good and efficient trick. CG is the art of cheating. A lot of people call these things "fake" or "lies' and want some sort of purity in their content but one of the most important things we learn is how to cheat an effect and how to let go of elitist realism mentalities.
-
I remember people (including myself for a time) wanting to render everything in one pass for their showcase character model rather than using passes, comp and 2d glow effects to get the final look. Fine tuning it all to work like real life is almost less likely to look like real life unless you are literally simulating the real world. For art, its all well done smoke and mirrors, and I applaud it.

edit: wait we are talking about traveling in game right? not about the science fiction of it?

Thanks for the explaination that helps clears things up a bit.

And yes, I was talking about how this is actualy achieved in the game - I wasn't talking about the lore or science of it. More interested in how it is achieved in the code. Though a number of people seem to have assumed I was talking about the lore so the thread is all over the place...

 

[Tar Stone]

If they're using scaling to create the illusion of FTL travel in supercruise, does that mean that when planetary landings are in you'll be flying down into a true 1:1 scale planet? The first time someone does that in an occulus rift they will probably need medicated.

 

[bitstorm]

That's the man, the Dandy Doctor! +rep for the research!

Heh!

[video=youtube;QDaCMhKPGys]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDaCMhKPGys[/video]

 

[Swan]

Direct faster than light travel would violate relativity but that doesn't mean it can't be done. Space itself can be bent, compressed and expanded. As such, you could theoretically travel faster than light without even moving as far as relativity is concerned. Sort of a strange concept and hard to explain I suppose. The best one I've seen is with a sheet of paper. The shortest distance between two points on it is not a straight line on the surface of the paper but instead folding the paper onto itself so the two points are on top of each other. This does not violate any known laws of physics and some experimental evidence of precisely this type of event has been found in labs around the world.

That's not quite true. Accelerating to, achieving and then exceeding the speed of light creates causality violations, but it's impossible as nothing can travel ~at~ the speed of light. If it were possible, you could double back on yourself and an observer could welcome you upon your return while still observing you accelerating away, then travelling via FTL to intercept the accelerating you that they can still observe.

You can go faster than light, but only in the context of covering the distance in a different physical frame of reference. So whether that's via warping spacetime, using a wormhole, temporarily moving into another dimension or any other theoretical means, you would still be going faster than light in the frame of reference of the observer as, if say you jumped 1 light year away and then back again, the observer would still see the event one year later, as it's fixed. There would be no interval event for them to interfere with, so no causality violation, while still experiencing faster than light travel.

I suppose it depends on the context in which you take faster than light. In terms of Newtonian mechanics, it's impossible. But if you consider instantaneous FTL and apply the principles of Lorentz transformations, there's no causality violations. Oddly enough, Einstein used Lorentz's work to come up with special relatively - an interesting factoid

 

[Shear]

The ships do in fact move faster than light, that's one thing they had to sacrifice when making ED so the game is fun to play, distances are immense so they had to do something.

 

[kiario]

We are not moving in the game. Itd just an illusion. Same as saying with a mouse click you can be anywhere in the galaxy map