I'm not convinced the sub-light speeds are accurate

DanGriswold

DanGriswold
This has probably been mentioned before, but the speeds that ships travel while not in supercruise (using normal thrusters) appears far slower than indicated. For example, my Alliance Challenger (beauty that she is) maxes out at 290 meters per second. That equates to approximately 1044 kilometers per hour. That's about 200 km/h slower than the speed of sound. However, as I try and get my pulse rate up and fly at max speed only 50-75 meters off of a planet terrain, it looks as though I am going far slower.

I understand that visual relativity plays a role here in that we have no real visual indicators of relative size to compare with real world items. So, the boulder that I am flying past slowly (in my opinion) may be far larger than I presume it to be since there are no trees and cars and trashcans around it to give me a sense of size. Same goes for distances from the terrain. I say above that I am travelling 50-70 meters above the terrain, but since I am not often enough travelling that far above the ground in real life, I do not know how that is actually supposed to look. Therefore, although it may feel slow to me, it is actually the correct speed.

I'm not sure what the solution is -- if there even is one -- but I feel as though a greater sense of speed would go a long way to making the game a little more exciting. Other games seem to be able to achieve this, but I'm not sure how. Perhaps this has been noted and will change in the Odyssey update (holy cow, I don't often write the word "odyssey" so I got it wrong several times and it still looks wrong now that I got it right). Or perhaps the improved terrain visuals will fix the issue.

Any thoughts? Have any other Commanders felt this? Has anyone tried to measure the accuracy of the speeds?

Cheers.
 

RamirezKurita

R
I think a lot of it comes down to the relative altitude compared to the speed as you have pointed out. We generally judge speeds by looking at the angular velocity of the ground moving beneath us as humans, so flying at double the altitude will halve our perceived speed. It's why riding around in a go-kart feels so very fast even if you aren't actually going all that fast - you are so close to the ground. Flying at 50m altitude at 1000 km/h will feel quite similar to flying at 100 km/h at 5m altitude, or 10 km/h half a metre above the ground.

Things like more ground scatter and varied terrain would help, but the other solution is to simply fly closer to the ground. Maybe we need a "hover" setting for our flight assists that deliberately tries to keep our ship a few metres off the ground?

Maggie_Oz said:
Mass, not weight.
Loaded 747 is around 400tonnes weight, divide by 10-ish to get the mass
Click to expand...

That's not really how it works, weight isn't measured in tonnes. Tonnes, by definition, are a megagram - a million grams or 1000 kg, they measure mass. Weight is measured in Newtons, as it is a measurement of the force due to gravity. The issue arises from non-technical people using the term "weight" when they are referring to "mass" or using the terms interchangeably, but it's easy enough to figure out which one they actually mean by the units they use. Even in engineering, there's no such thing as tonne-weight, if someone wanted a larger weight than the basic newton then they would just use kilonewtons or meganewtons instead.
 

thistle

T
shreddog said:
The Elite planet surfaces could do with some more detail. I think that would increase the feeling of movement more.
Click to expand...
yes, it's just fine detail level, the in ship perspective means all ED textures and detail are actually quite large. In VR on a hanger floor, the textures are very large, designed to be seen from the ship, and in VR from outside an SRV the small rocks are massive boulders compared to the commander lol. But most of the landscape is smooth.
 

[PS4] Filthymick420

[PS4] Filthymick420
What is the difference between tons and tonnes? Where im from a ton is a unit of weight. 2000lbs to be exact at least that's what they teach in schools.

To OP, i have felt this too. Id suggest sitting on a surface in your srv and having a friend fly around close to you on the surface. To you they will appear to be moving quite fast
 

RamirezKurita

R
Filthymick420 said:
What is the difference between tons and tonnes? Where im from a ton is a unit of weight. 2000lbs to be exact at least that's what they teach in schools.
Click to expand...

Tons (both long tons at 2240 lbs and short tons at 2000 lbs) are Imperial units of mass, Tonnes are a metric unit of mass that is equal to 1000 kg (or 1 Mg, equal to about 2204.6 lbs). It's quite convenient that 1000kg is basically around the same as an Imperial ton, as I'd imagine that helped a lot of people make the transition between the two systems.

Mass is a measure of how much physical material there is, which is measured in kg (or sometimes tonnes) for metric systems or tons/lbs/oz etc for Imperial.

Weight is the force due to gravity. In engineering and sciences it is measured in Newtons, which can be obtained by multiplying the mass in kilograms by the local gravitational field (approximately 9.81 N/kg on Earth's surface). Weight has sometimes been defined by lbf "pounds-force" in Imperial systems, which is the force applied due to gravity on a pound of mass, but you don't often hear it used any more as even in America most engineers and physicists use the metric units for technical work.

Weight depends on local gravity, but mass does not. Which is why out in space things are weightless (no gravity, so mass is multiplied by zero), but they still have mass and the associated momentum/energy/inertia etc. Someone walking on the moon would have the same mass, but much lower weight. Similarly, someone on a super high-g world would have much higher weight, but their mass would remain the same. Technically, the mass would change very slightly in gravity wells due to relativistic mechanics (the stuff that Einstein got into with e=mc^2), but the difference it makes is pretty negligible and only matters if you are measuring things to an extraordinary degree as part of particle physics research and the like.

The confusion arises from common parlance and how weight and mass are basically used interchangeably when in fact they mean different things, an error that is also taught in schools unfortunately. To make things more confusing, your bathroom scales in fact sense your weight (the force you apply to the top of them as gravity pulls you down), which it then converts into mass for the readout by assuming Earth's gravity. The difference only really gets taught in late high school and college level physics and engineering.
 

Maggie_Oz

Maggie_Oz
RamirezKurita said:
That's not really how it works, weight isn't measured in tonnes. Tonnes, by definition, are a megagram - a million grams or 1000 kg, they measure mass. Weight is measured in Newtons, as it is a measurement of the force due to gravity.
Click to expand...

There's not a single person on the face of the earth who refers to weight in Newtons outside of a laboratory.
A 747 weighs 400 tonnes when loaded, this is correct. The fact that technically it is 4000 kN is irrelevant.
Yes, using SI units would lead to different nomenclature but the final result is the same

Mass = Earth Weight / 10-ish

The point though is that our ships are supermassive compared to earthbound aircraft that we often compare them to which may account for the seemingly lethargic way they fly.
 
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Maggie_Oz

Maggie_Oz
Morbad said:
Mass and weight at standard gravity (1g) are essentially identical.

A 747 that weighs 400 tons sitting on the tarmac also has a mass of 400 tons.
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No the mass is how much stuff it contains, weight is how much force that stuff pushes against the earth with.

F = ma
400 = m x 9.8
m = 400 / 9.8
m = 40 .... ish

Mass doesn't change in different gravities but weight does.
 

RamirezKurita

R
Maggie_Oz said:
No the mass is how much stuff it contains, weight is how much force that stuff pushes against the earth with.

F = ma
400 = m x 9.8
m = 400 / 9.8
m = 40 .... ish

Mass doesn't change in different gravities but weight does.
Click to expand...

That's the formula is indeed used to convert mass into force, but tonnes are a measurement of mass; that formula is used to convert Newtons back into kilograms. Plane has 400 tonnes of mass, which is 400,000 kilograms. The 400 tonnes is already referring to mass, not weight.

This goes back to the common confusion between mass and weight in common parlance, as the "maximum takeoff weight" of the aircraft is actually referring to its mass under normal Earth gravity and atmospheric pressure, not it's weight. Plane has a maximum takeoff mass of 400 tonnes, which means a maximum takeoff weight of about 3.9 MN.

The issue is that most of the time people are actually referring to mass when they use the term "weight". You ask pretty much anyone how much something weighs, and they'll tell you what its mass is rather than what it weighs because the two are conflated to the point where 95% of the population doesn't even know the difference and the remaining 5% conflate the two unless they are in the middle of doing related calculations. It also doesn't help that the most common method of obtaining something's mass is to measure its weight then convert that value into mass by assuming Earth's gravity rather than measuring it directly.
 
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