Interstellar travel on supercrusie

[Tinman]

Does the frame shift drive consume fuel when not accelerating?

I guess so since it works by bending space time around your ship. "Acceleration" is probably not quite the right word to use when it comes to this form of propulsion. As long as the "space bubble" is active a constant source of energy is required to maintain it. If the energy supply (fuel) runs out you'll drop back into normal space.

So no...you won't be able to accelerate up to a certain speed and then coast over to the next system that way. Sorry.

 

[Mephane]

In-system travel DDF proposal will cover it for ya.

Both mini-jumps and supercruise will consume fuel. You will have to decide which one to do use, because jumps will use it less.

You are right. I somehow completely missed the bit where it says that the frame shift drive also consumes fuel.

Ouch. For someone with the (slightly OCD-y) psychological setup like me, this means a lot of waiting and dullness. The reason is, if I have to choose between burning money or just going all the way with regular thrusters, yeah guess who is tabbing out to browse the net while the ship makes the trip to the next space station at a snail's pace (as a side-effect, that means I will probably always run the game in borderless window mode, please tell me this will be possible).

Of course I know about the concept of opportunity cost, but if I'd ever start regularly comparing "time spent saving money" with "money earned saving time" I'd probably go genuinely mad.

And thus, #1 on my shopping list for spaceship equipment is the fuel scoop. And any ship that cannot use a one (though I still hope all will be able to) will effectively be non-existent as a playable ship for me. Le sigh.

Anyway, rant is over, thanks for the heads up, people. Fingers crossed that the "long range version of the Cobra MK III", which I can choose to start with, already comes with a scoop.

 

[Ian Phillips]

"Assuming" you don't run out of fuel, something like the Prism system from Drew's book would be a good place to try this. 4 stars in very close proximity.

The question then would be if the game treats the 4 stars as one system, where supercruise can be used normally, or whether it sees each star as a separate destination.

 

[Im_Lost]

I don't think systems are actually linked in "real time" this way. It's possible to do but I remember some comment about it not being possible for a multiplayer enviroment.

 

[Tinman]

I don't think systems are actually linked in "real time" this way. It's possible to do but I remember some comment about it not being possible for a multiplayer enviroment.

It seems to me that they are indeed linked:

There is nothing technical preventing you from travelling out of a system and to another providing you have all the time in the world to do so. However we're not explicitly doing anything to enable this feature either so there could be some weird rendering issues or possible crashes though it wouldn't actually be that difficult to ensure such a feature works correctly...<snip>...At the end of the day to enable travel even from the earth to the moon in real time pretty much ensures the tech is there to handle larger distances because it's pretty similar issue, just larger scale.

 

[Riedquat]

I would like there to be an incentive to trying this though, even if you cant get that far on the map, it would still be nice if you could switch on the drive, head into the black and have a chance of coming across something.

Whether it's npc pirates, a trader, or ship carcasses etc

I also like the idea of using the scanner to find lost cargo in space too, but not the way X-Rebirth did it, it was awful.

 

[Dejay]

The journey would last so long that you'd could either:
a) get patches to fix any rendering issues on the way
b) get overtaken by some kiddie in a new, much faster ship

 

[SpinBlade]

I would like there to be an incentive to trying this though, even if you cant get that far on the map, it would still be nice if you could switch on the drive, head into the black and have a chance of coming across something.

Whether it's npc pirates, a trader, or ship carcasses etc

I also like the idea of using the scanner to find lost cargo in space too, but not the way X-Rebirth did it, it was awful.

Yeah, all of this.

And also, I'm a bit confused by Mike Evans's quoted post up there.

So, if you just head out into the nothingness, there's no chance you'll bump into anything, and if you were to keep going, you'll crack the game? That's a bit off, isn't it?

I mean, I suppose regarding the first bit, one would expect most everything to happen in and around a system with the odds of bumping into something interesting out in the inkiness fairly small... but still, there should be a slightly non-zero chance of something happening in the middle of nowhere. Or let me put it this way, you could play the game for 1,600 hours and nothing happens out there when you go offroad, but just knowing that there's a non-zero chance something could happen, feels right. Knowing that a chance NPC or the like encounter in the boondocks is simply not programmed in and will never happen, and everything happens around systems simply per programming, and that's that, feels a bit off. Don't know if I'm missing something there.

And regarding that second bit, to me, just heading into nowhere shouldn't crack the game, and, as Mike says, that feature should work correctly if it's not too difficult to implement. If one decides to just fly pell-mell into the void, you shouldn't suddenly bump into a line of code .

 

[FoxTwo]

Regarding the huge scale of distances involved, I once did a calculation using Star Trek's warp scale as an example (TNG Era).

For example, to get to Orion, which is 1,300 light years away, travelling at Star Trek's Warp 9 requires you to be at warp for about 1 full year real-time to arrive (roughly 1,000 LY per year of travel at Warp 9). Voyager stated they need 75 years to "get home" and they were thrown 75,000 light years away into the Delta Quadrant.

So if you pointed your ship out into nothing and just headed out thataway, just remember the figures involved, using Star Trek tech If Supercruise is less than 1c, it would be considerably slower than Warp 9 of course About 6,500 times slower.

Just thought it might be interesting to some people

 

[Tinman]

Yeah, all of this.

And also, I'm a bit confused by Mike Evans's quoted post up there.

So, if you just head out into the nothingness, there's no chance you'll bump into anything, and if you were to keep going, you'll crack the game? That's a bit off, isn't it?

I mean, I suppose regarding the first bit, one would expect most everything to happen in and around a system with the odds of bumping into something interesting out in the inkiness fairly small... but still, there should be a slightly non-zero chance of something happening in the middle of nowhere. Or let me put it this way, you could play the game for 1,600 hours and nothing happens out there when you go offroad, but just knowing that there's a non-zero chance something could happen, feels right. Knowing that a chance NPC or the like encounter in the boondocks is simply not programmed in and will never happen, and everything happens around systems simply per programming, and that's that, feels a bit off. Don't know if I'm missing something there.

And regarding that second bit, to me, just heading into nowhere shouldn't crack the game, and, as Mike says, that feature should work correctly if it's not too difficult to implement. If one decides to just fly pell-mell into the void, you shouldn't suddenly bump into a line of code .

I can't seem to find the quote now, but I remember one of the devs mentioning how going out into "nothingness" should always present the possibility of finding something wothwhile. Basically, the further out you go the less likely it is you'll find something, but IF you do I might be more rare compared to what you could find in more explored space. As I remember it this was in respect to "local space" and not the galaxy map on a whole (where this also will happen of course).

I don't think we'll "bump into a line of code" if we tried what you are proposing. What most likely would happen is that the ship would eventually run out of fuel or break down due to lack of maintenance. Due to the mind numbingly huge distances we are talking about your ship wouldn't even come close to reaching the "barriers" of the game. If players found ways to reach these barriers THEN maybe FD would "patch them up", but it's not very effective development if you are putting effort into parts of a game that players never will see anyway.

 

[dannysquid]

I can't seem to find the quote now, but I remember one of the devs mentioning how going out into "nothingness" should always present the possibility of finding something wothwhile. Basically, the further out you go the less likely it is you'll find something, but IF you do I might be more rare compared to what you could find in more explored space.

Although realistically, given the distances involved there is probably some weird statistical thing where you can prove it is impossible to meet anything or anybody in the depths of space no matter how populated it is.

 

[SpinBlade]

I can't seem to find the quote now, but I remember one of the devs mentioning how going out into "nothingness" should always present the possibility of finding something wothwhile. Basically, the further out you go the less likely it is you'll find something, but IF you do I might be more rare compared to what you could find in more explored space. As I remember it this was in respect to "local space" and not the galaxy map on a whole (where this also will happen of course).

I don't think we'll "bump into a line of code" if we tried what you are proposing. What most likely would happen is that the ship would eventually run out of fuel or break down due to lack of maintenance. Due to the mind numbingly huge distances we are talking about your ship wouldn't even come close to reaching the "barriers" of the game. If players found ways to reach these barriers THEN maybe FD would "patch them up", but it's not very effective development if you are putting effort into parts of a game that players never will see anyway.

Hey, Tinman. Thanks for the thoughts.