My understanding of the FSD is not that it allows you to travel at superluminal speeds, but instead warps spacetime around you in order to get you from one location to another. If that's the case, then maybe it is realistic (but then again, I have no idea what warped spacetime should look like). However, I always thought that travelling in supercruise felt lackluster and boring considering that you're (or maybe not) travelling through space at several hundred times the speed of light. They ought to make it look more dramatic.
Is ED visual depiction of supercruise sense of speed realistic?
- Thread starter n4p0l3on
- Start date
Yea, one definitely would not use a manual joystick while flying at relativistic speeds xD
Even with sub-light engines I doubt there would be a lot of manual control (if we had a spaceship-based economy).
FD art department are on it:
Even when using an Alcubierre-style drive (that compresses space-time ahead of you and expands it behind), you would still interact with regular space-time (it would not bring you to some kind of special dimension). So, photons would still hit you, just with very out-of-the-ordinary relative speeds / angles.
And I agree, FSD feels too much like flying sub-light, except you get those guide bars on the sides of your HUD.
Nice little guide to the FSD here. Should really be a sticky.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/106861-DCello-s-Science-Guide-to-the-Galaxy
Rep for dealing with the OP in the spirit with which it was presented. And also for reminding me of DCello's excellent thread
Last edited:
Man oh man, that's interesting stuff!
Keep in mind that only applies to Supercruise. Witchspace works.... in inexplicable ways
Well, I'm not wanting an argument but I'd like to try explaining something about modern physics.
To ask whether it's possible to travel faster-than-light is a mistake. The question implicitly assumes that speed can be defined as distance travelled / time elapsed, but that's a definition from Newtonian physics which isn't valid at high speeds. In modern physics the formula is more complicated and it would be better to ask "Do speeds faster than light exist?" Since space and time won't behave in the ways suggested, the answer is that there is no valid calculation involving a distance and a time interval which can give a result bigger than the speed of light.
Asking whether something is possible is loaded; in recent decades we've become used to amazing things becoming possible. Asking whether a valid calculation exists gives a better picture of the real issue in physics.
That's the best I can do without bringing maths in.
As for the Alcubierre drive, it may be that this sidesteps the issue and lets you arrive somewhere without apparently having to take a direct route, but it only just functions as a piece of game lore. When you decide to compress the space of half a solar system to traverse it quickly, what happens to all the inhabitants of planets in that half? And what happens to another ship travelling at right-angles to yours? It's a neat piece of handwavium, but there's no way to get a rigorous theory out of it which will have the effects we want.
To ask whether it's possible to travel faster-than-light is a mistake. The question implicitly assumes that speed can be defined as distance travelled / time elapsed, but that's a definition from Newtonian physics which isn't valid at high speeds. In modern physics the formula is more complicated and it would be better to ask "Do speeds faster than light exist?" Since space and time won't behave in the ways suggested, the answer is that there is no valid calculation involving a distance and a time interval which can give a result bigger than the speed of light.
Asking whether something is possible is loaded; in recent decades we've become used to amazing things becoming possible. Asking whether a valid calculation exists gives a better picture of the real issue in physics.
That's the best I can do without bringing maths in.
As for the Alcubierre drive, it may be that this sidesteps the issue and lets you arrive somewhere without apparently having to take a direct route, but it only just functions as a piece of game lore. When you decide to compress the space of half a solar system to traverse it quickly, what happens to all the inhabitants of planets in that half? And what happens to another ship travelling at right-angles to yours? It's a neat piece of handwavium, but there's no way to get a rigorous theory out of it which will have the effects we want.
Last edited:
We mock the scientific certainties of the past because we know how wide of the mark they were as we have access to better technology and more accumulated research. Some of our views will be treated with the same disdain in the future, some will stand the test of time. We just don't know yet which ones.
We are all the product of our times, had Einstein been born a few hundred years earlier or later his achievements would have been very very different.
The energy required to create a "negative energy density space" is theoretically enormous. As such the size of the field would have to kept as small as possible without risking annihilation of the ship by the tidal forces present at the edge. In fact, in order for the theory to be even remotely feasible an absolutely minimal (close to the Planck length) amount of space is actually compressed/expanded. It is fair to note that this form of travel is potentially destructive though as at any point the drive drops below a relative superluminal velocity there could theoretically be a hugely destructive pressure wave created at the edges of the "warp-field" caused by the release of particles gathered by the field in transit.
Last edited:
Sounds like time dilation to me. Of course, there's also the observable length contraction... here's a few good links:
https://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/specrel/lc.cfm
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/tdil.html
But this still doesn't really tell us what it would look like, how we would perceive it visually. Assuming we actually could perceive it at all, since we'd be outrunning the photons that enable us to actually see at all. I suspect the visuals would be more like a red-shift to white-out to fade-to-black until we slowed down enough for photons to strike our optic nerves again and register in our brains as visual stimulus. There may even be some odd after-image effects for photons that struck our optic nerves and triggering impulses to our brains, but impacted with superluminal+ velocities, creating a delayed reaction - kind of like what happens when the photo-flash makes you "see spots".
While I agree with all you say, you've illustrated the problem I was getting at. "We'd be outrunning the photons" - this is a contradiction because whatever you're doing, photons always move relative to you at a fixed speed. That's not just Relativity, all of electromagnetism would have to go wrong to change this. That's what I mean by saying "There are no speeds faster than light". Whatever you do, light is faster. Any time you think you might catch up with it, space and time will make sure you don't.
Teleportation is probably more likely to happen than FTL.
Anyway, I believe our understanding of space and time is seriously wrong. We are pretty good at explaining our observations though. However, we don't know what we don't or can't observe. Sorry if that gets too philosophical for a semi scientific discussion.