I'm trying to piece together a timeline of the maximum distance ships traveled in the elite dangerous universe in the in game year 3000. i know for a fact that they made 140ly from sol at the very least. i'm including the generation ships in this. any help would be greatly appreciated. O7
maximum distance from sol in the year 3000
- Thread starter Cmdr Crux
- Start date
Caveat: I'm using the lore and/or in-game reality from the earlier FE2/FFE games. This "old lore" has been retconned in the past so may no longer be accurate in ED.
Prior to the invention of the FSD, ships traveled via "hyperspace". Hyperspace was not near-instantaneous, like the FSD is. Ships with a longer jump range could travel faster than ships with a shorter jump range, but the maximum-range jump for any ship took exactly 1 week.
Hyperdrives were also notorious for spontaneously breaking down and disintegrating, stranding one's ship in the middle of nowhere. In the days prior to FTL communication, that was a death sentence. A hyperdrive that went without a full mechanical service at a starport shipyard every year was highly prone to breaking down.
The Bubble was smaller back then, too; I don't think there were any starports with shipyards more than 150 LYs from Sol.
The upshot of all this is that there was a de-facto limit to how far exploration ships could travel. It took about six months for an experienced explorer to fly from an edge-of-the-Bubble starport out to the Unexplored systems at the edge of "the frontier", about 1000 LYs from Sol, and another six months to fly back to inhabited space, giving you virtually no "free time" at the frontier to do any actual exploring. Granted, a dedicated long-range explorer might have some means of repairing and maintaining their own FSD remotely and so be able to explore further, but such things were unavailable to players in-game. So in 3200-3250, the bubble of "explored space" was 1000 LY radius.
Prior to the invention of the FSD, ships traveled via "hyperspace". Hyperspace was not near-instantaneous, like the FSD is. Ships with a longer jump range could travel faster than ships with a shorter jump range, but the maximum-range jump for any ship took exactly 1 week.
Hyperdrives were also notorious for spontaneously breaking down and disintegrating, stranding one's ship in the middle of nowhere. In the days prior to FTL communication, that was a death sentence. A hyperdrive that went without a full mechanical service at a starport shipyard every year was highly prone to breaking down.
The Bubble was smaller back then, too; I don't think there were any starports with shipyards more than 150 LYs from Sol.
The upshot of all this is that there was a de-facto limit to how far exploration ships could travel. It took about six months for an experienced explorer to fly from an edge-of-the-Bubble starport out to the Unexplored systems at the edge of "the frontier", about 1000 LYs from Sol, and another six months to fly back to inhabited space, giving you virtually no "free time" at the frontier to do any actual exploring. Granted, a dedicated long-range explorer might have some means of repairing and maintaining their own FSD remotely and so be able to explore further, but such things were unavailable to players in-game. So in 3200-3250, the bubble of "explored space" was 1000 LY radius.
