Thargoids and Supercruise

[JesusRocks1988]

Thus far, we have encountered Thargoids pulling us out of hyperspace and milling around wreckages searching for things in normal space... But what about Supercruise? We haven't seen any Thargoids travelling at FTL speeds through normal space yet, so it begs the question... Do they have that capability? Do they even have that kind of tech or are they limited to hyperspace and normal space? Could this be one area where human technology surpasses that of the Thargoids?

From a metagame perspective, should they have that capability? Should we be seeing Thargoid ships around in Supercruise like ordinary NPCs? Should they be able to interdict us like any other NPC?

Personally, I think the answer to that is no; unless they were to move exactly the same way in Supercruise as they do in normal space - just use their crazy drives to get all up in our faces at 20c completely disregarding what we know of the physics of Elite's FTL travel (not seeing them as light points, but as ships that can scan and attack us and interact with us even at those speeds), the same way they disregard inertia in normal space. I just think they're too interesting to be relegated to normal NPC status.

I suppose the bigger question is... Will they? Is their appearance in Supercruise something that FD are building up to? If not, what other ways can we think of, aside from signal sources, to interact with them?

There's a lot of questions there, plenty of theory crafting potential, so... Discuss!

 

[Trafalgar Law]

They must have some way to interact with ships in supercruise or else how are they interdicting all those ships and destroying them. Besides having the ships in supercruise (especially if they have a different more sinister appearance to the human glowy comets) would go a long way towards increasing the feeling of danger and menace.

 

[CMDR Ofan]

They must have some way to interact with ships in supercruise or else how are they interdicting all those ships and destroying them. Besides having the ships in supercruise (especially if they have a different more sinister appearance to the human glowy comets) would go a long way towards increasing the feeling of danger and menace.

They seem to have complete mastery over hyperspace, they can drop out wherever they want and enter wherever they want. They were even rumoured to live there at one point. That's all they need to (hyper)interdict us they just drop out wherever we are.

No sign of them even caring about scruise in the slightest so far, of course who knows

 

[Friedenreich Xante]

They are bound to Hyperspace from USS to USS.

 

[Thatchinho]

Was going to post about it on the Canonn thread, but as you've already started this one...

It seems pretty likely that the Thargoids don't have SC capability. - why would they need it? If they've mastered hyperspace to the extent that they can just travel to wherever they want via HS then they wouldn't need to develop any other FTL.

We on the other hand can only HS to very large gravity wells. Consequently we've had to develop another means of FTL travel to reach other destinations.

 

[JesusRocks1988]

You all make very good points about the Thargoid mastery of hyperspace, such that they wouldn't need to Supercruise... I'm going to add this thread here because based on what I've read in here, I've had a bit of a revelation about their tech:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/379072-Is-it-intentional-that-the-Thargoid-ships-turn-as-if-they-had-no-mass-or-inertia

Thargoids have mastered hyperspace - they can drop out anywhere, meaning they don't need to use Supercruise to go any distance.
BUT if you pay attention to the way the Thargoids move in normal space, it becomes clear to me that they are, actually, always moving in Supercruise. At least, their inertia-less drive technology could possibly use the same basic principle that our FSDs use to move us about in Supercruise.

Humans can only use spacetime distorting drives to move forwards at speeds faster than 30km/s. We can turn, but the turn rate is slow. We can't reverse. We use it to shoot ourselves across vast distances at ludicrous speeds.

Now look at how the Thargoids move. Look at the visual distortion around their ships. Look how they gracefully go in any direction, turn instantly, accelerate quickly; how they waft themselves through space like a jellyfish. They have far superior manoeuvrability, as if they were moving in water with complete mastery of it.

They're using the same tech, except so much more advanced than us. They're distorting spacetime to move through normal space at non-relativistic speeds - they are constantly in a state of frame-shift. Even their tractor beams utilise the same principle - as one poster in the thread I linked mentioned - tugging on the fabric of spacetime to draw something towards themselves like pulling a tablecloth or carpet. They seem to actually be using spacetime as a medium to push themselves through, the same way we push ourselves through water, or air.

And they wouldn't need to use this tech to go into relativistic speeds, because for anything at those kinds of distances, they could just instantly pop in and out of hyperspace as they like.

Yeah, they're far more advanced than us. And the ludicrous thing is, even as the FSD is grounded in real science; so are they. This could actually be possible in the real world, if you give it enough time for us to discover how to distort spacetime, and then achieve mastery over the process.