Newcomer / Intro The passage of time in Elite

[Galactic Fork]

I've only been playing for a few weeks and I'm really liking the game a lot. One thing has been bugging me though and it really messes with my immersion. Is the game supposed to be real time? I mean all the dates are today but in 3302, but that kinda makes no sense if we're supposed to be playing in real time. Elite 2 had the stardreamer which let the player get the sense time was passing, while not making the game horribly boring. Without that, none of this makes sense.

Why is the bulk of inhabited space only a 300 to 400 light year bubble if we can travel in a few minutes. I can make the trip faster than it takes me to get to work. And why is going to the core or the opposite rim of the galaxy impressive if it can be done in a couple days? Truckers do that all the time. And why wouldn't humans have expanded everywhere if a cross galaxy trip is so short. Look at how we expanded throughout our planet when it would take months and months to get anywhere.

So yeah, sorry for the rant. I know it's a game. And I wish official time in the game was a bit fuzzier to give the sense that a realistic amount of time is passing in game time, while still being fast and fun. Frontier and First Encounters did this nicely.

Thanks!

 

[Yaffle]

Welcome there!

It's in real-time from the point of view of there is no time compression. That wouldn't work in a game where there are other players such as this.

 

[Galactic Fork]

I don't mean official time compression. I just mean that overall official time is faster, like a month game time is a year, or a day is a month. I totally understand the stardreamer wouldn't work. I was just using that as an example of how the older games got around it. As it is, everything just seems so close together. But that answered my question. Thanks.

 

[Luke3107]

As Yaffle said, time compression isn't an option in an always online game where you can meet up with other players.

Travelling from one end of the bubble to the other in a short period of time doesn't mean it would be easy to populate further. Just think how much work the ISS has taken to get to where it is today, and thats a cooperative effort between two of the worlds superpowers (Russia and USA). The galaxy in ED has 3 superpowers and 10 major powers which are ALL in conflict with one another. Which would certainly serve to slow the speed of progress.
Furthermore, you are travelling in a small ship with a drive that enables Faster-Than-Light travel. A capability stations lack (with the exclusion of Jacques Orbital which has sadly gone missing).
That said, there are a few stations that are a bit outside the bubble. Look up Sothis, CEOS, Robigo and 17 Draconis. They are all about 150+ Ly outside.

As for travelling from the bubble to the core or even the opposite end, these aren't just a couple of days journey. Total playtime maybe, but in real life a journey to Beagle Point (65K Ly away) will set you back at least a week in real time. Perhaps more. I recently did a Buckyball trip to Sagittarius A* where literally all I did was plot route, jump, scoop, jump, scoop and it still took me just shy of 14 hours to complete. Bring up the galaxy map at the next opportunity you can and look it up. Take note of just how densely packed the stars are too as this is the biggest problem when travelling through the core. The sheer volume of options for the route plotter to choose from often means plotting a route more than 2 jumps becomes impossible.
To experience this for yourself, I recommend travelling to Barnards Loop. Which is roughly 1000Ly from Sol. (Search "Beregovoy"). Once there, plot a route from one end of the cluster to the other, say to "Archer's Wish". Having never tried this myself, I'm not 100% it will work as a comparison to Galactic Core plotting, however you should find it very difficult to get your jumps plotted.
Failing that (and I admit this is going to sound pretentious no matter how I put it), if you feel it's so easy, fit your ship with a fuel scoop, scanner and a good FSD, and off you pop to Sag A*. I'm not saying it's HUGELY difficult, but the issues of route plotting have caused many CMDRs to give up.

 

[Galactic Fork]

I'm not talking about sending stations out into new systems. I'm talking building new stations. The reason the ISS is so difficult is fuel\materials. It takes a lot to get any significant amount of weight to escape velocity. That's also the reason we haven't already put bases on the moon and mars. If we had a way to get to Mars and back in just a few hours, we'd already have a dozen Starbucks up there. That's hardly an issue in this situation. With the speed ships fly in, there is no significant difference between a station being built 150 light years from earth and one being built 5000 light years from earth. Or 10,000. It's the difference in maybe shipping time of the materials of a few hours. Fuel can be picked up on the way. The logistics are the same either way.

As for the core... truckers go 14 hours like it's nothing. Families go on days roadtrips. Humans expanded across the whole earth when it still took years by foot before we had any real technology. And later nations expanded across the globe when it took months and months to travel anywhere significant by boat. Humans wouldn't be stuck so close to earth if we actually had a means to travel as fast as we do in this game. It's incongruous. Using logistics from the older games which used a more realistic time scale, and only adjusting the speed for multiplayer.

 

[Alex Brentnall]

Word in advance, roundabout way of answering the question here but bear with me as I set the scene a bit.

Ok, imagine a universe with infinite energy availability. Fuel is cheap as chips or free from the nearest fuel scoopable star. Fusion reactors are plentiful in ships, on stations and on planets.
Water and other metals etc can be mined from asteroids as can materials.
Literally the only resources that are limited is food and they can now turn entire planets and space stations into agricultural mega-farms for that. Even then the waste products from the billions of population on stations are worth shipping to these agricultural stations/planets since transport costs are virtually free with the aforementioned cheap/free energy.


Now onto the question, yes there is faster than light travel. Thats the game's biggest lie to make it a game and not just a "point ship and leave pc on overnight" simulator. It's set in the future which is why the date is just under 1000 years ahead but time is normal and linear. If I remember correctly Hutton Orbital was the only "pre-FTL" outpost apart from those in the Sol system (only recently upgraded to a full station) in game.
Now thats ~4.3Ly away or roughly 40,653,296,308,650,000metres away. Currently the fastest thing we have in 2016 is the Juno probe at 40,230m/s. Meaning we would have to put a team in a space colonisation ship for around 32,000 years. Even with significant advances in speeds the amount of materials required for anything outside of our local solar system are staggering to achive anything like that before the FTL travel was invented.

As for expansion the main reason for lack of complete colonisation once FTL became available is time and reason. Many stations and planets are not even close to capacity (If the numbers we read are correct on galnet). With easy access to resources and no overcrowding why go through the effort of expanding everywhere. I mean some outposts have like 6 people if I remember rightly.
In any case to build a station even though resources are easily available the requirements are immense, in a recent community goal to create a station over 3 million tons of metals were delivered for it to be created.


Either way the real life reason that expansion is fairly stale currently is because it's a manual process the Developers have to place stations into systems. Hopefully this helps and it isn't just inane rambling thats created more questions than answers

Edit - Ironically many people complain jump ranges of ships in-game are way too low and they want to travel faster. I still think it was about right before the most recent patch but some people insist they want the heaviest most combat loaded ship to be able to get from A-B like a lean exploration ship.

 

[Vitamin Arrr]

Very good points OP. None of the points you bring up are ones that I think anyone here can offer a viable explanation for, other than just, "They made it that way to make the game more fun" or "because of development limitations."

One annoying thing to me is how mission timers run even when you're offline. So if something comes up in the middle of a gameplay session, and you have to take someone to the hospital, then when you get home you've lost rep with all these factions. Because, I mean, it's not like you can know how long a particular mission might take you to finish.

 

[CMDR Mr. Boombastic]

Here is the current timeline from the 19th to the 32nd century...not sure how much of it is canon though:
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Timeline

So I think we've done quite well as a civilisation for 3302.

Maybe in another 1000 years we will have expanded throughout the galaxy but there might be some obstacles on the way that may stop our progress.[alien] Also to expand requires infrastructure, food, jobs, terraformed planets and the migration of large numbers of people which is not a simple task.
Plus there isn't an unlimited supply of ships & pilots.

There have been Community Goals in the past to build new stations, but that requires quite a bit of time & effort. Eg:
Community Goal: Campaign to Construct New Starport in LHS 3447

 

[Galactic Fork]

Word in advance, roundabout way of answering the question here but bear with me as I set the scene a bit.

Ok, imagine a universe with infinite energy availability. Fuel is cheap as chips or free from the nearest fuel scoopable star. Fusion reactors are plentiful in ships, on stations and on planets.
Water and other metals etc can be mined from asteroids as can materials.
Literally the only resources that are limited is food and they can now turn entire planets and space stations into agricultural mega-farms for that. Even then the waste products from the billions of population on stations are worth shipping to these agricultural stations/planets since transport costs are virtually free with the aforementioned cheap/free energy.


Now onto the question, yes there is faster than light travel. Thats the game's biggest lie to make it a game and not just a "point ship and leave pc on overnight" simulator. It's set in the future which is why the date is just under 1000 years ahead but time is normal and linear. If I remember correctly Hutton Orbital was the only "pre-FTL" outpost apart from those in the Sol system (only recently upgraded to a full station) in game.
Now thats ~4.3Ly away or roughly 40,653,296,308,650,000metres away. Currently the fastest thing we have in 2016 is the Juno probe at 40,230m/s. Meaning we would have to put a team in a space colonisation ship for around 32,000 years. Even with significant advances in speeds the amount of materials required for anything outside of our local solar system are staggering to achive anything like that before the FTL travel was invented.

As for expansion the main reason for lack of complete colonisation once FTL became available is time and reason. Many stations and planets are not even close to capacity (If the numbers we read are correct on galnet). With easy access to resources and no overcrowding why go through the effort of expanding everywhere. I mean some outposts have like 6 people if I remember rightly.
In any case to build a station even though resources are easily available the requirements are immense, in a recent community goal to create a station over 3 million tons of metals were delivered for it to be created.


Either way the real life reason that expansion is fairly stale currently is because it's a manual process the Developers have to place stations into systems. Hopefully this helps and it isn't just inane rambling thats created more questions than answers

Edit - Ironically many people complain jump ranges of ships in-game are way too low and they want to travel faster. I still think it was about right before the most recent patch but some people insist they want the heaviest most combat loaded ship to be able to get from A-B like a lean exploration ship.

This entire post was from a world building perspective, I wasn't suggesting frontier start expanding. More like I didn't think time should be 1:1 with ours. it creates a disconnect. If say 1 day was a week in game (things like mission timers and such would be for our benefit not in game time), this would account for more realistic travel times that would be horrible for a game. It would account for cargo magically appearing in your hold after you buy, or vanishing when you sell. All the gamey things there because it's a game and it'd be tedious if it was realistic. By making time 1:1, it's saying everything is happening in real time, and cargo literally appears in your hold.

Full disclosure, I am big into RP and am currently focusing on exploring. It's put a damper on the experience that how I could go to the center of the galaxy so fast in game time, yet it's called "exploring." where's the adventures of the age of exploration where you'd be on a ship months away from civilization? That's the feeling I wanted to roleplay when exploring, but officially in game I literally can't go more than a few days away. It just makes the galaxy seem so much smaller to me.


That said, I disagree with your reasoning about the distance. It goes all the way back to the federation and empire. They expanded at some point, why keep everything so close together? This would allow both to be more choosy. Why choose a nearby system 10 ly away that's OK, if a great one is 1000 light years away? That's only a couple hours or so farther away.

 

[Alex Brentnall]

This entire post was from a world building perspective, I wasn't suggesting frontier start expanding. More like I didn't think time should be 1:1 with ours. it creates a disconnect. If say 1 day was a week in game (things like mission timers and such would be for our benefit not in game time), this would account for more realistic travel times that would be horrible for a game. It would account for cargo magically appearing in your hold after you buy, or vanishing when you sell. All the gamey things there because it's a game and it'd be tedious if it was realistic. By making time 1:1, it's saying everything is happening in real time, and cargo literally appears in your hold.

Full disclosure, I am big into RP and am currently focusing on exploring. It's put a damper on the experience that how I could go to the center of the galaxy so fast in game time, yet it's called "exploring." where's the adventures of the age of exploration where you'd be on a ship months away from civilization? That's the feeling I wanted to roleplay when exploring, but officially in game I literally can't go more than a few days away. It just makes the galaxy seem so much smaller to me.


That said, I disagree with your reasoning about the distance. It goes all the way back to the federation and empire. They expanded at some point, why keep everything so close together? This would allow both to be more choosy. Why choose a nearby system 10 ly away that's OK, if a great one is 1000 light years away? That's only a couple hours or so farther away.

Hmmm, kinda get where you are coming from but to be honest I'd approach it from a different angle and visually have automated cargo loading robots, fuelling staff etc inside hangars

I fully agree with you. Space has got smaller since the game launched as jump ranges have got higher. Yes it's fairly quick to get end to end (approx 23 hours solid jumping with a bare-bones Anaconda iirc) but for many people the ranges are way too low. You (same as me) seem to lean a bit more towards the simulator/exploration than the Action space adventure crowd. I've been out exploring since December
Some are here for the lights and pretty explosions and it seems unfortunately they outnumber us by a good percentage meaning very few updates touch exploration. That seems to be changing shortly with a bit of luck. Passenger missions may breathe some life into it yet


Ok, one of the other explanations I've heard on the forums about not spacing the stations out is trade. If I remember correctly they argued no one station is self-sufficient they all rely on imports and exports keeping them relatively close is the only way to avoid paying ridiculous prices to traders to make it worth their travel/risk and fuel costs. If you are a trader and you get 50Cr/T to travel 2Ly or 50Cr/T to travel 200ly you know which one you'll always pick.
Some stations have gone 200ly+ out (see Robigo/Sothis/Maia etc), they currently can only realistically survive since so many people are going there to pick up illegal cargo to smuggle back into central space. Even then I don't think that quite fits the realism bill, don't think enough people trade to sustain the population and production of goods there...

 

[kdogg788]

True but then you have the NPC population as well who might trade there...

I've always thought that you can never fully rationalize a sci-fi or fantasy universe because at some point there's a logical breakdown somewhere. It's easier just to suspend disbelief if only for a short time, and put yourself in those worlds.

-k

 

[Omegahunter]

I've only been playing for a few weeks and I'm really liking the game a lot. One thing has been bugging me though and it really messes with my immersion. Is the game supposed to be real time? I mean all the dates are today but in 3302, but that kinda makes no sense if we're supposed to be playing in real time. Elite 2 had the stardreamer which let the player get the sense time was passing, while not making the game horribly boring. Without that, none of this makes sense.

Why is the bulk of inhabited space only a 300 to 400 light year bubble if we can travel in a few minutes. I can make the trip faster than it takes me to get to work. And why is going to the core or the opposite rim of the galaxy impressive if it can be done in a couple days? Truckers do that all the time. And why wouldn't humans have expanded everywhere if a cross galaxy trip is so short. Look at how we expanded throughout our planet when it would take months and months to get anywhere.

So yeah, sorry for the rant. I know it's a game. And I wish official time in the game was a bit fuzzier to give the sense that a realistic amount of time is passing in game time, while still being fast and fun. Frontier and First Encounters did this nicely.

Thanks!

From reading this and your other posts I get the feeling that your problem isn't with the passing of time or the 1:1 time scale. But with some of the current game short cuts or missing visuals/ game actions.

Let me try to make this a bit clearer first. When you jump to a new system you have travel time in Witchspace then a drive cooldown period before you can jump again, following this you have to fly to a station/ outpost/ surface base. All of which takes time, then you have to request docking and more time is taken with the approach and landing.
Even after you have landed you still see time taken up with your ship entering into the hanger even if its just to turn it round for launch again (and the blast ramp being raised/ lowered )

But and this it the current big one: Trading , Refueling, Upgrading your ship all seem to having instantly. Frontier haven't taken the time to include cargo-rackers ( 34th century forklifts). You don't see a fuel line being attached to your ship and hear the sound of the pumps running to refuel you. Or worse yet we never see Mechanics or their work drones/ robots/ cranes. Doing work on our ships to remove that Class 4D frameshift drive and fit in the replacement 4A.

All this happen in invisible game time (as if my magic) and I agree with you it's a cheat that I would like them to remove or at least improve a lot. We have to wait 10 to 30 second every time we launch for the pad to turn our ship around and can't cut that scene but something important like a ship upgrade is implied. Yes if you had to watch your 4 tons of cargo being removed from the Sidewinder when you started the game it would get boring after the first 5 or so times but think what it would be like for the Anaconda or Type 9 owner with over 400 cargo pods!!

The problem with adding these animations/ visual features isn't just the time they would take. I know I would be fine waiting 5 minutes for an FSD upgrade but if I upgraded a whole ship (unless they make the upgrade multitask ie all modules got done at once). You could be looking at 1 or 2 hours sitting on the pad waiting to fly your ship.
As for cargo units, say you could load or remove one from you ship in 10 seconds, then your 4 ton Sidewinder would take 80 second ( say one and a half minutes) to unload and reload. Not to bad.
But without multitasking cargo-rackers (ones that can load a cargo then take one to remove in one job) and control system that could handle more that one at a time (IE you would need 10 or so working together at once) the time needed to unload and reload the cargo bay on a 500 ton Type 9 would take ( 10 seconds x 500, times 2)

Two hours and forty seven minutes. :O
Even if you could speed it up by making ten cargo-rackers work together you still end up with over sixteen minutes of waiting time.

The other problem is that Frontier would have to design and code all the new animation and very likely put in a skip feature. Something that almost everyone would be screaming for an auto off button in the menu after the first ten minutes.
But yes would be nice if you at least saw someone /something take a screwdriver to a panel once in awhile when they say that your ship is being repaired, or see a robot sprayer start work on your new paint job.