The realism on your speed of light and your black holes

[Argyris]

[...]What I don't get is why killing the thrusters stops the drive from working in the game[...]

I don't think it actually does. I remember a fight where my thrusters were knocked out but I was still able to activate my FSD and get away. I figured that I had been lucky because I had FA off and my ship was drifting at max speed because of its inertia when the thrusters blew. So I think you just need to have a critical speed to be able to enter SC.

 

[jpaulwilson1982]

Traveling at or above the speed of light is mathematically and logically impossible for many reasons already stated. And, for that matter, black holes should be warping time and not just space in the game. But I really don't want to have to deal with time acting crazy, not being able to see out of my ship at significant fractions of c, compensating for the actual present position of a distant object so you reach it in the appropriate place, or not having a possible source of power for at-light or FTL speeds. There's theoretical ways to avoid these consequences, any of which I'd be willing to accept just to be able to travel FTL in the game. I'm not saying a game that took such consequences into account wouldn't be good, but man would it be crazy. In Elite such consequences would work against the mechanics of the game, and wouldn't be practical, especially in a multiplayer, online, persistent universe where FTL travel is so essential.

 

[JeffRyan]

Traveling at or above the speed of light is mathematically and logically impossible for many reasons already stated. And, for that matter, black holes should be warping time and not just space in the game. But I really don't want to have to deal with time acting crazy, not being able to see out of my ship at significant fractions of c, compensating for the actual present position of a distant object so you reach it in the appropriate place, or not having a possible source of power for at-light or FTL speeds. There's theoretical ways to avoid these consequences, any of which I'd be willing to accept just to be able to travel FTL in the game. I'm not saying a game that took such consequences into account wouldn't be good, but man would it be crazy. In Elite such consequences would work against the mechanics of the game, and wouldn't be practical, especially in a multiplayer, online, persistent universe where FTL travel is so essential.

We actually did this in Alpha 3, but due to time-travel effects Michael Brookes was able to go back in time and become David Braben's father. It was a mess and thus abandoned.

 

[CipherZR032]

I don't think it actually does. I remember a fight where my thrusters were knocked out but I was still able to activate my FSD and get away.

Must of been that I was not traveling at the right speed then, not the thrusters.

So I think you just need to have a critical speed to be able to enter SC.

Which is another thing that I don't get. Technically the ship is already orbiting at quite a speed, well its traveling with whatever you have a destination lock to, so what difference does changing your velocity by a few m/s make to be able to go FTL?

I mean say your target destination is in the general direction of the retrograde vector when in an orbit of say 5km/s, altering your velocity by 200 m/s wouldn't make that much difference, you'd still be traveling relatively "backwards".

I know, I know, gameplay reasons, was just thinking from a physics standpoint.

 

[TehWardy]

lately I came across your game and this is what I ever wanted. A great very realistic space simulation for what I would get an expensive HOTAS. I did not buy the game so far, I just saw some gameplay videos. And then I got sad a little bit. Even when it's so near of realism, traveling from one system to another is clearly wrong implemented.

Firstly, the problem is how the game presents traveling speed of light. It's wrong and looks not real, see https://youtu.be/lD08CuUi_Ek?t=6m13s to let Michael from VSauce explain it. In this video he explains when getting close to c your FOV would increase drastically because you can see the light behind you traveling in your direction, because you travel with it. This would let everything appear farer away in the first moment.

Bit presumptuous of you don't you think?
Isn't FTL travel entirely theoretical and yet you seem pretty clued out about all this?

Also you're getting even faster than the speed of light with that Frame Shift Drive, but there is no need to get faster than speed of light, because there is nothing faster than speed of light and it would be fast enough. Why?
Because when really reaching speed of light, you can travel forever without any instant moment is over, see https://youtu.be/ACUuFg9Y9dY?t=5m36s to even hear up on Michael and feel free to scroll to the begin for further information and more explanation.

Correction:
It's "theoretically impossible to travel at the speed of light because the mass tells us that our thrust requirement increases with speed and mass at which the result would be the need for infinite thrust".
Travelling less than or at the speed of light would take a very long time to travel between stars as it takes light 8 mins or so just to get from the sun to us so travelling between stars would always have to be done at faster than light speeds or it would never be possible.

That said:
"Travelling faster than light" may mean "bring to points in space closer together then travel slowly between them" in some contexts, which is likely what the FSD does in Elite based on what little I know of the lore and terminology.

I'm pretty sure you're not actually traveling at C. Instead, the frame shift drive compresses space around you by a (massive) proportion, and your main drives continue to propel you at their normal capacity, resulting in you crossing ridiculous distances proportional to the level of compression achieved by the frame shift drive. The speed measurement you see on your HUD in supercruise and hyperspace is more or less a measure of "how quickly you'll get from point A to point B compared to light."

And as a sidenote, I believe the reason you continue gaining relative speed during supercruise over long distances is because the frame shift drive continues compressing space more and more, which would explain why there's no fixed range on frameshift interdictors and your ability to tether a target in supercruise depends on your relative speed, relative to their relative speed, or perhaps the amount of space being compressed by each of you in comparison :] And I'm not sure if there's a cap to this continuous compression, as I tend to be too lazy to attempt traveling to stations more than 20,000 Ls from the arrived-at-star in any given system.

This backs up my point I feel.

I made my wife play Elite: Dangerous for three months. When she stopped she wasn't noticeably younger.

PLEASE get the relativity right Frontier before I try such a thing again.

Dam Right ... I had to lol before writing this.

AFAIR compressing space around you to achieve "faster than light" speed requires a Gravity force minimum equivalent with a super massive black hole and even in that case the effect would be extremely limited. But maybe i mix it up with time travel theory.

Personal remark: I myself could live with " Infinite Improbability drive" much much easier to understand.

Theoretically yes .. but maybe in 1300 years from now todays genius crowd are the butt of most science jokes like ... remember those idiots that thought the earth was flat?

Wow, thanks for those links, I should have spend more time on this forum before posting.
The team cares a lot about the design progress, so my first post is a bit odd. Sorry for that.

I get that feeling every day despite reading for hours before posting I still miss stuff and repeat post, its great that others are so dam good at helping point out the links though, must be awesome for the devs to have an audit trail of an idea like this lol.

Nuff Said!