When traveling faster then light: Something scientific

[Kneid]

Hello,
Since i like sience and space, and all the good stuff around it, it was nice to see how accurate Elite is at times.

But one thing striked me when flying in supercruise: wouldnt the vision go crazy when traveling faster than light?

Im no expert in science by any means, this is just me thinking about it a bit. just be warned, a lot of science:

Spoiler

when traveling close to the speed of light, the frequencies of light would be compressed or stretched out.
imagine it like the doppler effect, when you hear an ambulance passing by: driving in your direction, the soundwave gets pushed together or pitched up. for light it would aproach blue in the spectrum, because of the higher frequency.
When the ambulance drives away the sound gets pitched down aka. the soundwave streached out. in case of light i would aproach, you guessed it, red in the frequeny spectrum of visible light.

Another interesting effect would be, that the photons wouldnt have to fly in your direction in order to reach into your eye. since youre so fast you could also overtake photons flying in the same direction as you, or even have them hit your eyes.

So when flying with supercruise you could implement wierd effects in vision that grow more intense with higher speed.
For example a fisheye effect, trails for bright objects, noisy vision (like when taking pictures with high iso settings) and shifting the frequencies of light.

I know, the games proirity is to be playable and fun. The effects would have to be quite subtle in order to have supercruise still enjoyable.
for example the glowing dots that represent other ships could change in colour, depending on their movement relative to you.
Or have one, or multiple, effects i previously listed implemented but only a little so vision in not obstructed.

The main idea i had was to have something that makes the player think about how incredible it is to travel faster than light, because of the wierd and unknown effects that would occur when moving so fast.

I hope i got my point across well enough to get you interessted. Let me know what you think.

Greetings,
KDT. Kneid

 

[z33r0x]

Cool, I would also like to see some kind of effect. The glowing star dust that is just for a moment when enting supercruise, I wish this was in super cruise, and somekind of thing that gives us the feeling of a fast speed.

 

[denisbloodnok]

FTL is impossible [1] so there's no scientific basis for what things might look like in FTL - and by analogy with sound, you'd expect to see nothing at all ahead of you, which would be unhelpful. There is a redshift effect at high sublight velocities which could be modelled.

[1] If you're about to reply saying "Alcubierre Drive", you're wrong.

 

[c00ky1970]

I thought the lore is that it isn’t actually travelling faster than light, hence no tunnelling of objects in front and behind you.

The frame-shift, shifts your frame of reference forward at super luminal rates, but you don’t actually break the light barrier.

Or it’s just a game and it would be a bit difficult to fly if everything coalesced to a point once you hit light speed....

 

[Irishd08]

That's really cool! Rep given

 

[denisbloodnok]

I thought the lore is that it isn’t actually travelling faster than light, hence no tunnelling of objects in front and behind you.

That's a variant on the wrong "Alcubierre Drive" reply. It doesn't matter what the explanation is (and this includes "it doesn't look like FTL to you"); FTL+relativity gives causality violation.

Or it’s just a game and it would be a bit difficult to fly if everything coalesced to a point once you hit light speed....

This is entirely correct.

 

[Kneid]

im aware, that traveling faster than light is impossible. but yet ingame its done. since c stands for the speed of light (the measurement for speed in supercruise "136c"), youre actually traveling up to 2000x the speed of light in game in supercruise.
and i know the red and blue shifting is only for aproaching c, not with hypothetical multiple times the speed of light.
vision ingame still needs to be possible tho (even at 1000 times c) so its playable.

i just wanted to propose hypothetical effects to vision when traveling so fast. and not scientificly correct events. if the devs would go scientificly correct, elite wouldnt be fun to play.

 

[Kneid]

I thought the lore is that it isn’t actually travelling faster than light, hence no tunnelling of objects in front and behind you.

The frame-shift, shifts your frame of reference forward at super luminal rates, but you don’t actually break the light barrier.

Or it’s just a game and it would be a bit difficult to fly if everything coalesced to a point once you hit light speed....

im not sure, but i think ingame speed is multiple times the speed of light. because when you travel for a long time in supercruise it says something like "568c" and "c" is often used in formulas for the speed of light.

 

[denisbloodnok]

i just wanted to propose hypothetical effects to vision when traveling so fast. and not scientificly correct events. if the devs would go scientificly correct, elite wouldnt be fun to play.

That's fine (incidentally, I recommend http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ for an interesting look at redshift effects) but why then call it "Something scientific".

im not sure, but i think ingame speed is multiple times the speed of light. because when you travel for a long time in supercruise it says something like "568c" and "c" is often used in formulas for the speed of light.

It is; c00ky1970 is referring to the ingame handwave that locally your speed appears to be sublight to you, not claiming the actual speeds aren't FTL.

 

[Kneid]

ooh i see, thank you for the clarification.
maybe it wasnt the best idea to call it scientific. its rather "a lot of rambling leaned on wannabe science"

but youre right. when activating the free camera in supercruise you can see the thrusters being completely inactive (or so it seems).

so i guess we dont really know how the ships are propelled?

in case of something like "Alcubierre Drive" it would still be nice to have some visible effect. for example subtle distirtion in front and back when going in free camera mode.

 

[denisbloodnok]

so i guess we dont really know how the ships are propelled?

As far as I know there's just some handwaving about warping local space and going sublight inside that. These days that tends to get called "Alcubierre Drive" but it is of course a much older idea. I could be wrong but I don't know that FDev have used that particular expression.

Incidentally, the expression "Alcubierre Drive" is incredibly unfortunate. The use of the word "drive" suggests that this is merely a very hard engineering problem to be solved which would require some advances in other fields, just as (for example) building a space elevator would be very hard and require some materials outside the scope of current materials science. What Alcubierre came up with is an interesting mathematical model for something impossible.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

Your vest bet is to assume the FSD is an Alcubierre Drive or that it uses Wormholes.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

Even if the Alcubierre Drive is being used, it's the wrong response to this question because the effect is only a small bubble around your ship.

That bubble is still moving at FTL speeds with respect to the objects you see through the canopy.

However, any 'science' on this is extremely speculative and mostly of the pseudo variety.

 

[PiggyPiggyPig]

It might be better to pretend that the canopy glass is more than just a window, but cleverly designed panels that convert strange FTL optical effects into something less disorientating. Come to think of it, why do they even have windows in the 33rd century?
And why are most space ships aerodynamically shaped with little winglets. Couldn't your shields take on that role by continuously reshaping themselves into the most streamlined aerodynamic shapes around the ship with the most optimal flight characteristics for any given speed. I guess nobody wants to ride around in a cube, sorry T7 owners.

 

[Moesis]

by analogy with sound, you'd expect to see nothing at all ahead of you,

I believe it would be that you'd see nothing at all behind you (like with sound, you don't hear a sound source behind you when traveling away from it at the speed of sound, you would hear one ahead of you, but it would sound different).

So IMO you'd still see light sources ahead of you (distant stars, albeit they'd likely look different). While other bodies that don't produce light, would likely only be perceived appearing quite some distance further away than what they would actually be (due the oldness of light being reflected and the fact you'd be perceiving an image of that already old light from further away than when you are consciously aware of it) and if seen at all would likely be the last thing you ever saw, or would vanish again, (assuming you didn't blink, and miss seeing it), and this would only be if you passed close enough to see it but were never going to hit it, mostly you'd only see other stars, within a cone, ahead of you, the faster you travel the smaller the cone would become, and there'd be a lot of nothing to see everywhere else.

 

[Shadowdancer]

wouldnt the vision go crazy when traveling faster than light?

It would go weird while you are still significantly slower than light, and then you would just die because everything is ionising radiation.

Displaying those effects would also require generating an obscene amount of data, since you're suddenly not only interested in the materials for basic tristimulus vision, but everything from DC to X-ray spectra.

 

[Redanblue]

its a game ..

 

[Shinji Ikari]

Even if the Alcubierre Drive is being used, it's the wrong response to this question because the effect is only a small bubble around your ship.

That bubble is still moving at FTL speeds with respect to the objects you see through the canopy.

However, any 'science' on this is extremely speculative and mostly of the pseudo variety.

Well, at least the interior of the bubble would be farily normal. Regarding the outside though... Yeah, I've little reference to answer that but I'd suspect you wouldn't be able to do so.

 

[777Driver]

Always a good read, explains the background behind the FSD and why we are not travelling faster than light

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/106861-DCello-s-Science-Guide-to-the-Galaxy

Here's a snippet -

Finally, the speed indicator in-game represents your current speed, which is a scalar quantity of distance over time and completely relative in regards to observer and observed. Therefore, it doesn’t mean that your body and molecules are accelerating above the speed of light in regards to realspace around you – it just means the *distance* you’re moving is faster than the speed of light. This again returns to the area of Special Relativity, which can be a bit difficult to understand. Just remember that relativity is the main focus here – what is observer and who is observing is more important than what is observed.

Fun fact: the breaking of the bubble and the reality normalization is what causes the "bang" when you exit Supercruise. It's literally space decompressing and throwing you forward.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

Always a good read, explains the background behind the FSD and why we are not travelling faster than light

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/106861-DCello-s-Science-Guide-to-the-Galaxy

Here's a snippet -

Finally, the speed indicator in-game represents your current speed, which is a scalar quantity of distance over time and completely relative in regards to observer and observed. Therefore, it doesn’t mean that your body and molecules are accelerating above the speed of light in regards to realspace around you – it just means the *distance* you’re moving is faster than the speed of light. This again returns to the area of Special Relativity, which can be a bit difficult to understand. Just remember that relativity is the main focus here – what is observer and who is observing is more important than what is observed.

Fun fact: the breaking of the bubble and the reality normalization is what causes the "bang" when you exit Supercruise. It's literally space decompressing and throwing you forward.

Sounds like an Alcubierre Drive to me.