You can actually crash into planet at 0 throttle SC position

Mark Allen

Programmer- Elite: Dangerous
M
Morbad said:
Frame of reference seems to be fixed until you switch flight modes.

Upon entering a system you are in the main star's frame of reference, but if you leave SC near another body, you enter that object's frame of reference and stay there until you enter SC again.
Click to expand...

To clarify, while you're in supercruise you're in the frame of reference of whichever body in the system has the highest gravitational influence on your ship (bar some exceptions that slightly inflate the sphere for tiny bodies that are near massive ones and would otherwise be dominated entirely). In practice which object you're in the frame of doesn't affect too much unless you're travelling very slowly for a long time, as the speeds your ship can achieve dwarf any stellar body... Aside from that one bug I remember when a superluminal moon overtook me :/.

What your maximum speed is limited by is calculated on a similar basis, it just does a little bit of number-fudging to normalise scales - without which large gas giants would take exceptionally long to get away from if you start close.


@OP - yes, you're never stationary in SC! (in fact, in fiction if you're ever not travelling at speed in the direction your ship/FSD is pointed you drop out of cruise - interdiction uses that by trying to pull the opposing ship out of alignment, there's more in the pipe that uses this as well further down the line).
 

Spanksh

Spanksh
Mark Allen said:
@OP - yes, you're never stationary in SC! (in fact, in fiction if you're ever not travelling at speed in the direction your ship/FSD is pointed you drop out of cruise - interdiction uses that by trying to pull the opposing ship out of alignment, there's more in the pipe that uses this as well further down the line).
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Thargoids confirmed. :p
 

edd

edd
Yes, 30 km/s is not zero, and yes it's pretty fast by every day standards, but the OP said he was in the ballpark of 10 lightseconds from the object and it'd take over a day to get there at that speed.
 

nicomak

nicomak
You can even "reach" a planet without SC. But at 30km/s, crashing into a planet(or else)shouldnt do any damage i think. It's like a normal safe drop. Also i sometimes take picture of planets and try to have the closest view while seeing them entirely on the screen. At 30km/s, it can be a little fast at times.

I remember back in beta, i took the trip from Freeport to the ring at normal impulse, i had a little trouble getting out of the Station SOI as it kept catching up on me. But at one point i dit get out, reached the rings below, went trhough them from the outter side to the inner one(painful to avoid so many rocks, i did get out to see how much distance i travelled, most of it at that point, and possibly made a few km out of the ring before going back in) and then down to the planet. I could see the station making a few orbits in the distance, while i was probably also moving with the rings themselves untill i left them. It took quite a few hours in a viper, but there is no "wall" to block you off. Well today there is one around planet, one that you cant get in at all. there was only the SC "Drop zone" in Beta, you could still cruise to the surface freely ... and beyond... at a few hundreds m/s.
 
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jacozilla

jacozilla
Not sure if i want to test this with my normal (e.g. Expensive) ships, but can you die by colliding with a planet?

what i mean is, obviously for a star - whether you emergency stop crash or just safely coast up to it, the heat will fry you.

but for a planet, like my OP of slow motion smacking into one, the zero throttle SC did no dmg because it was well under the threshold for dmg when the emergency stop pulled me out of SC. I turned and got out of there,

but i'm now curious - what happens if you stay pointed at the planet? Will you burn up in atmospheric re-entry? smack into the planet and explode? Kinda curious so maybe take a sidewinder and see what happens
 
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Mark Allen

Programmer- Elite: Dangerous
M
Currently you'll just be stopped short of the planet with a warning message, it's one of the things that kept being on lists to make prettier but fell onto the TODO backlog for time reasons. Not forgotten though ;)

As nicomak points out - the the pre-release builds there was no glass wall there and people flew all the way through a planet... it looked a bit "special" back then!
 

Tarman

Tarman
Mark Allen said:
Currently you'll just be stopped short of the planet with a warning message, it's one of the things that kept being on lists to make prettier but fell onto the TODO backlog for time reasons. Not forgotten though ;)

As nicomak points out - the the pre-release builds there was no glass wall there and people flew all the way through a planet... it looked a bit "special" back then!
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Thanks for the info posts in this thread; these are the kinds of things I like to hear from you guys. It's appreciated.
 

Tinman

Tinman
Mark Allen said:
Currently you'll just be stopped short of the planet with a warning message, it's one of the things that kept being on lists to make prettier but fell onto the TODO backlog for time reasons. Not forgotten though ;)

As nicomak points out - the the pre-release builds there was no glass wall there and people flew all the way through a planet... it looked a bit "special" back then!
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"...back then."

;)
 

Arindor

Arindor
I, too, dropped out of SC and throttled down to zero on the orbital path of a planet, and watched it speed towards me very fast indeed. I didn't hang around long enough to experience the consequences! :)
 

jacozilla

jacozilla
TheDayman said:
Watch this video - it shows how fast a planet (or a moon) can move:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBfOGnb8AeI
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cool video. The comment box said you couldnt escape via thrusters - couldnt you escape by entering into SC?

and wondering why thrusters wouldnt work - wouldnt a spacecraft just use the rotational orbit of the moon/planet to do a gravity slingshot out into space, unless the object was so massive it couldnt escape the gravity well (e.g. Jupiter)
 

Mark Allen

Programmer- Elite: Dangerous
M
A surprisingly speedy planet does seem likely in this case...

On a tangent for anyone who hasn't tried, google is awesome at converting between speeds/units, try searching for : "15 light seconds / 30 km/s"
 

jacozilla

jacozilla
Zadkiel343 said:
1 LS = 300,000km

so at 30km/s you would need to travel for 10,000 seconds to move 1 LS.

OP said he was 15 LS from the planet when he went AFK.

I doubt very much he was afk for 150,000 seconds, or over 41 hours.

Therefore I would assume he was in the planet's orbit path and the planet moved into him
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Well to be most correct and clarify - I was absolutely At 10-15 LS when I started scanning, small planet so scan didn't start till about that range. I was set on fairly low throttle setting, bit below what you approach a station at to no overshoot. So I think the eta timer was like at 15 sec and holding steady vs the 7-8 sec we maintain on a station approach.

I didn't look exactly when scan finished but best guess is greater than 5 LS but well under 10. maybe call it 5-7 LS out, but this is just pure guess. All I know is planet looked reasonable 'safe" distance away when scan stopped and I cut throttle to zero.

Did my youtube thing and then...smack.

I didn't even think about orbital paths until this thread but I'm thinking that's what must have happened - my ~45min watching videos allowed the planet to close in on me while I was drifting towards it at 30 km/s , so whatever the combined rate of closure was, it was enough over 45 min to have me face plant into it :)
 
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Commander Dave

Commander Dave
Minimum supercruise speed is 30km/s.
This is 67108 mph.
Sixty seven thousand miles per hour.

Which it, coincidentally, almost the same speed that the Earth moves around the Sun.

It's absolutely not stopped, or even remotely slow.
 

jacozilla

jacozilla
Commander Dave said:
Minimum supercruise speed is 30km/s.
This is 67108 mph.
Sixty seven thousand miles per hour.

Which it, coincidentally, almost the same speed that the Earth moves around the Sun.

It's absolutely not stopped, or even remotely slow.
Click to expand...

I learned that reality of physics through the Wile E. Coyote method.
 
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