Physics

[Leonis]

Hm, never thought of this... good idea, though.

But i honestly wouldnt like to wait 30min with my single-pilot ship to reach other planets.

 

Maybe the power output to speed transfer could be less and less effective as your grows.

Normally the only thing limiting your speed would be your mass, as pushing your reactors even into space would add force to it over and over. Again, maybe the gravitational acceleration thanks to the planets.

[Daphne Jones]

We don't need relativity. At accelerations your body can survive, it takes too long to get to speeds where relativity matters for it ever to occur in game.

 

For FTL, relativity has no answers. This is necessarily essentially magic unless you use warp drive which deflates the space between you and you destination and you cross the shortened distance at normal speed. This may actually be possible - and relativity would not be necessary.

 

In RL, we do have to take relativity into account to make GPS work. Because of gravity, time runs measurably slower on the earth than in geo-synch orbit and GPS is all about timing. But there's no need to simulate that in DU... the difference in time is measurable but you wouldn't notice it if you were just talking to someone on the radio.

 

The IFCS in Star Citizen works well and lets you fly in space roughly like an airplane if you want to (you can turn it off). They have somewhat artificial speed limits there which I think are a practical necessity for the game engine. If everyone in a combat is falling at 10K m/s in the same direction, combat between them would work find, unless you hit a limit of the game engine. The ships wouldn't be coming at each other at 10K m/s... closing speeds would be the difference between your speed and the average speed of the group. You would not just be able to change direction and fly the other way at 10K m/s... the acceleration would kill you. An acceptable work around is just to assume the average speed of the group is 0... Relative to the group enaged in combat, it is 0 no matter how fast the group is falling. That's essentially what SC does.

 

I hope DU will have newtonian physics as good as SC's.

[Lethys]

We don't need relativity. At accelerations your body can survive, it takes too long to get to speeds where relativity matters for it ever to occur in game.

 

For FTL, relativity has no answers. This is necessarily essentially magic unless you use warp drive which deflates the space between you and you destination and you cross the shortened distance at normal speed. This may actually be possible - and relativity would not be necessary.

 

 

You bend spacetime with an alcubierre drive. It contracts space in front of you and, most importantly, expands space behind you. You are not moving at all (in a common sense). Possible? Perhaps - if you overcome the problem of negative energy density by exotic matter, radiation inside the bubble doesn't kill you, effects of the sharp bending of space is handled and the particles inside the field don't destroy anything while you 'decelerate' at your destination.

 

Relativity would just mess things up in DU, better to use good old Newton