BLACK HOLE TIME DILATION

[Azythromycin]

whilst orbiting a black hole in real world scenario in reference to time dilation the person on the ship would experience "Less time" than the surrounding space... can we make this happen?

[LorDC]

A cool idea. But how it would tie up with existing game mechanics?
Other than being a "noob trap" for unaware players who would set up a production in black hole system to only realize that it is working slower than planned.
As a side note: current cluster generation algorithm seems to pu black holes on the fringes of sector, so I imagine most players only visit black holes once to set up a unipolar magnet mine and never return again.

[Dirkels]

That time dilation does not happen on the planet in far away stable orbit at a 'normal' orbital speed. Only when you get close to the event horizon and have to have near light speed velocity time dilation would happen.

The time dilation happens because of your speed, not because there is a black hole. Although the black is of course a catalist for needing high speeds to stay away from it.

[LorDC]

Originally posted by Dirkels:

The time dilation happens because of your speed, not because there is a black hole. Although the black is of course a catalist for needing high speeds to stay away from it.

You are wrong here. There are two distintct time dilation effects. One described by special relativity and is indeed tied to to going at the speeds near the speed of light. Second effect is described by general relativity and is tied to being inside a strong gravity field. When you are close to a black hole you will experience second effect even if you are stationary. (As a side note, the second effect is observed even here on Earth although it is extremely weak.)

[TropicalBubble]

Yeah and then you can enter it, to say hello to your daughter in the past by moving books in her library

[kris44dad]

Originally posted by Azythromycin:

whilst orbiting a black hole in real world scenario in reference to time dilation the person on the ship would experience "Less time" than the surrounding space... can we make this happen?

Go in as far as you can, and look back out.

[mreed2]

The issue is twofold:

First, as others have pointed out, a planet orbiting a black hole would be very unlikely to experience notable time dilation. Remember, a black hole is a large star that is compressed into a infinitely small point, so the gravity (and thus, time dilation) at a certain distance is exactly the same as it was when it was a star -- as long as the distance is greater than the radius of the star. If you replaced the Sun with a black hole of the same mass, the time dilation on Mercury (with respect to Earth) would be the same then as it is now.

Secondly, even if we ignore how relativity works (after all, the game takes plenty of other liberties with physics, what's one more?), it would be really, really annoying to have a planet that produces less than all other planets. Introducing a mechanic that only serves to annoy the player isn't a very good idea.

Finally, as far as "Well, what if the mech gets very close to a black hole -- shouldn't the speed of everything else increase?" Yes, that would be a great feature, but... If the developer had the ability to speed up the simulation, I'm pretty sure that would have already happened. Certainly, there is a narrow window of time between when you get green cubes and when you start running into FPS problems, but its a narrow window and you are far, far more likely to want the speed up after you start scaling up to produce, say, 100 rockets / minute rather than before. This is a feature that would only serve to highlight the limitations of the games performance, and that's not a good idea.

[Bobucles]

Icarus is a gigantic galaxy terraforming robot. A little bit of time dilation isn't going to do anything, he can just process faster to ignore it.

[thenonsequitur]

Originally posted by LorDC:

I imagine most players only visit black holes once to set up a unipolar magnet mine and never return again.

Not true! We go back to get the "Faster than light" achievement :)

[Denagar]

the TIDI effect does not matter here ( if you really want the idea given ) since ICARUS is a terraforming robot ( as stated before ) wont be affected by TIDI and ( presumably ) humans ( or the species controlling icarus ) are either machines themselves or just DATA in a centerbrain quantum comptuting entity 10000 years is just a blink of an eye to them and icarus so the idea of TIDI does not apply at all ( if that makes sense to everyone to agree ) cheers :)