Please explain this... Painful slow inter system travel

[Hawkcode]

I got a Mission to Transport something from a system next to Alfa Sentauri (sp?) so when I jumped into AS I found the station it said like .22Ly 8:34:20. I start toward in with frame shift, I get up to 1,488c. Is c the speed a light???

Anyway it gets to about .14Ly 39:36 and the countdown of distance slows way down so that the second number is taking like 2 real seconds. I was still going 1700c +.

Anyway I din't make it in time!

What is the deal!!!!

[ResplendentGoop]

1c is the speed of light, so if you are travelling that fast it will take you a RL year to travel 1 LY. 1700c is 1700x the speed of light. Basically .22 LY is almost a quarter of a light year, which is a rediculously far distance, which is why it was taking so long.

[ConcealedFire]

Yeah, some things are really far out there.... Nothing you can do about it. You jump to the most dominant object in the system, then you can only supercruise around the system.

[Bjørn]

Some stations are indeed very far from the jump-in point. You should use the system map to check out a system before accepting any missions requesting you to transport something to them.

These are mainly systems with more than one star in them (like Alpha Centauri in your case). You will drop out of hyperspace at a star in system, so systems with only 1 star will not have travel times like that.

The bulletin board selects missions at random, not considering the time it takes to transport something.

The upcoming 1.3 patch scheduled for release in a few weeks will have a complete overhaul of the missions system, or so we've been told... :)

(As a tidbit, Alpha Centauri is the closest system to our own solar system (4,3 LYs from Sol), and it's well known that it is a 2 star system. However since the stars are so far apart from each other, some consider it as 2 separate systems, with one of the stars called Proxima Centauri. Apparently they don't make that distinction in this game.)

[Bjørn]

Originally posted by Rich:

Is c the speed a light???

It is, and as another tidbit, 1 LS is the distance it takes light to travel for 1 second, which is approximately the time it takes it to travel from Earth to our Moon.

[RenegadeZed]

Originally posted by Psilio:

(As a tidbit, Alpha Centauri is the closest system to our own solar system (4,3 LYs from Sol), and it's well known that it is a 2 star system. However since the stars are so far apart from each other, some consider it as 2 separate systems, with one of the stars called Proxima Centauri. Apparently they don't make that distinction in this game.)

Alpha Centauri AB (or a cen AB) is a binary star system. the distance between a cen A and a cen B is the same as the distance between saturn and our sun at some times, and pluto and our sun at some other times. proxima centauri (or a cen c) is a third star. the distance between a cen AB and proxima centauri is about 15000 AU. they are probably gravitationnaly bound.

[Bjørn]

Originally posted by #EDQc:RenegadeZed:

Originally posted by Psilio:

(As a tidbit, Alpha Centauri is the closest system to our own solar system (4,3 LYs from Sol), and it's well known that it is a 2 star system. However since the stars are so far apart from each other, some consider it as 2 separate systems, with one of the stars called Proxima Centauri. Apparently they don't make that distinction in this game.)

Alpha Centauri AB (or a cen AB) is a binary star system. the distance between a cen A and a cen B is the same as the distance between saturn and our sun at some times, and pluto and our sun at some other times. proxima centauri is a third star. the distance between a cen AB and proxima centauri is about 15000 AU.

Ah thanks! Learned something new today as well :)

Disregard my previous statement then, guys...

[JoeShmo]

The problem with the game is that it calculates speed / distance in brackets. Reaching a station 400 ls away your ship will speed up to around 20c, when it gets closer to 100 ls it proportionately slows down to hundreds of ms; and then when it transitions to .XX it scales down equally again...and again...and again.

I call it the "6 seconds out" system.

Because once the game reaches the ETA of 6 seconds....it forever locks your ship into keeping you at 6 seconds for the next 2 minutes.

It is a REALLY terrible way of controlling your speed to destination, considering your ship can utilize a vastly quicker way of getting there; but the game forces you to do it ( and even so with any sort of cruise speed travel ).

I believe the devs were trying to simplify players reaching destinations that were not easily "seen" because of how distance and vewing transitions between brackets of length in the game ( going from outside a system to inside...to near the sun...to near the planet...etc. ). On the flip side of their decision....it means that players have to spend way too much extra time in cruise and/or fighting the speed of your ship.

[JoeShmo]

Originally posted by Psilio:

Originally posted by Rich:

Is c the speed a light???

It is, and as another tidbit, 1 LS is the distance it takes light to travel for 1 second, which is approximately the time it takes it to travel from Earth to our Moon.

A neat bit of horrific knowledge as well:

If our sun went supernova ..we wouldn't know we were going to die "visually" for 8 minutes after the fact. Because the change in light would need 8 minutes to travel from the sun to us on earth.

It wouldn't be:

"POOF!" Watch explosion of sun.

Wait 8 minutes in panic

Keel over.

[Bjørn]

Originally posted by JoeShmo:

It wouldn't be:

"POOF!" Watch explosion of sun.

Wait 8 minutes in panic

Keel over.

Ha ha! I laughed :D

We will at least know when we have to leave our planet, since our star (the sun) will become a red giant, and will grow to a size where it will first fry every living thing on Earth before it engulfs Earth completely.

But we still have a few billion years before it happens... :)

But you are correct. It takes light about 8 minutes to travel from the sun to Earth or vice versa.

[JoeShmo]

Originally posted by Psilio:

Originally posted by JoeShmo:

It wouldn't be:

"POOF!" Watch explosion of sun.

Wait 8 minutes in panic

Keel over.

Ha ha! I laughed :D

We will at least know when we have to leave our planet, since our star (the sun) will become a red giant, and will grow to a size where it will first fry every living thing on Earth before it engulfs Earth completely.

But we still have a few billion years before it happens... :)

If I remember correctly...the red star transformation would put the sun actually right up to earth, but not envelop it. We would lose Venus and Mercury obviously...but earth would just turn into the new "planet on fire" . So it would sort of be like planet nostalgia ....being able to return to its early childhood years as lots of volcanoes and pew pewing.

The interesting part though...is what would happen to Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter and Saturn.

Would the change in gravity and temperature ( including the melting / crashing of the outer dwarf system into the planets ) cause them to possibly create "earth like" planets. Even though 2 of them are gas giants and 2 are ice planets....they are all believed to have solid cores like earth. It could be possible with the changes to our solar system from the super nova...that there is enough sudden or reactive "chaos" for something interesting to happen.

Would be rather neat if we had a "changing of the guard" ..and one of our outer planets became a new "Earth" after billions of years.

[ConcealedFire]

Originally posted by JoeShmo:

Originally posted by Psilio:

Ha ha! I laughed :D

We will at least know when we have to leave our planet, since our star (the sun) will become a red giant, and will grow to a size where it will first fry every living thing on Earth before it engulfs Earth completely.

But we still have a few billion years before it happens... :)

If I remember correctly...the red star transformation would put the sun actually right up to earth, but not envelop it. We would lose Venus and Mercury obviously...but earth would just turn into the new "planet on fire" . So it would sort of be like planet nostalgia ....being able to return to its early childhood years as lots of volcanoes and pew pewing.

The interesting part though...is what would happen to Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter and Saturn.

Would the change in gravity and temperature ( including the melting / crashing of the outer dwarf system into the planets ) cause them to possibly create "earth like" planets. Even though 2 of them are gas giants and 2 are ice planets....they are all believed to have solid cores like earth. It could be possible with the changes to our solar system from the super nova...that there is enough sudden or reactive "chaos" for something interesting to happen.

Would be rather neat if we had a "changing of the guard" ..and one of our outer planets became a new "Earth" after billions of years.

At the height of the expansion, earth will be about the distance from the sun to mercury.
And, the sun will then shrink back to a size smaller than it is now, and then finally collapse in a nova (not a supernova, our sun isn't massive enough)
Also, with that nova so close to the expansion, it would be pointless to colonize Titan, or another gas giant's moon, mostly because the 'natural terraforming' wouldn't be complete until some time after the nova, and, by that point, the whole solar system is pretty much shot for habitation...

[Bjørn]

Interesting stuff posted here in these last 2 posts. I was kind of aiming for Europa being our next home (being a big fan of 2001 / 2010 by Arthur C. Clarke myself), but by the time these events happen we will probably either have exterminated ourselves as a species or moved on to other systems like in this game.

But speculating about this stuff is truly fascinating!

[Bjørn]

In the meantime, let's speculate if life already exists on Jupiter...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uakLB7Eni2E

[Edelweiss ✿]

Ah, another new player succumbed to the trap that is Hutton Orbital. Welcome to your initiation

[Arya]

Oh well, atleast he has He Bo to look forward to. Distance from RES to Roddenberry Station: 0.34 LS