"Set speed" cap at 300 000km/s

[mruk]

Alpha 13, in Set speed mode, player can set speed in unlimited scale.

[Brianetta]

Player can reach those speeds, too, given time.

[PinBlacniP]

Is there any reason to exclude a limit of just below 'c' if there is enough fuel? Surely this will not be a problem when fuel use is implemented for IS flight!

[Brianetta]

At those kind of speeds it'll be obvious that we're using a Newtonian, rather than Einsteinian, model of physics, at which point any limit will seem to be rather arbitrary. One could, in actual fact, fly a spacecraft arbitrarily quickly, fuel permitting. Even above the speed of light. There's no barrier; time changes to accommodate the speed, meaning that even if you could fly to Jupiter in a subjective twenty minutes, observers at the start and destination would see your journey take much longer. They'd also see you become more massive and appear to become less responsive.

A simple way around this is to allow arbitrary speeds for the player ship at will (no NPC will ever bother to accelerate to that extent unless chasing you, in which case, meh, they're practically in your frame) but to fast-forward the rest of the universe by cranking up the stardreamer while sneakily slowing down the ship.

If anybody can be bothered, of course!

[Brianetta]

I've been reading up on this, just to make sure. From the relative POV of the traveller, exceeding the speed of light simply isn't a problem.

If we care about the light speed barrier, the only thing we need to care about are the missions, which are rewarded from the POV of a space station, which saw us asymptotically tend to the speed of light, and apparently get heavier and shorter as we did so. So, we might get some late deliveries, as the clock on our dashboard would be wrong. For maximum hilarity, instead of putting a speed limit on the ship (which isn't realistic in any physics model) we should correct the clock by fast-forwarding it upon docking, if (and only if) the ship went fast enough. I leave the maths to whoever wants to sort this out.

It would be funny in the extreme for relativity to kick the player in the 'nads like that. I'd be 100% behind the idea, too. In fact, I'd write to New Scientist and tell them how awesome our game is, and try for some publicity there. (-:

[s20dan]

Its a nice idea but theres a lot more than time dialation that should be happening at those speeds. The very universe itself would seem to expand, although from the players perspective this would become apparent from the warping of nearby objects. Might be possible with a lens effect and lower field of view.

Relativity would also give the player a viable means of travelling from system to system within a reasonable amount of game time, which might mean we would want to revisit that area too.

Anway, yeah I think it would be cool, but also anyone tackling it should think about more than just time dialation.

[Brianetta]

The warping would be most apparent in external view, and I'd be inclined to hand-wave it. We could colour shift visible objects, which would probably be enough to satisfy most physics nerds. Bearing in mind that our spacecraft have some sort of enhanced display system, perhaps the ship's computer is correcting the distortion, compression, trailing event horizon and colour skew for the pilot's benefit. Not to mention shielding us from the blue-shifted gamma rays hitting the front of the ship.

Perhaps we could take it too far?

[Brianetta]

[22:53] <Brianetta> We're wondering how to deal with the speed of light [22:54] <Brianetta> Somebody logged a feature request, asking that "set speed" mode has a cap of 300,000km/s [22:54] <Brianetta> which isn't how it works in Newton's or Einstein's universes [22:54] <Brianetta> I think, for now, we're going to continue to quietly ignore it [22:55] <Brianetta> although there are some interesting work-arounds [22:55] <tommmmm> you could quietly ignore it yes [22:56] <tommmmm> an alternative would be to stick some faux relativity into the dynamic body update function so that you can only approach c. it would be garbage because the frames and everything else would not be doing special relativity. but it would be a 1-liner [22:57] <Brianetta> Well, *subjective* velocity can exceed C [22:57] <Brianetta> no issues [22:57] <Brianetta> but we could fast-forward the clock on docking [22:57] <Brianetta> "Hey, dude, what took you?" The universe moved on while you were relativistic. [22:58] <_robn> Still have to deal with npcs and interactions with them [22:58] <_robn> They all run on the same clock [22:58] <_robn> Morning lads [22:58] <Brianetta> Well, fast-forward it as soon as you come into "clock sync range" [22:59] <Brianetta> or run the ship's clock extra-fast when at very high V [22:59] <Brianetta> There are ways [22:59] <_robn> They all feel a bit Jacky [23:00] <_robn> Hacky [23:00] <Brianetta> I'm all for ignoring it, frankly [23:00] <Brianetta> This is a newtonian universe. [23:00] <_robn> Agreed! [23:00] <Brianetta> Newtonian physics has no speed limit. [23:00] <Brianetta> Or black holes, alas [23:01] <jpab> It'd make game tuning decisions w.r.t. expected time periods harder to deal with [23:01] <jpab> I'd go with ignoring relativistic time effects [23:01] * Brianetta nods [23:02] <jpab> game-time is hard enough with just the stardreamer [23:02] <tommmmm> it would be pretty mad to try introducing relativity [23:02] <tommmmm> basically all the code would become wrong [23:02] <Brianetta> #366 closed: Newtonian physics doesn't require this. [23:02] <tommmmm> we are only just smart enough to create a newtonian universe :-)

General consensus is that we overlook this, on the grounds that the game is modelling Newtonian physics, not relativity.

[PinBlacniP]

Just impliment fule consumption ... it will then be a non-problem, because one COULD NOT carry that much fuel!!!