Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Kitsune on May 21, 2002, 06:42:37 pm
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I'm writing up some technical info on the Freespace ships. But what I'm after is the distance travelled in the final mission in FS one.
Where it takes about what, 10 minutes for the Lucy to run from Delta Serpentis to Sol. (I think it's Delta Serpentis, might be another system.)
Anyone know the RL distance that would cross?
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Check the mission briefing, it says how long you have (of course, you don't have to abide by it:D)
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As your topic suggests... there really isn't a constant speed... if there is even any speed in subspace at all.... personally the lucy mission threw out all my theories on subspace... the theory that objects break down into their elements, then reassemble on the other side... as for the distance to SOL -> Delta Serpentus (was that the system?) Im not sure.
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Indeed it was Delta Serpentis, and that 2nd last mission on FS1 was rigged, there was no way the Bastion could've reached the node in time, even if you kept the "B"s hull above 35%(Clash of the titans, 3rd last mission) the Lucy will still be about 10 klicks away and just jumping out.
And, the distance you would travel would be THOUSANDS, if not 10s of thousands of light years between star systems.
Hope that helps...prolly not, but oh well
Cya
Cor
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There's no way to know for sure how fast intersystem travel is. I did a quick calc for the trip from Delta Serprentis to Sol and came up with nearly 90 lightyears an hour for the trip. But given that its only one trip, and we really don't know exactly how long the voyage was, its hard to say for sure.
It is fast though, even if it is so limited.
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Well you have 7 minutes to stop the lucy, but I've always managed to take less than three to get to the node. So I figure it traverses the distance in 10 mintues.
The distance from Delta Serpentis to Sol is what I'm after.
The rest of the math I can deal with on my own.
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systems arent all thousands of lightyears away, Alpha Centauri is only about 4 lightyears from Sol....Delta Serpentis on the node maps doesnt look that much farther from Sol when compared with the distance from Sol to Alpha Centauri, so my guess is that for freespace purposes, somewhere between 4-6 light years. Do a search on the net, im sure theres some astronomy site with Delta Serpentis on it and its distance from earth.
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You're asking for the imaginary speed of an imaginary warship of an imaginary race crossing from a largely imaginary star system on an imaginary mission using an imaginary spatial phenomenon. If there was ever a time for bloody guessing, this is it.
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Originally posted by Stryke 9
of an imaginary race crossing from a largely imaginary star system
Imaginary race... Terrans.... humans.... we are imaginary? jeezus... and look up in the sky... you can see Delta Serpentus... and you can hopefully see SOL.... the only system they made up was Vasuda.
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Shivans and planets in Delta Serpentis. Even if there are some, they won't be like FS had them.
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Delta Serpentis is 88 Light Years away (Eishtmo's information posted on this very website - Do a search for Stars of Freespace)
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The distance travelled in subspace probably has nothing to do with the distance in realspace. For all we know subspace is like an intestine: a mass of tunnels that are twisted up into a strange shape. It may take 10 minutes to cross 88 lightyears sometimes, and several hours to cross 1 other times. Who knows?
Stryke 9 also has an excellent suggestion. The time given was only there for plot purposes and there are enough unknowns that you can do whatever you want as long as the time between systems remains more or less constant.
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Well the Nereid was supposed to take 15 minutes to cross from vega. The Lucifer took around 10 to cross from DS to sol so it makes sense to say that all subspace travel takes about that length of time regardless of distance.
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Thanks Karajoma. I tried google and a few other engines but hell, try doing a search on delta serpentis. I had about 5 pages of results, 80% of them was for Freespace.
The only one I found that mentioned DS that wasn't a FS site didn't give the info I wanted. And the others weren't anything except pages that had 'delta' and 'serpentis' somewhere on the same page.
I figure that how quickly you can traverse the subspace corridor is relevant to how long it takes you to get from point A to point B and then activate your drive to get out.
The lucy travels at what, 20m/s or so. But an orion usually goes at 15 I think. Which would be enough to give a couple minutes of variance.
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The FS1 Lucy mission is useless when it comes to the finding out how subspace works, disregard it...;)
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Celestia says that DS is 209 light years from earth. Vega is 25 away. Face it, there's no way to calculate subspace speeds.
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Personally i dont like the FS node map, i think they just thought up ever star they could think of and threw it in.
I used to play Frontier Ellite a lot (i wasted many an hour trading between sol and barnards star, and some of the imperial systems). I base all my star location knoledge upon its map, it made more sence that the FS one. According to it, vega and cappela are on different sides of Sol, in FS they are next to each other (?).
Most of the FS stars you can recognise from FE. I cant remember a Delta serpentis on it, I remember a 'Delta', but i dunno what the second half was (it had a desert world on it). Cappella was on it, it was the Federal Navy base(or maybee it was eta cassopia), and vega was a bright white star with a jungle planet.
I think one of the causes in map difference was FE was looking down upon the galaxy's spiral arm, and FS is looking from the side.
Mr Vega is right about the Vega --> sol distance.
Ahhh, Frontier ellite was great, but enough of my rambling.
Here's some star maps that seem to check out, and some have distances:
http://www.projectrho.com/smap12.html
I recomend this one http://www.projectrho.com/smap07a.html
Anyway, back to freespace.
Technically the lucifer didnt travel relative to this dimension, since it went in hyperspace, so distance shouldn't really be applied, but...
It takes a few minutes for an intersystem jump (Lucifer example).
Although the distance in subspace was about 10000m, the actaull distance on the FS node map appears to be about 6ly's. So about 51 lightyears an hour.
But never compair subspace and realspace distances. Ever. Its like sayying you have more apples than sound because you have 40 apples and 30dB of sound. It just doesnt work.
pete
Edit: i have recently discovered the system i know to begin with 'delta' was Delta Panvios, about 18ly's from sol, not Delta Serpentis.
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It's too bad that taking minutes to perform intersystem jumps is official. It's kind of stupid. Imagine the pace of a war like that. Moving your entire fleet across your space would take under an hour! Considering how fast movement is, there is not much reason to have defense in one area. Just rush it to wherever it is needed when you get called. Then again, beams can forcefully dismantle things rather quickly, so maybe it all balances out.
It's easy to see why the duration of the Great War was measured in days.
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Originally posted by NotDefault
It's too bad that taking minutes to perform intersystem jumps is official. It's kind of stupid. Imagine the pace of a war like that. Moving your entire fleet across your space would take under an hour! Considering how fast movement is, there is not much reason to have defense in one area. Just rush it to wherever it is needed when you get called. Then again, beams can forcefully dismantle things rather quickly, so maybe it all balances out.
It's easy to see why the duration of the Great War was measured in days.
Although they can travel through subspace quickly and intrasystem jumps are near instant, the ships still have to travel between the jumpnodes. You probably can't warp in right next to jump node from somewhere else in the system due to the in rift in subspace, and big ships need to charge their jump drives too.
I recon it would take about a day to move a large fleet across GTVA space. Individualy destroyers would be less, about 15hours, and smaller ships a good bit quicker.
Pete
*ooooo, 100th post*
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Just a little note, but distances between astral bodies are not constants. Moons orbit around planets. Planets orbit around suns. Suns orbit the center of their galaxy. (And I think I read somewhere that our galaxy at least is spreading out a bit. And that the whole galaxy is moving.) As far as subspace, I've always thought of it as another reality where the laws of physics were different and ships could either go faster or the geography of the universe is different so they can get from one real space point to another by going a shorter distance in subspace. (Something like A Wrinkle in Time's tesserect.)
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True but when you measure your distances in light years it takes a long while for things like galactic rotation to make a difference and things like planetary orbits are negligable anyway :)
Still if you wanted to set a mission 10,000 years in the future you might have to make changes :))
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Since subspace is supposed to be a dimension that exists relatively apart from our own (on another layer if you will) the distance between stars and the time it takes is arbitrary. Subspace, aside from jump nodes, does not have any correspondance with normal space. Vega may be 25 light years away from Sol but it takes 4 jumps (that may be over an hour just in subspace jumps - but then there are all the systems to cross) while Delta Serpentis is 209 (thats what someone said up there) and takes one jump with about 10 minutes of subspace travel time. Its impossible to calculate the distance travelled in subspace compaired to normal space by using the time taken inside subspace - its relative.
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I know this doesnt have much to do with freespace's idea of subspace, but for all those struggling to understand some basic things about travelling faster than light, i think its important to explain, since ive seen about 4 topics today discussing jump nodes and the like:
Take a peice of paper, and draw 2 dots on it, a good few centimeters apart. Now whats the shortest distance between them? A straight line? Wrong. The actual shortest distance is 0. Fold the paper so the dots match up, it'll show that.
If u can fold space, the distance you have to travel is reduced greatly.
A lot of sci fi bases itself upon this theory.
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However freespace is based up the theory that there are multiple dimensions existing, each with their own set of physics laws, different from ours. In FS1 it explained that when a ship wants to slip into the dimension of subspace, it vibrates at a set frequency, and it leaves our physical dimension and only exists in freespace till it leaves it again.
Jumpnodes are used to to do intersystem jumps because the jumpnodes form where the gravity of stars weakens the separation between subspace and real space. However this does not explain why intersystem jumps take more time than jumps in the same system. We assume that it takes less time, but we cannot explain it from what we are told in freespace. The obvious answer is that there is less distance to cover, but in distance in subspace are irrelevant of realspace distances, sine its a different dimension. In fact, it is most probable that a seperate dimension is created for each intrasystem jump, since there have been no cases of intercepting a ship in subspace jumping around a system.
Lesson : Never ( ever ) compair subspace and realspace. DON'T.
it upsets me. :( :mad:
If you want to write up some useful information about subspace Kitsune, write about how a ship acheives subspace.
pete
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Originally posted by IceFire
Since subspace is supposed to be a dimension that exists relatively apart from our own (on another layer if you will) the distance between stars and the time it takes is arbitrary. Subspace, aside from jump nodes, does not have any correspondance with normal space. Vega may be 25 light years away from Sol but it takes 4 jumps (that may be over an hour just in subspace jumps - but then there are all the systems to cross) while Delta Serpentis is 209 (thats what someone said up there) and takes one jump with about 10 minutes of subspace travel time. Its impossible to calculate the distance travelled in subspace compaired to normal space by using the time taken inside subspace - its relative.
While I agree with you that it's all relative you aren`t comparing like with like. There is no node between vega and sol so it doesn`t matter how far apart they are.
Here's a good example of what I mean.
Suppose the Sol - Delta Serpentis jump takes 10 minutes and that the distance covered is 100 light years. (figures may not be correct)
Now suppose Regulus is about 400 Light Years away from Polaris. Would a jump from one to the other take 40 minutes or 10?
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Okay, it's obvious I'm going to have to fudge it all since I can't get any kind of concrete answer that can be agreed on.
But you have shown a point that I'm going to have to arbitrarily put down some numbers for ease of gameplay.
About one minute of subspace travel (At 50 m/s) covers 10 LightYears worth of distance.
This way intersystem jumps would be near instantaneous. Except for the drives powering up, getting up to speed, travel the distance, then exiting and slowing down.
And while I'm going to briefly describe the subspace drive, I'm not going into details on it as I'm a mechanic, not a physicist And it sure as hell wouldn't hold any water for some of the nit-pickers who won't simply take 'It works, some how it works.'
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Now suppose Regulus is about 400 Light Years away from Polaris. Would a jump from one to the other take 40 minutes or 10?
Or 5 or 16.5 minutes or 23 minutes.....the distances in normal space are irrelevant.
If we use the paper analogy...then imagine two pieces of paper one ontop of the other. Every place there is a star on the bottom piece of paper, there is a dent in the top piece of paper. That shows us the gravitational effects on subspace. Now, take some straws and link up the appropriate stars (always going up to subspace and then back down to the star). Now...take that second piece of paper and make it a 1000th of the size (thats impossible but this is the analogy) and scrunch it up a bit. Now you've got subspace and real space. The real space paper is nice and "flat" while the subspace one is at an angle and with lots of dents and scrunch marks.
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Position in subspace is tottaly irrelevant of position or distance in real space. Subspace is not a shrunk version of real space.
Accept it.
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Pete, if that was the case, why didn't the Lucy jump to subspace, then immediately jump out again after a minute to recharge it's engines?!