[IronForge]

Would someone care to enlighten me as to how long a superdestroyer like the sathanas can stay in space without docking or returning to base? After all, it IS the base. Same for orions, just why can't they put in a few farms, re-route some of the power to food growing operations, and stay independent basically for ever?
Then the subject of fuel, in space, things just kinda keep going in a straight line unless bumped. Which happens sometimes so best keep some fuel handy... but for propulsion, once cruise speed is achieved, thats basically it.

So, the million dollar question.
WHY CAN'T THE SATHS JUST SLOWBOAT OUT OF CAPELLA and nuke everyone else?
Also,
WHY CAN'T THE GTVA JUST SEND SOME FOOD-GROWING EQUIPPED SHIPS BACK TO SOL?

I mean jump nodes enable fast travel, but is by no means the only way to get from point A to point B...
So technically a fleet of orions designed to carry enough or grow enough food for the journey can evacuate SoL, reunite everyone with their families, and end of story.
And this makes a great campaign plotline...
FREESPACE 3: IN EXILE. OR something like that. Maybe everyone got nuked and the GTVA sends 5 ships full of people on the run, Battlestar Galactica style but without any destination or jump drives. Settling down again will just mean getting found again, and so best bet is actually to sit halfway between systems and deliberately drift offcourse. Without any coordinates to jump to, no one can find you...

TLDR: Get 10 or so huge ships (with cryogenic facilities even better if the technology exists outside of Blue Planet universe) and set course for SoL the manual method, no fancy jump node and all. Then get everyone out of there, same method. Sure it will take 50 years or so, but heck, who cares how long it takes? Those ships can last forever.

[Jeff Vader]

in space, things just kinda keep going in a straight line unless bumped.

In space: perhaps. In FreeSpace: apparently not.

WHY CAN'T THE SATHS JUST SLOWBOAT OUT OF CAPELLA and nuke everyone else?

Personally I'm still assuming they jumped to a galaxy far, far away during the supernova.

WHY CAN'T THE GTVA JUST SEND SOME FOOD-GROWING EQUIPPED SHIPS BACK TO SOL?

They probably don't want to, since (according to Wikipedia), Delta Serpentis is roughly 210 lightyears away from Sol. And the question remains: why would they want to move the entire GTVA to Sol? Solely because of the families? That good ol' sun? Vodka?

[Mongoose]

They probably don't want to, since (according to Wikipedia), Delta Serpentis is roughly 210 lightyears away from Sol. And the question remains: why would they want to move the entire GTVA to Sol? Solely because of the families? That good ol' sun? Vodka?

Alpha Centauri is a hell of a lot closer, though.

[Jeff Vader]

They probably don't want to, since (according to Wikipedia), Delta Serpentis is roughly 210 lightyears away from Sol. And the question remains: why would they want to move the entire GTVA to Sol? Solely because of the families? That good ol' sun? Vodka?

Alpha Centauri is a hell of a lot closer, though.

Touché. I was going with the "the node was in D-S, ignore everything else" principal.

[ChronoReverse]

With propulsion there's two options: high acceleration high fuel usage or low acceleration low fuel usage.

For the first option, you'll need a ship that is only rocket and fuel.  Half the journey will be spent accelerating and the other half will be spent decelerating.  But there's no room for anything else.  It won't actually be that fast though.  High acceleration means the fuel usage is so high that there's no possibility of reaching relativistic speeds.  The more fuel you carry, the more mass needs to be accelerated.  It's a losing battle.

For the latter option, you don't need much fuel so you have space for the other stuff.  But the acceleration is infinitesimal (again, half the journey is acceleration and the other half is deceleration).  Eventually you'll build up to an appreciable fraction of c but it'll take over half a century to cross 4 light-years.  Now, if you're going a longer haul, say 100 light-years, since you can build up to a large fraction of c, the pace is quite good.  But it'll still take over a hundred years to cross 100 light-years...


Neither solution is exactly useful.

[Pred the Penguin]

Or... FS doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Personally I'm still assuming they jumped to a galaxy far, far away during the supernova.

The Jedi are going to get quite a shock from that.

[Vip]

Or... FS doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Personally I'm still assuming they jumped to a galaxy far, far away during the supernova.

The Jedi are going to get quite a shock from that.

Oh, I can already see a new series of books. "Luke Skywalker discovers an ancient enemy from a different galaxy that possesses a weapon unlike any other. Will the Skywalker family manage to find a way to defeat the seemingly invincible adversary before every star in the galaxy is destroyed ?"

[General Battuta]

I think the primary reason is that FS ships aren't built for sublight travel and thus don't carry nearly enough fuel to make the transit in a reasonable time.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

TLDR: Get 10 or so huge ships (with cryogenic facilities even better if the technology exists outside of Blue Planet universe) and set course for SoL the manual method, no fancy jump node and all. Then get everyone out of there, same method. Sure it will take 50 years or so, but heck, who cares how long it takes? Those ships can last forever.

Wait, are you suggesting to travel 4 lightyears at a speed of 15mps? That should take some more than 50 years...

[Nuclear1]

set course for SoL

For Shadows of Lylat?

[Colonol Dekker]

Snipes- Onoz Shivans in SOL!
 
Petrarch- Do a barrel roll!

[Commander Zane]

Bosch - I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Snipes.

[Thaeris]

I think the primary reason is that FS ships aren't built for sublight travel and thus don't carry nearly enough fuel to make the transit in a reasonable time.

I realize we've had numerous discussions on this matter before... However,

(a.) Again, I'll cite that I feel the FS-verse relies heavily on the "play with game mechanics, tell the story with elements of real mechanics." Any ship which must be capable of course correction in a vacuum full of gravity wells must be capable of operating without subspace. If your ship doesn't have the power to break orbit with its main engines or get SOMEWHERE on its own power, that vessel is doomed if your subspace drives fail. Capship speed in FS is a game mechanic if there ever was one. A game with a two- or three- kilometer long thunderstick moving at 9,000 m/s is not fun for a fighter pilot (AKA: you) to do strafing runs on. Slow speed relative to the player with subspace enables gameplay to feel challenging in a small region while the pace of the operation is enabled to feel alive and even frantic due to extreme mobility. The load that FS ships can't do long-term space flight is pretty stale, as although it's never seen in the main campaign, it's that way for a reason: the fighter pilot is not entertained by long-term fleet movements. That said, there's no reason to discourage an author from including something like that as long as the story and feel is believable.

(b.) This is another issue we've touched on in a different thread, Battuta. Subspace "flight" is only roughly defined in the main FS elements available in retail FS. We don't know how much energy it takes to do a jump, though you'd assume that the larger the ship, the more power it would need. Over a long-range intra-system jump, you'd probably use less resources than if you went out under sublight power. Over very short ranges, that might be careless use of the ship resources. This is further argument for why ships would need to be capable of operation without subspace. That said, we're given the idea that FS ships use fusion drives. Nuclear power FTW. An ideal nuclear-powered ship would hopefully be using an extremely dense fuel (good for space in the ship) which would be broken down with very high efficiency. The result of this is that you release a massive amount of energy when running the engines (thus producing a great deal of thrust) while not having a ludicrous fraction of the ship reserved for fuel storage. I'll counter your argument that "it's not canon"... which is a little true... by asking the question: how is it not?

(c.) That in mind, the reason you'd not devote your resources to long-range inter-system travel in the FS verse is that it doesn't seem to fit the times well. Just like our governments won't seem to invest the time and manpower/brainpower in sending real-world space expeditions out there (as the current means are not economically justifiable in the short term), the FS governments won't either. Ships can do intersystem jumps through stable nodes. It's a proven method and it meshes well with the intersystem economy. And when you're in a situation like Reconstruction, a civil war, possible dissidents to quell (apart from the NTF/HOL... you know, the possibility of pirates), a second Shivan incursion, and rebuilding after the loss of an entire system - not to mention all the possible new node routes from that system - the last thing on your mind, no matter how much you want to do it, is going to be an unconventionally conventional space flight op between two star systems. Specialized ships, crews, and technological development (though this would have probably been the first sort of thing you'd see in real life development) for crossing light years of space at a proverbial snail's pace IS NOT going to be on your government's mind. And lastly, if the Shivans really wanted to cruise on in the slow way, it would still potentially take decades - if not milennia - to do so due to some of the distances by sublight power alone.

[General Battuta]

a.) You need to check your engineering. Whether or not the ships have power to break orbit and stuff like that is irrelevant. They can have the ability to move at realistic fusion drive speeds and it still won't matter to interstellar travel. They do not seem to carry enough fuel.

b.) Subspace is totally irrelevant to this discussion. The issue is whether intersystem transit is realistic using FS designs. The ships probably do not carry enough fuel to make the transit in a reasonable period (within their own operational longevity.) You do, indeed, need a ludicrous fraction of the ship for fuel storage, even with the high specific impulse of a fusion engine (the type of which is left to the imagination.)

c.) The fact that no STL transit to Sol was attempted during Reconstruction probably indicates it is not practical using existing FS ship designs. A specially designed vessel might be able to make the transit.

In the end your decision to ignore in-game speed measurements, while believable, simply opens the door to making up whatever we want. Canonical speed is all we have. Anything else is fanwank.

Go through your, post find every sentence with 'probably', 'ideally', 'hopefully', and remove them. See how the argument holds up.

FreeSpace is a setting defined by subspace travel. The ships do not appear to have the ability to move faster than a few meters per second at sublight speeds. Change that and you need to discard fighters and turn the entire thing into another iteration of Alastair Reynolds or Transhuman Space.

[Sushi]

c.) The fact that no STL transit to Sol was attempted during Reconstruction probably indicates it is not practical using existing FS ship designs. A specially designed vessel might be able to make the transit.

And, as I mentioned in the other thread, it's a great possibility for a custom campaign. So everyone should stop whining about the fact that the GTA/GTVA didn't try it and write a story about what happened when they did.

[Mongoose]

I don't think moving away from the concept of the in-game displayed ship speeds as some sort of absolute value necessarily entails scrapping the entire FS combat model.  Just the canon fact that capital ships are often in-orbit around a particular planet obviously implies that, at least in that planetary frame of reference, said ships are moving at orbital velocities.  This doesn't necessarily mean that something like an Orion can break orbit under its own power, much less undertake some sort of interstellar journey at sublight speeds, but it at least has to be able to maintain said orbit.  I've always been fairly comfortable with doing a bit of handwavium and treating the low in-game speeds as being relative to some external frame-of-reference, be it a planet or installation.  That way, you get to keep the need for small, relatively-fast combat craft, but you're not stuck trying to rationalize why a two-kilometer-long starship would be moving as fast as a city bus.

(Granted, the whole discussion is rendered moot by the game's made-for-fun, non-Newtonian physics framework, but you get my point. )

[General Battuta]

Precisely. The fact is, it's a WWII-in-space combat model, rather like Star Trek and Star Wars.

Unfortunately, Mongoose, if you move away from that model you also introduce concerns about fuel burn, endurance, specific impulse and delta-V. None of these are favorable to manned fighters.

[Commander Zane]

How is that? Star Trek and Star Wars are no more Newtonian than FreeSpace unless you're referring to something else.

[The E]

He meant that, like fighter actions in ST and SW, the action in FS2 is patterned after WW2 dogfights. That is, close-range, gun based dogfighting instead of BVR missile sniping.

[Dragon]

Unfortunately, Mongoose, if you move away from that model you also introduce concerns about fuel burn, endurance, specific impulse and delta-V. None of these are favorable to manned fighters.

Play The Minbari Project if you want realistic physics, FS2 physics are made just for fun.
Of course, fully Newtonian flight model can also be fun (as proven by TMP), but is much more difficult to master.