Freelancer Timeline

[Snapp]

On a side note, looks like Chris Roberts intended for us to return to Sol. Shame that it didn't happen, I would've loved to see that.

Maybe we still can? Put Sol in a system all alone in the bottom corner of the map maybe? either way your right here it woulda been nice if he had been given the time and allowed to do everything for the game he had plans to do.

HOWEVER, Igiss AND the game itself states that the sleeper ships did indeed use jump drives, allowing them to defy the laws of physics and exceed the speed of light, thus reducing the travel time by a huge amount.
"I presume that sleeper ships had some sort of warp drives, if they didn't have FTL, the journey would take too much time." - Igiss

This is the only thing that i didnt count, was if they used a jumpdrive or something of that sort which would make the journey take alot less time.

(Apparently, they went past Sirius to find a cluster of stars behind it. They just used the gravity of Sirius to accelerate them and activate their jump drives.)

This is why i didnt count the jumpdrives, they wouldnt have been able to activate them until they were already nearing Sirius. Which would mean the first 1/3 of the journey was still made the slow way taking possibly hundreds of years.

Hypersleep, yes, anything more than 5-10 years would require a stasis of some kind i think.

Anyways, i think im going to go by the dates i came up with, they just make sense to me. 800 years of hypersleep is alot easier explination for it, without digging into the accual physics of space travel.

Does a mod version only span 1 year?

Not really, but to explain, i worked it out like that so that the real current date and time can/will match up with the current date/time in Sirius. Again, for me atleast, doing it that way makes it ALOT easier to determine times and dates as to when things happen to my characters and or events in-game. Its an easy thing to simply turn 2008/12/30 into 3808/12/30 or 808/12/30, if that makes sense. :) My guess is that Chris roberts did much the same thing, just look at what was happening in real life (2000 A.D.) as he was creating the singleplayer story (800 A.S.), i find it a little too much of a coincidence the last two digits in the year match up precisely. So i simply carried the dates on up to present day which means the last 4-5 entries on the first post of this topic accually took place between 2007/2008 IRL or 807/808 A.S.

edited instead of a new reply:

I think what's confusing you is the distance between Sirius and Sol. Sirius is actually very close to Sol, being only 8.6 light years away. However, the general consensus is that the sleeper ships simply used Sirius' as a slingshot to go much farther than the real Sirius star system.

I wouldnt say im confused at all, i absolutely undestand the "slingshot" and the distance/time, infact, thats why i believe the 800 year "traveltime" even if it was entirely spent at jumpdrive, near light, or warp speeds.

Comparison,
"The nearest known star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.23 light-years away. The fastest outward-bound spacecraft yet sent, Voyager 1, has covered 1/600th of a light-year in 30 years and is currently moving at 1/18,000th the speed of light. At this rate, a journey to Proxima Centauri would take 72,000 years."

Even if the sleepers were going as fast as 1/100th the speed of light (a speed which is highly doubtfull without a FTL drive and flat out improbable on thrusters/rockets/nulcear alone) it would still take 860 years to get to the Sirius star 8.6ly away.
The ONLY way to shorten that timeframe is if the jumpdrives could attain 1/95th the speed of light or faster. Which to me means that the 800 year traveltime seems to be about right, since as the closer you get to the speed of light the harder it is to achieve and maintain it.