So it appears that there's half an hour of our time per day in the FL universe according to Digital Anvil. I don't exactly know what the hell that number is used for, though.
Could we say, use it to work out ZOI's? Instead of saying "Corsairs can't go to liberty" and "Ur cap ship can't fly this far away from base", say that ships have a flying range of X days, and go from there? Giving us actual, role playing reasons as to why we can't do such and such a thing. And then the ability to make the necessary deals and politicking from there?
the edgeworlds are mostly travelled in destroyers or capital ships in general than in fighters, cause fighters are short range ships - and capital ships can travel the huge distances easier.
thats why in delta - the BHG uses mostly destroyers - cause ... back then... they had no base that far away. ( refers to the NPCs )
In our own solar system (sol), earth is one AU (astronomical unit) from the sun. It takes light 8 minutes to travel from the sun to earth, passing by two planets along the way. Jupiter is 5 AU from the sun, meaning 40 minutes of travel time at the speed of light. Saturn is about twice that distance, so that trip would take two hours.
I recall from somewhere that trade lanes in FL allow ships to travel at the speed of light within a solar system. I would venture a guess that travelling between any two planets via tradelane probably takes anywhere from 3 to 10 minutes, and travelling across an entire system probably takes one to two hours.
Why, then, would Trent take roughly two weeks to travel from Bretonia to Liberty? My guess is fuel limitations and frequent stops, most of that time he probably spent at stations or planets along the way, he wasnt flying in space constantly for that duration.
It could also be that jumps between systems take longer than we percieve due to time dilation from bending space. It could be that the 10~ second transition sequence from one system to another is really taking a day or more in real-time.
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' Wrote:Hehe, sometimes it does, i think. :D
Say that to the guy that decided to put apes on Planet Primus for some unknown reason, decided ships should explode if they go further than xK from the centre of the system, made planets 10-30K wide, and put Apes on Primus.
[22:47:54 | Edited 22:48:05] Alex: List unrealistic things in FL?
[22:47:55] Alex: Gogogo
[23:02:10] Peter: - the sizes. planets, suns, fields, clouds ect are too small. I know there's a limit, but hell a 15-20K planet is too much ask? and a 400K-500K system. ( though personally I would make 30-40K planets and about 1500K systems.
- Why can't you put a cd AND a torpedo slot on a ship?
- Why do bombers have to mount slow **** guns? their powerplant could support fighterguns without any problem.
- Why does radiation damage you hull?
Trent landed on Manhattan two weeks after the Freeport 7 attack. The reasoning for why they didn't drop off the wounded in Rheinland escapes me, but I'm assuming they made best speed to Manhattan.
' Wrote:Hehe, sometimes it does, i think. :D
Back to topic (I'm referring NOT to reality and real life physics!):
Within the physics of FL, trade lane travel is done in sublight speed while the use of jumpgates and anomalies moves you with superlight speed acroos the universe.
This causes a time effect and you travels months while the pilot and crew feels it were just seconds.
I'm sure I had read this somewhere on a FL related source but I cannot recall where.
this is so close to the truth its scary.....
tradelanes speed up time for the pilot. space is not space, space is space/time.
the reason why our ships are limited to 350 is because to go faster than that would make us younger than the universe. and this would result in juvenile behaviour, such as saying 'lull' and 'roffle' over the radio; these are not real words, but the sounds that babies make when first learning to speak.
if we were to constantly accelerate from manhatten to kusari, we'd end up exploding, as we'd get so young we'd experience the big-bang first hand. this is why when we fly so far off the edge of the map our ships explode; we have travelled so far back in time that the universe has ceased to exist.
the reason why planets and ships are so big compared to say suns is due to a psychological phenomenon known as 'set perceptual set. this describes how our preconceptions influence what we perceive... we conceive of a planet as a large, comfortable place where we were born, and so it seems larger to us than it really is. the same is true of our ships, they SEEM really large, but i'm afraid that's the 'climbing back inside the womb' thingy we get: the ships keep us safe in the cold dark depths of space. we never feel this connection to space stations and asteroids, as we didnt evolve on them, and so we know that they are flimsy things; thus we see them closer to their real sizes.
in fact, as we look at the sun, our brains refuse to accept that the sun is large, because its always been a small but bright light in the sky, and now its a large and bright thing in space? no-way says our brains, and remodells it to a more manageable perspective.
the fire-on-your-ship-just before explosion comes from oxygen leaking OUT of your craft.
finally, the reason why the tradelanes never move is because everything in the universe is moving at such a slow speed: ageira et al can easily program the tradelanes and jumpgates TO ORBIT THE SUN AT THE SAME RATE AS THE PLANETS, and so it appears that the bases and tradelanes never move.
As V gets closer to the speed of light, you'll be attempting to get the square root of a smaller and smaller number until you have a time dilation factor of 0. This basically means that time will pass instantly.
So the faster you go, the quicker your journey will be, except that time will pass normally to everyone else, so by the time you arrived at the end of the tradelane it's entirely possible the human race would be extinct.
Also, it's impossible to reach the speed of light, and if you went by our solar system as a guide, it would take many years just to get from planet to planet (with our current technology that is).
My final point? Freelancer obeys pretty much no rules of physics, so stop worrying about it and enjoy the game.
For my trader i use the term 'weeks ago', if i tell someone about the lat trade runs i made. It looks silly, in my view, if i tell them about the drinks on New London 30 minutes ago, whil beeing in NY for exapmle.
On my weapon dealer, i play in realtime.
Side note: Realism is boring. IF distances, planets suns etc. are correct in size, we all would need hours to cross a system without lanes. Even cruising to the next lane, if disrupted, isnt an option anymore. If you want realism, go out of your rooms...