Travel time in I:B

Several ways to balance it:
-Random exit locations (your suggestion)
-Entry/exit speed requirements (have be moving at a certain rate in, means you have to slow down/speed up when you exit)
-Cooldowns
-Broadcasting exit location (think a gaping hole opening up before you arrive, broadcasting radio waves)

As someone who only did a little bit of study on the matter, what would they see? I assumed anything moving at a significant fraction of c (relative to them, of course) would appear to be running on “fast forward,” although it’s hard to imagine them seeing anything for long enough to register the change.

Hm. Now that I’ve thought about it, I see what you mean. To the “moving” twin, they are stationary and the world is the thing moving. So how does the time paradox resolve itself, when you come out of the flight?

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BINGO! So, understanding that, what does the “moving” twin see when they look out their window?

The situation is only symmetric while the “moving” twin is cruising. When it’s accelerating up to speed, or decelerating back to match the “stationary” twin, it is experiencing something that the “stationary” twin isn’t (because acceleration isn’t relative; one twin objectively has a force acting on it, while the other twin objectively does not).

It’s this acceleration that “locks in” the time dilation effects.

Anything moving relative to them being squashed along the axis of travel. That would look…strange, as orbit. I wonder if an orbit at a significant fraction of c would 1. be possible and 2. have the same effects. To the googles!

Gotcha. That sounds vaguely familiar, like it might have been part of the lesson from college, but that was…seven years ago now? Heh. So is it the relative difference in velocity, or the acceleration, that actually results in the dilation?

Both, I guess? It’s the relative difference in speed (direction doesn’t matter so much) that causes the time dilation. It’s the fact that only one of the twins experiences acceleration that causes the difference in aging. Two different things with two different causes.

Yes, and yes. The only catch is that you need a gravitational source that is strong enough to hold an orbit at a significant fraction of c. So, we’re talking neutron stars or black holes.

Indeed, there’s an expected feature of a black hole called the photon sphere (not to be confused with a photosphere!), where the orbital velocity is exactly c.

Or you can make the jumps only possible where there are very low gravity fields. So ships can only jump a significant distance away from planets or other massive objects.

There could also be jump gates that “stabilize gravity” or some other sci-fi explanation that can allow people to jump close to a gravity field or inside an artificial gravity distortion field.

I’d suggest the following, assuming light speed as a speed limit, and assuming the use of micro-jumps:

  1. Warp up to some significant speed, aligned with a planet.
  2. Hit the jump button
  3. Generate a flash at the origin and rocket away through the system. Ships may not alter velocity once a jump starts.
  4. Take perhaps 10-20 seconds per AU to reach the destination. During that time, anyone looking will see a bright light zipping through the system.
  5. Arrive at destination, generating another flash.
  6. The arrival point is dependent upon the lineup with the targeted planet, but will always place the ship at least X minutes out from the planet. Arrival velocity matches departure velocity.

The X minutes out thing is to ensure that ships can be intercepted before reaching the destination. Most optimally, defending ships would spot incoming jumps and move to the normal interception point, then try to stop the ships. The farther a planet is from other planets, the more capably it can be defended because of the 10-20 second delay per AU of jump. The ships cannot be intercepted mid-jump, so the mechanics must provide time and space to make the interception upon arrival.

A poorly-aligned jump will result in an arrival in the boonies somewhere near the planet (I won’t go into the math). The general idea is that if you align perfectly, you’ll arrive perhaps 5M km out (0.04AU). The more misaligned you are, the farther off to the side and away from the planet you’ll get. If you just jump randomly, you could end up several AU from the closest planet, requiring a new jump. That technique would allow ships to reach various locations around a system so that they could then jump at their final destination from an unusual direction. If recharging for a jump takes time, there would be a natural balance between back door approaches and fast approaches.

Yes, letting players mess with the rules of jumping would make sense. My preference would be to implement something that allows player skill to determine how close a ship gets, and the more familiar a player is with a particular jump, the better they can get at it.


For those pondering movement systems, I invite you to look at the warp prototype videos. That system allowed ships to fly seamlessly around a system using only warp. Naturally, the warp drive could get ships well over the speed of light. In the prototype, 50c was the speed limit.

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I really like JBs idea.

Staying with 1c “warp” and “micro-jump” has its upsides. Battles will mostly happen close to big bodies. (Devs could put asteroids and bases out in the blu…black, to mix it up a little).
What is really important is to not just teleport the ship but have it travel. I know, it would look the same because the planets would just disapear, adding a 1-2 second avceleration would help show that it’s actually moving and not just a teleport, justifying the work and also, partially, the travel time.
Making “Jumping” ships visible can be balanced too. Maybe just have them be visible in the visual range, without sensors responding, people would actually need to look out if they wanted to spot aproaching ships, the brigthnes could be related to size etc… (Just noticed JB did flesh out that part similary)

What could be done with JB idea additionaly is to not have selectors for destinations. Just point and fire. The algorithm will then determine if the path crosses a destination, alter the couse a miniscule ammount to point at the “random” exit location and proceed with travel. If it doesn’t cross a destination the ship will just race by and the pilot needs to abort the jump or continue flying into the nothingness.

The “Tactical” game DLC could feature beacons pilots can throw out to generate virtual destinations for team rally points or such. It could also affect enemies but that’s another sub-topic.

Kerbal space prog uses this but simplified system:

You cannot time warp xx times while lower than eg. 120km.
Once you leave lower orbit u can increase time warp.

IBS could use a simple size/mass algorythm on its planets to enable jump drives

That was the intention. My first step was originally “Target destination”, which I took out, realizing that would kill the organic nature of jumping. The system could be made to be very interesting, with a large gas giant blocking jumps to its own moons, bodies between you and your destination forcing double jumps, and so on. The blocking thing would be such that you’d jump close to the gas giant, but still out far enough that you could jump again to get to the moon. That would happen because your start point is already under the influence of the gas giant, permitting accurate local jumps to moons.

Interestingly, ships may influence jumps as well. If a fleet jumps far out from your moon base so that they can jump a second time more precisely, then you should certainly be able to do something about that. So you point in the direction of their fleet that’s still 1AU out - far from any masses - and jump. You might end up right on top of them, which could be the downside to trying to jump into the middle of nowhere.

And that suggests that the closer you are to a destination when you jump, the closer you are when you arrive. If I jump from 10AU out, I may arrive 0.1AU out. But if I jump from 1AU out, I may arrive 0.01AU out. Or some such thing.

There are so many different things that could be thrown in there, and they’d make good carrier pilots worth their weight in gold. If not carrier pilots, then Jump Leaders, which would be the guys flying the ships to which everyone slaves their jump drives.

If size and mass influence the warp drive, then requiring a certain speed that is only practical on warp makes it all work out.

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Kichae has answered your questions much more gracefully than I could have I think.

There are still some consequences that are fuzzy for me in special rel and I haven’t(and won’t) take a general relativity course until grad school at the earliest.

Relativity is probably one of the weirdest things in our universe next to QM in my opinion

As they say it’s all relative :stuck_out_tongue:

Another thing that could be fun would be to distort the trajectory of the jump based on nearby gravity fields, like your warp prototype did with its jump tunnels (or however they were named, I don’t remember, sorry :frowning: ). That way a good pilot could jump right around a gas giant and end up on the planet on the other side, while an inexperienced pilot might end up crashing or going off target and requiring a second jump. Of course, while that might be easy to do on 2D, on 3D the interface might require some extra thought.

I really like your ideas. Well done. Hope you pledged the developer tier :smile:

Nah! It all makes perfect sense, once you wrap your head around the full consequences of the constancy of the speed of light!

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So what about relativity in I:B ? I wonder what kind of impact it could have on gameplay… in fact, would it have a real impact on it, for a space arena shooter I doubt…

at first, it would be funny to implement (giving gravity the speed of light instead of an infinite speed as it is probably implemented for the moment). For a server, one go to the planet B in 2 seconds, for the one seeing him doing, the server must calculate the coordinates according to the start position and the duration already passed…

This makes me think of something…

Admitting I want to surprise my enemy (I think I can’t but let’s see), an observer orbiting planet C. I travel (near light speed) from planet A to B. each distance between the three planets (what a luck) equal 1 UA. it takes me not even a second to travel from A to B, and appears to take me ~8 min (probably false but for the example) from the observer point of view. If I travel from B to C the same way, the only thing changing is that this time my direction points to my enemy position. I will feel that it took me 2 seconds to be near my enemy, but him could make a coffee, listen to its preferred music preparing a mega blaster to shoot me at the moment I arrive or something else will happen ?

                  1UA
      A o -------------------- o B
          \                   /
            \               /
        1UA   \           /  1UA
                \       /
                    o
                     C

No calculator is authorized. you have four hours :smiley:

perfect sense and I also feel that the synthesis we can make on it “everything depends on your point of observation” resounds in every seconds of my life and thoughts I have, and I think in every cause-consequence

The Universe is perfect. Of course not if you just look from your personal point of view, but as a sum (a product would be more correct mathematically) of points of view, it is.

I said weird! Not that it doesn’t make sense :smile: I was just commenting that it’s weird that the universe has a speed limit. The lorentz transforms have to happen because that limit exists.

@kamui

I’m not sure what you’re asking us to do.

just to have your thoughts on this. According to you, what would be the result of trying to play with relativity to try taking advantage on an enemy. In my example, what will happen ? Am I wrong or right in how think it will end?

It would be difficult/impossible from a gameplay point of view.

So we have your point A and B separated by a distance of 1AU(I believe this is what you’re trying to say). For the sake of simplicity Lets say our observer is the defense force that it “stationary” at B

a ship at A leaves instantaneously at .99999c heading towards B.

To go one AU it takes like 8 minutes at c, so according to the ship traveling it takes 8 minutes to reach point B. I’m actually ignoring length contraction here so now I’m secondguessing myself that this is the case. The space around the ship would appear to be moving .99999c so I suppose there would be length contraction.

.99999c gives us a gamma of 316. Gamma is the factor by which things are transformed in relativity.

For example, x’ = x/gamma where x’ is the new contracted distance and x is our old one.

So our 1AU becomes 150Gm/316 which is 50,000km. Moving at basically the speed of light gives us a travel time of about 1.6 seconds.

The interesting part is what happens when you calculate how long the defense force is waiting.

Here, t’ = tgamma where t’ is the time from the observer(our defense force). So our defensive force would wait 1.6316 which is conveniently 500 seconds or about 8.5 minutes.(This is about the time it takes for light to reach Earth from the Sun…which is really interesting coincidence :wink: After checking my sanity and belief in the powers of physics this shouldn’t be that surprising.sidenote below)

Unfortunately, you can’t simulate this in a video game :stuck_out_tongue: How are you going to turn 1.5 seconds for the attackers into 9 minutes for the defenders? The devs, unfortunately, cannot control time. If they could, TQFE would be finished already because they could spend years working on it in what would seem like moments for us ;).

I’m pretty sure my maths/concepts were right but I wouldn’t mind a check @Kichae.

Sidenote: I’m not sure what I was expecting the time to be for the defenders and the fact that I got 8ish minutes really surprised me. I guess thinking about it it’s really not that surprising and I should have even expected it. It makes sense too sense gamma is transforming both the time of the traveler and how much dilation it experiences. We should always get 8ish minutes. What I found more unsettling was my initial thoughts that it should break as you get to higher fractions of c, but that’s when gamma comes in to correct both sides. This means that a photon traveling across the universe does it virtually instantaneously. They barely even exist in their reference frame and that’s pretty crazy. I did not expect to get that sort of revelation from this, thank you kamui. It’s something you sort of know, but don’t really think about it.

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sorry in french it’s UA (Unité Astronomique) :smile:

edit : to implement that I think it’s not so hard. This is why I spoke about changing gravity speed, rendering of an object depends with this detail on what distance it is from where you draw the scene. With this you can have different players having a different perception of positions… it’s a really bad and simplified explanation but the idea is here. For the difference of duration for players, this is why I spoke about the direction your move goes. If you’re going to reach the other player, you’re “resynchronizing” with his “time perception” if he’s not moving… and when you arrive, you’re at the same “present” at the same space (close I mean).

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I learn something new everyday, thanks!

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yes I felt the same thing about thoughts around photons a few weeks ago and it really pushed me in some trouble for a few minutes :smile: … I was like : “in fact photons make 1 million years to reach the surface of the sun and 8 minutes to come to my eyes, or it make everything instantly ? It must be that, even at speed limit, time is not completely dilated, it always passes, even a little… this speed limit for light and gravity has so much impact that it’s awesome”.

Think of all of this next time you look from stars, it’s just awesome to think that according to where you’re watching, you’re in fact watching a different space AND time (space-time so). Present is, for each point of view, at each time, something different, sum of different pasts, and maybe also future from some points of view…