I'm not that experienced in space, but am currently hitching a ride to Arkadia to do a little crafting. While talking to my pilot, he mentioned that rebooting cost us 2au. On further investigation, I note that when marking Arkadia as a waypoint, it counts down in au (which I can only assume refers to astronomical units) as we near our target. Now, I have always understood an astronomical unit to be the distance between Earth and its star, the Sun, which can be rounded to about 150,000,000 km. Please check my maths, because I'm actually hoping I've made a mistake somewhere. Watching the au counter tick down as we approach our destination, I note that in the VTOL we appear to be chewing through about 0.01 au approximately every 1.5 seconds, or 1,500,000 km every 1.5 seconds. That equates to about 60,000,000 km a minute or 3,600,000,000 km per hour. Light travels at roughly 1,080,000,000 km per hour as far as I know, which leads me to believe that I am currently travelling at approximately 3 1/3 TIMES the speed of light. In a VTOL! My pilot tells me that a quad travels twice as fast, so that would be about 6 2/3 TIMES the speed of light. Can someone tell me why: a) a mothership needs a warp drive? b) I can converse with my pilot without turning inside out? c) our VTOL is not creating a black hole? d) time is not doing strange things? e) I have gone cross-eyed?
Because if they didn't have a warp drive there would be a lot of people REALLY bored on those long flights in space. Those really bored people would have their minds wandering of, resulting in loads of post like this.
Yeah, this is EU ... not RL physics. Go try warping in EVE Online ... you find yourself going thru planets, suns, or any other object that is your direct flight path. jc
Eu is set in the future, not 2011, in present day we are only just noticing things traveling faster than the speed of light, imagine what we could figure out in 1000 years from now
If you look at the actual speed and size of the ship, it is apparent that au in EU is not very big. You can clearly see a ship that is 1/10 of an au away, making 1 au on the order of several km.
What Stave said basically Speed of Light Breached IRL? I will award you the medal of 'Interplantary Patience' when next I see you, for the bravery (and afk skills) required in being a passenger on a Vtol from Calypso to Arkadia
Sorry, it is a bit hard for me to understand the theory behind oil-based propulsion to achieve faster then speed of light travelling. jc
Lol everyone Pwnd indeed by Harmony. Thank you for putting it all in perspective. Neil, I agree with your observation. I suppose part of my point is that "astronomical unit" in our language is a term that is reserved for the distance between Earth and its star. If "au" in here is shorter because it's the distance between (um, what?) then it shouldn't be called au, I think. Having said that, in 3008 you'd expect language to have evolved too. But something non-conflicting would be lots better imo.
"au" stands for "ancient unit" wich means it is the distance our ancestors were able to cover with an oxcart within one day.
AU is the Average Distance from Main planet in a Solar system to it's star. There is only a small band in each solar system that can be considered inhabitable by races like humans, so most all inhabitable planets will be in this zone. I say most because there could be factors where there are other super massive planets making other inhabitable moons and such who knows. In our Solar system it is Earth so our AU is 149 598 000km. In the solar system in game who the heck knows what an AU is? You can't fly to the Sun in the game to test it out lol. The whole system in space seems wierd in this game we have 4 planets orbiting the Sun of the game all within it's enhabitable belt. In our real life solar system you can try to fly the entire way around the sun from earth to earth in this inhabitable belt in 6.28AU distance. So to figure out what an AU in the game is you could fly around to each planet in circular pattern find the distance flow to each, add them all up to find the circumference/6.28 which is circumference/2*pi. You then could find Km's by multipling that value by 149 598 000 and you will know how many Km's 1 AU is in the game. Knowing Km's and how fast you fly you can acutally figure out if your sliepnir is faster then the speed of light. I am sure it is some wacky number that makes no sense. GL to anyone willing to take the time to figure it out. In theory all the planets should be colliding with each other because the different densities composing each planet would cause them to rotate faster and slower then the others around the sun and the other planets gravitational fields should be drawing then into collisions. This only makes sense if they are all within the inhabitable belt that is. But hey this is a game like physics and logic like planetary inhabital zones actually need to exist for it to make sense.
