Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Well, with the latest beta, the idea has potential for implementing!

Destroyer drives will have an acceleration ability of something about 0.0001, with heavier ships getting even smaller numbers http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

One thing for sure, is that it will be very important to start slowing down before you get to your destination.
I've crashed into starbase terra many times http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif
(Time to mod in turning ability, I guess http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif )

Hehe. Whoops. Big crater on Vendrin Junction VI now.

[ December 22, 2003, 20:27: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Would be nice if you would tell us -why- this now has potential.. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Actually you can do it with the current patch, it just gets messy because you have to asign "bonus speed" to all the components. Bonus because it ISN'T divided by the number of engine slots..

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Mainly the custom slots are working nicely.
So, I can force different size ships to have different engines, and make the small ships accelerate faster than the big ones.

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

That's good. I was afraid I'd end up having to puit custom slots on the ships manually (i.e. draw them in the top-down view)

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Unless it has been changed, all you need to do is steer slightly to one side of the target station or planet and when you get in range, the "Shuttle Over" button turns green, then push "S". Insta-stop, insta-repairs, etc. In fact, when you exit, if you are fast enough, when you get back into your ship, you will find that it is still moving and if you hit the full speed button fast enough, you will quickly be at full speed again.

This is a bug and quite unfair during combat since you can recharge shields and do repairs instantaneously with respect to the combat timeframe. Granted, you are only cheating yourself. I think planets/stations should not allow "Shuttling Over" when >1 ship is within a small radius. (Elite has such a restriction, probably to prevent this exploit.)

Slick.

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Even if you shuttle over, you'll still be going the exact same speed when you return, but your throttle will be set to zero.

In this mod, the stopping distance of your ship will be at least an order of magnitude larger than the shuttle over distance.
So if you're heading straight for the planet at more than 5% speed or so when you shuttle over, nothing can save you.
If you're heading just past one side, you'll get one chance to shuttle over before you go whizzing by. That's not so bad.

While cruising from warppoint to warppoint, 2000 speed is fine.
When you enter your destination system, you'll need to immediately start slowing to half that.
As you get to 500-1000 ls from your destination, you should be slowing even more, and then ease yourself to a stop nearby.

[ December 23, 2003, 16:24: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Now if your top speed is something like 2000, wouldn't that make the "increase/decrease speed by 1/4" buttons kind of coarse? I wish we could change the amount that those buttons affect your speed... I hate controlling my ship's speed with the mouse, the slider's soooo tiny and speed is VERY vital to avoid crashing into things! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Of course in a Newtonian mod, most likely the pace of the game will be slower so you'll have more time to react, right?

And what's to stop the player from whizzing around the system at 8x timescale when he doesn't have any time-critical missions to complete? Instant acceleration! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Too bad the turning won't be newtonian - i.e. you use your turning thrusters and your ship just rotates, it doesn't actually start GOING in the direction it's pointing at whatever speed it had before... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

But at least there can be different sizes of turning thrusters for the different hulls, so we won't have the "level 12 turning thruster on a battleship quadruples its turn rate" or something... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

The time multipliers actually seem to have very little effect on the game, so far.

Acceleration is very slow, so even cranking up the timescale to 8x leaves the little blue bar to climb one pixel at a time.
There is more than enough time to click a steady speed before you get to it, and in combat, your choices are not "Speed X" they are "accelerate or decelerate?" You'll never reach your desired speed before it changes drastically http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

When you're cruising, you're moving at quite a clip already, and adding a time multiplier to your reaction speed dosen't help http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif
Even if you do use it, you'll only have it kicked in for a few seconds before you need to slow it back down.

[ December 24, 2003, 03:38: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Interesting. Any more on this? Looks like a "turnover time" pop-up calculator for a zero-zero arrival might be handy.

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

I am imagining how hilarious the AI must look with this mod. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

PvK

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

They do tend to putter around in small regions while you tend to be cruising across the system at half to full throttle.

In order to fire more than once (or twice for fast-reloading weapons) at an enemy target, you've got to slow down... and that takes time...

Its pretty hard to plan your course such that you end up behind the enemy, and then you still have the problem of turning around before they paste you in the back.
Strafing runs tend to be the easiest tactic, I think... brakes during the approach to maximize firepower, then gas gas gas as you pass.

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

So, eh, why the larger ships are more difficult to speed up or slow down? I thought that weight in space does not matter as much.

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

F =ma
or in the case
a = F/m

In other words, if you want the same accleration with double the mass, you have to double the force.

EDIT: don't confuse weight and mass, BTW. Mass doesn't change. Weight DOES. Mass is how much matter an object has, weight is the acceleration produced by gravity on that object. It's just than on earth mass = weight, since we're at 1 G by definition.

[ February 09, 2004, 03:15: Message edited by: Phoenix-D ]

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Hmm, so, why does mass matter then? There are no counter reacting forces when you try to well...make a spaceship move.

On that F=ma and a=f/m You say that it means that you need double the force for double the mass. But, why would that matter in space or in a weightless/no forces (at least strong enought) present environment? I can understand this on Earth or on any planet, but, space? At least outer space?

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Talking of which, and if you think I am in a way hijacking this thread please tell me, I never ever understood the whole can't go faster than light thing. And most of the things that "go" with it. Like that if you travel from A to B in the speed of light (large distance) then you will age as long as you traveled (1 year?) while everybody else far more. Why would that happen? Why does it actualy matter how fast you are travelling to the actual time. I see time as a constant that progresses at the same frequency and direction no matter what. I can undersant if you go to deep freezing lets say that your body will stop(or very very slow) metabolizing and you will in a way live longer, but saying the same thing about speed of light sounds silly to me, are you (them?) saying that travelling at the speed of light doesn't actualy make you travel at high speed but just puts you in a bubble where time passes by in slower rate? So, how do you collerate that with the actual time that is needed to travel to that distance with that speed? If you travel at the speed of light for 1 year, (lets say star A to star B) it takes you 1 year to go there. You have lived for a year inside the ship, why would everybofdy else lived for more than that? Hmm, purplexed.

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

There is a counter-acting force when you try to move a ship: its own weight. Anything in motion will stay in motion unless stopped, and anything stopped will stay stopped unless something makes it move. To accelerate you've got to overcome the objects inertia, its inbuilt tendancy to stay put. And that's where f =ma comes in.

EDIT: to make it clear..

f = ma is

Force = mass time acceleration

my other equation was solving that for accleration, so
accleration = force over mass

The speed of light thing is..weird. And complicated, to say the least.

The speed of light is speed of light in a vaccum, BTW. Everything else is measured by that constant.

[ February 09, 2004, 04:20: Message edited by: Phoenix-D ]

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">The reason you can't go faster than the speed of light is that as you accelerate your mass increases at a rate of 1/(c-s), ie the closer to the speed of light you get the greater your mass. Since it requires energy to accelerate you need infinite energy to reach the spped of light.
The mass increase has been poven experimentally using electons - which are theoretically mass less.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Unfortunately time is not a constant. It is a relative quantity and varies according to where you measure it from.

As Phoenix also pointed out the speed of light is also not a constant. Einsteins equation is actually wrong e doesn't equal mc² but mc²+delta. I can't remember the actual proof but it was done by an Australian mathmatician about 3 years ago.

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Electrons aren't massless...
Constant #03 on my calculator reports the accepted rest mass of the electron as 9.1093897 x10^-31 kg.

Very small, certainly, but still worth a half-million electron volts of energy.

-----

The e=mc² is the rest energy when you plug in the rest mass. If you fling the object, then the you have to add on the energy you just added.

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

But (time) while time can be relative in some cases, (black hole etc) the time for everyting else doesn't change, does it? You can slow down the pass of time somewhere, but that would mean that there is a general time constant in a way. (I am nor sure I make my self clear on this..)

About the delta part of the equation of the c. What is delta? A random type of a variable?

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

If you can slow the passage of time you can by default speed it up as well. What screws me over is it says as speed increases..fine, speed relative to WHAT?

If an object is moving away from me at .3C, and I speed up to .4C to catch it, the relative speed is only .1. But speeds are ussually compared relative to the earth, which is of course moving around the sun which is moving around the galaxy, which is..you get the point.

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Howie!

New to this place and to the game. Where can I get the Newtonian mod? And are there any other public mods I should get in order to "balance" the game?

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

You can get this mod and SJ's P&N mods at http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/starfury when its up. Right now it appears to be down.

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Relative to the observer.
Both your crew, and the people back on earth will see the other group as slowing down.

If you meet each other again, the group that experienced the acceleration of the "turning around" part will be the younger one when you meet.

*SJ reboots imagemodserver*

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

Thank you very much!

I've gotten the mod now, and it works fine. However, if I wish to play any other campaign, or create a new one, using Newtonian, is there any way to transfer only the Newtonian parts of the campaign into another, or do I need to re-do the entire thing?

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

At least for the stock campaigns, you will be able to copy the story files over.

I think the critical files to copy over are:
- displaytext
- events
- jobs
- missions
- campaigndata
( Except these lines )
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Map Size Width := 2500
Map Size Height := 2500
Map Square Size := 25
Map Scaling Factor := 2.5
Weapon Scaling Factor := 2.0
Job Time Scaling Factor := 2.5</pre><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">

Re: Newtonian Propulsion Mod!
 

If you think the lightspeed thing is crazy, think abut this:

If a person i traveling to, say, 2/3 light speed in a direction, and another person is traveling at the same speed (2/3 lightspeed) at the opposite direction, the logic says tha one traveler would see the other travelling at a speed of 4/3 lightspeed in relation with himself, right?

Wrong.

According to the classical theory, no object can travel at greater relative speed from another object that the speed of light.

This is the major flaw in the classical theory of physics, and one of the most striking hints that the faster-than-light speeds is theoreticaly possible...

One real example of faster-than-light relative speed among objects is the light itself, where a light particle (i know that we are still discussing if light is a wave or a particle, but for the sake of this post lets consider it a particle) traveling at the opposite direction of another light particle is with relative speed in relation to the other particle of 2 times the lightspeed.

Quantum physics (that, according to some scientists, only hald a dozen people in the entire world really understant) have several unresolved manifestations that could be only explained with faster-than-light speeds (or at least communication) among particles.

All this that i spoke here have a very long and complicated mathematical representation (that i, myself, don't hope to understand), but the end point is: there are still flaws in the classical physics theory, and one of these flaws might (just might, it's not a proven fact) allow theoreticaly faster-than-light speeds.