Miss jumps following an NPC's wormhole

[Switeck]

I'm not convinced they should end up in interstellar space in the first place. When you misjump on someone else's wormhole-tunnel, shouldn't they already be "long gone" by then on the other side and thus immune to your misjump?

[Spartan]

just because your RemLock makes it seem like mere moments and your ships clock rolls like mad, in real time the other ship is only minutes into the wormhole...

[DaddyHoggy]

just because your RemLock makes it seem like mere moments and your ships clock rolls like mad, in real time the other ship is only minutes into the wormhole...

I thought time passed in the wormhole but you and your ship did not perceive its passage - when you exit the wormhole - your ship's computer picks up Galactic Standard Time from the clock in the WitchSpace Buoy and corrects itself to include the lost time from inside the wormhole...

[Mauiby de Fug]

Surely if you intentionally misjump into someone else's wormhole, then they will have traversed the wormhole successfully, as they created it and did not misjump? Unless the act of you forcefully misjumping inside their wormhole creates an instability throughout the wormhole, which then acts upon the NPC before they reach the other side, thus causing them to drop out into interstellar space too?

[Cody]

It's an interesting question, which we've talked about on IRC. I reckon that a broken tube gets them all.

[DaddyHoggy]

Except for the very shortest of jumps the ratio of wormhole entry point existing to actual time travelling in the wormhole is very small - wormhole entry windows last minutes (for normal sized ships), traversing the wormhole takes hours, so if you go in and misjump I reckon, as EV says, the tunnel collapses for everyone - but would you all be in the same place... (given the great distances travelled inside the tunnel - many times FTL relative to normal space - even a minute's head start should put the NPC ship a considerable distance (but still in the "middle" of the jump distance) from your player ship.

[Cody]

A tube always breaks, or is broken, at exactly the mid-point... so all should arrive at the same place.

[Switeck]

Interacting with a ship further ahead in the wormhole is a faster-than-faster-than-light interaction. They may have created the wormhole only seconds before you reach it, but if travel through the wormhole is "instantaneous" from the traveler's point-of-view then they'd already be on the other side from their point of view when you "hit" their wormhole. The observer position of a wormhole might radically change the order in which things happen.
Also worth noting: when does the wormhole exit form relative to the wormhole's moment of creation? The stated hours of travel time means the "tube" inside the wormhole that the ships are actually using must be compressed to a very short length, firstly to cover such a long distance in a short time...and secondly to explain the almost instant travel time from the player's point of view. NPC cargo transports and their escorts could be viewed as almost on top of each other the whole trip even if the distance and time in the tube is longer.

[DaddyHoggy]

Just because in the tunnel you *perceive* the journey to be instantaneous doesn't mean it is - in fact it definitely isn't instantaneous - otherwise there'd be no need to add many hours to the ship clock when you emerge from the other side and perception of time for both the ship and its pilot/crew is reinstated...

[Cody]

[immersion mode]Those tubes take time to traverse... welcome downtime for my commander[/immersion mode]

[DaddyHoggy]

A tube always breaks, or is broken, at exactly the mid-point... so all should arrive at the same place.

Thought experiment:

A convoy of Anacondas plus escorts plus a variety of freeloaders bundled through a wormhole entry point to a system 1ly away (1hr jump time) taking about 10s to all enter the wormhole.

59m and 59s later you enter the not yet collapsed wormhole entrance and force a misjump.

The tunnel collapses and all the ships end up at the mid-point of the jump? Really? Even though the lead Anaconda was just 1s away from exiting the wormhole?

[Cody]

That's the beauty of witchspace, I suppose... I must resist thinking like a fictioneer.

You are right of course, DH... but the game always breaks a tube at mid-point, so that's what we have to 'rationalise' (heh).
Time for a handwavium wizard to help out, I think.

[DaddyHoggy]

That's the beauty of witchspace, I suppose... I must resist thinking like a fictioneer.

You are right of course, DH... but the game always breaks a tube at mid-point, so that's what we have to 'rationalise' (heh).
Time for a handwavium wizard to help out, I think.

Perhaps ships only have the potential to exit the Wormhole tunnel X hours after they enter, until they *actually* exit into *real* space they exist only at the point of highest potential, i.e. the mid-point of the tunnel?

[Smivs]

It's a quantum dilation effect.
When a ship enters a wormhole it 'stretches' to fill the whole length of the wormhole, and stays like this till it exits. Multiple ships can exist in this state simultaneously. This is why no time seems to pass for those on the ship. The dilation effect means that the same 'time' exists in all parts of the wormhole all the time it exists. When a ship exits, space and time condense back to 'normal', and the ship clock has to catch up, adding the time the wormhole was open to the time when the ship entered it.
When a wormhole is broken, any/all ships in the wormhole drop out together, half-way between the two ends, because that equates to the middle of the ship/s.

[Switeck]

Just because in the tunnel you *perceive* the journey to be instantaneous doesn't mean it is - in fact it definitely isn't instantaneous - otherwise there'd be no need to add many hours to the ship clock when you emerge from the other side and perception of time for both the ship and its pilot/crew is reinstated...

An auto-correction wouldn't be needed if the clock was secretly advancing when you weren't looking at it. Once exiting the wormhole it would already be the "correct" time since it never quit ticking.

As for perceptions not matching "reality"...Something like this happens in real life even with non-relativistic space travel. The time as measured by a space ship moving relative to the Earth is less than the time that passes ON Earth in the same period. In Oolite, the clock has to be adjusted because of either a perception of time freeze while in the wormhole or an actual time freeze for those in the wormhole. Either way, the reason why the ship's clock has to be adjusted is because it no longer matches the "correct time" of normal space. And strangely it never gets ahead, it's always having to catch up to the normal universe.

Even "climbing" out of a deep gravity well screws with time, the ultimate example is a black hole where at its event horizon time may well stand still. There's a reason Russian astronomers once referred to them as "frozen stars". Were that to somehow happen to Earth without killing us beforehand, it'd be like our clock slows way down while the rest of the universe speeds up...till the stars might appear to "fall from the heavens" and burn out.

While it may sound like "nonsense" for different perspectives to have totally different time dilation, it's actually reasonable to assume anything that bends space so hard it bleeds blue (wormholes) probably does nasty things to the apparent passage time in its vicinity and inside of it as well.

Going back to the "gotta set the clocks ahead an hour for daylight savings time", a misjump is a curious one...there is no beacon to synchronize your ship's clock with. Current time has to be estimated/measured by first figuring out where the ship is at then figuring out the time based on objects that are multi-light-years distant and thus viewed as they were multi-years earlier. And considering Oolite's limited "radar" range, I think it's safe to assume ships don't have telescopes with a high enough zoom to clearly see ship-sized objects from light-years away. So for the clock's corrected time to be accurate, it has to be based on something changing at a regular rate yet large and/or bright enough to be resolved/measured clearly. So it's not reasonably likely to be anything human or alien made -- power output would have to be outrageous even by Oolite standards and if viewed from 100's of light-years away...it would also have to be in continual service for 100's of years.

I know how such time estimates can already be done without first building remote super-objects. It would be very hard to do in practice...but my guess is their relative inaccuracy would probably be so great that they'd be worthless for anything more accurate than what year or month it is "back at Earth". That's certainly not good enough to explain Oolite's strangely accurate auto-correcting clock in interstellar space after a misjump.

Wormholes could be like giant space slinkeys (that walks downstairs...), everything is trapped inside of them till their entrance closes then everything is spit out at a relatively fast rate. Stuff going through it might experience a Zeno's paradox -- covering half the distance, then half of that distance, then half again...thus causing the exponential increase in time the more distance is covered. By compressing everything in the wormhole to the size of particle -- either with 0 dimensions-size or even negative in scale, a certain uncertainty principle might say their exact location and speed cannot be precisely measured...for to measure one is to change the other. This includes interacting with it. Thargoids "intercepting" wormhole tunnels would have to somehow catch ships crossing through it, which might prove difficult if the ships were effectively teleported from entering to leaving.