Miss jumps following an NPC's wormhole

[Commander McLane]

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?

I fully agree, and I used to think from my earlier trials that the ship you're following doesn't actually end up in interstellar space. Now that the subject has been brought up I've done some more tests and find that the ship did end up in interstellar space. I am a little puzzled. Have I overlooked their presence earlier? Or is there some other factor involved (like for instance the current state of the wormholes-array in my save-game)? I don't know.

But I feel that—if you forced the misjump—your leading ship should have completed the jump and not be in interstellar space.

Only if he himself misjumped in the first place he should be there, and you should end up with him regardless of how you entered the wormhole. (I think this one works like this.)

[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...

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.

It gets a little handwavium near the end!

How about in Interstellar Space - which is normal space just a long way from anywhere - the ship's clock triangulates on the various (weak) signals from all the system clock updates traversing the cosmos from all the surrounding systems' witchspace beacons - perhaps measuring red shift and somesuch to confirm position and to extrapolate time accordingly...

[Switeck]

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.

How about in Interstellar Space - which is normal space just a long way from anywhere - the ship's clock triangulates on the various (weak) signals from all the system clock updates traversing the cosmos from all the surrounding systems' witchspace beacons - perhaps measuring red shift and somesuch to confirm position and to extrapolate time accordingly...

Read up on the signal strength of the Voyager 1/2 probes at their current distances. That's a very tiny fraction of 1 LY. The witchspace beacons certainly are "louder" than that, but I doubt part of their purpose is for deep interstellar navigation. Even if they were, they'd need to be immensely strong RF emitters or gravity wave/space bending to even be detectable at interstellar distances. But assuming they are used, you'd have to know your current location accurate down to less than a light-minute (which would imply micro-arcsecond angular measurements, or at least 4 orders of magnitude more accurate than the best telescopes now and probably more accurate than even light passing through the near-vacuum of space would allow) and then back-calculate the current time based on probable distances to these distant objects.

Much stronger natural sources generating a near-perfect signal would be better candidates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar
"Because neutron stars are very dense objects, the rotation period and thus the interval between observed pulses is very regular. For some pulsars, the regularity of pulsation is as precise as an atomic clock." ...
"Initially baffled as to the seemingly unnatural regularity of its emissions, they dubbed their discovery LGM-1, for "little green men" (a name for intelligent beings of extraterrestrial origin). While the hypothesis that pulsars were beacons from extraterrestrial civilizations was never taken very seriously, some discussed the far-reaching implications if it turned out to be true."
While pulsars are (hopefully!) not beacons made by extraterrestrial civilizations, they may be used as beacons out of convenience.

"turbulence in the interstellar gas causes density inhomogeneities in the interstellar medium (ISM) which cause scattering of the radio waves from the pulsar. The resulting scintillation of the radio waves—the same effect as the twinkling of a star in visible light due to density variations in the Earth's atmosphere"
Which is why such distant observations are probably not accurate enough to synchronize the ship's clock down to the second.

[DaddyHoggy]

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.

How about in Interstellar Space - which is normal space just a long way from anywhere - the ship's clock triangulates on the various (weak) signals from all the system clock updates traversing the cosmos from all the surrounding systems' witchspace beacons - perhaps measuring red shift and somesuch to confirm position and to extrapolate time accordingly...

Read up on the signal strength of the Voyager 1/2 probes at their current distances. That's a very tiny fraction of 1 LY. The witchspace beacons certainly are "louder" than that, but I doubt part of their purpose is for deep interstellar navigation. Even if they were, they'd need to be immensely strong RF emitters or gravity wave/space bending to even be detectable at interstellar distances. But assuming they are used, you'd have to know your current location accurate down to less than a light-minute (which would imply micro-arcsecond angular measurements, or at least 4 orders of magnitude more accurate than the best telescopes now and probably more accurate than even light passing through the near-vacuum of space would allow) and then back-calculate the current time based on probable distances to these distant objects.

Much stronger natural sources generating a near-perfect signal would be better candidates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar
"Because neutron stars are very dense objects, the rotation period and thus the interval between observed pulses is very regular. For some pulsars, the regularity of pulsation is as precise as an atomic clock." ...
"Initially baffled as to the seemingly unnatural regularity of its emissions, they dubbed their discovery LGM-1, for "little green men" (a name for intelligent beings of extraterrestrial origin). While the hypothesis that pulsars were beacons from extraterrestrial civilizations was never taken very seriously, some discussed the far-reaching implications if it turned out to be true."
While pulsars are (hopefully!) not beacons made by extraterrestrial civilizations, they may be used as beacons out of convenience.

"turbulence in the interstellar gas causes density inhomogeneities in the interstellar medium (ISM) which cause scattering of the radio waves from the pulsar. The resulting scintillation of the radio waves—the same effect as the twinkling of a star in visible light due to density variations in the Earth's atmosphere"
Which is why such distant observations are probably not accurate enough to synchronize the ship's clock down to the second.

Or failing all of that we could remind ourselves that Oolite is a game with, quite literally, no sense of scale...

[Note: I thought of pulsars, but discounted them for the reasons you stated, so I went for some handwavium instead using something that is actually inside the game - presuming, ships 1200 years in the future, might have better/different transmitters and receivers utilising a full array of Unobtainium constructed equipments]

[Cody]

Or failing all of that we could remind ourselves that Oolite is a game with, quite literally, no sense of scale...

Shock! Horror! Consternation at the Admiralty... questions asked in the House!

[Switeck]

[Note: I thought of pulsars, but discounted them for the reasons you stated, so I went for some handwavium instead using something that is actually inside the game - presuming, ships 1200 years in the future, might have better/different transmitters and receivers utilising a full array of Unobtainium constructed equipments]

If the signal's fuzzy, having the perfect sensor to pick it up still results in a fuzzy signal. Active/adaptive optics works by measuring the distortion, but that's almost impossible to do over light-year distances. Averaging out the signal over time could reduce the error, especially while moving enough so the signal path doesn't travel through the exact same distortions. It might get the time accurate down to a minute. This time-measuring window might explain why the ship's clock doesn't instantly change to the "correct" time.

[Disembodied]

The ship could be measuring how much spacetime has expanded since entering the wormhole ... it's a little-known fact that, because spaceships miss out on the ongoing expansion of spacetime while travelling along wormholes, the ships – and their crews – get just that tiny little bit smaller every time we jump, because we've failed to expand along with the rest of the universe. I read that on the back of a packet of Wolf Nipple chips, on Cediza, so it must be true.

[Commander McLane]

The ship could be measuring how much spacetime has expanded since entering the wormhole ... it's a little-known fact that, because spaceships miss out on the ongoing expansion of spacetime while travelling along wormholes, the ships – and their crews – get just that tiny little bit smaller every time we jump, because we've failed to expand along with the rest of the universe. I read that on the back of a packet of Wolf Nipple chips, on Cediza, so it must be true.

It certainly must be true. How else could you explain your own shrinking to the size of a brain in a jar, dear jumped-a-million-times commander?

[Switeck]

In Battletech, jumpships are ripped apart if they jump too close to a gravity well...and for them "too close" for the Solar System is about Saturn's distance from the Sun. This also applied to jumping out of a system for them -- they could only do it by being far away from significant masses. One exception though -- if they find a spot where gravity from different objects cancels out, they could hyperspace to/from there. But that was a small target to hit, so it typically was only used as an exit point. Jumpships were really sad -- they could jump up to 30 Light-Years away, but took roughly 1 week to charge up to do it. Their jump drives made up roughly 90-95% of the ship by mass and acted like a supercapacitor that gets discharged in an instant. They could only jump once normally before needing to be recharged. A very few newer ones had a secondary charge system that allowed them to do 2 jumps, but that just meant they took twice as long to charge before jumping those 2 times...and they had considerably less cargo capacity because of it.

Oolite has mass-locking, but it's trivial compared to that.

[Smivs]

The ship could be measuring how much spacetime has expanded since entering the wormhole ... it's a little-known fact that, because spaceships miss out on the ongoing expansion of spacetime while travelling along wormholes, the ships – and their crews – get just that tiny little bit smaller every time we jump, because we've failed to expand along with the rest of the universe. I read that on the back of a packet of Wolf Nipple chips, on Cediza, so it must be true.

Ah, now that's my sort of diet (not the chips).

[Disembodied]

It certainly must be true. How else could you explain your own shrinking to the size of a brain in a jar, dear jumped-a-million-times commander?

It's just erosion, I tell you!

[DaddyHoggy]

[Note: I thought of pulsars, but discounted them for the reasons you stated, so I went for some handwavium instead using something that is actually inside the game - presuming, ships 1200 years in the future, might have better/different transmitters and receivers utilising a full array of Unobtainium constructed equipments]

If the signal's fuzzy, having the perfect sensor to pick it up still results in a fuzzy signal. Active/adaptive optics works by measuring the distortion, but that's almost impossible to do over light-year distances. Averaging out the signal over time could reduce the error, especially while moving enough so the signal path doesn't travel through the exact same distortions. It might get the time accurate down to a minute. This time-measuring window might explain why the ship's clock doesn't instantly change to the "correct" time.

OK, ok, I give up, ignoring the fact that my first degree is Physics and I spent 13 years working for the military on a variety of sensors (optical, near/far-IR and radar) - I'll pretend that Oolite is real and therefore nothing 1200 years from now (in a multitude of potential handwavium hyper-dimensional sensors and measuring devices type ways) could possibly explain how the ships might get accurate clock measurements when they fall out of the wormhole tunnel...

[PhantorGorth]

I would like to point out my handwavium (include maths) on hyperspace jumps and the time they take. See here and here. It all fits together better if the wormhole is an opening to Hyperspace(witchspace) which we do not get to see in game (cut for game play reasons). You supposedly experience time in witchspace of a matter of hours and then get ejected back into real space whether it be interstellar space or near the witchpoint. This idea is held up by the fact that the wormhole that a ship enters is only around for a few minutes compared to the actual journey time and a wormhole at the other end only appears for only enough time for the ship to arrive.

The simplest scenario is if you use someone else's wormhole all you are doing is riding the NPC wave in entering witchspace so to speak and gaining the same physical parameters to arrive at the require destination. This is further supported by that fact that there are wormhole analyzers which measure those parameters. If you force a misjump on entering the NPC wormhole they would end up at their destination but you would end up in interstellar space. If they misjump you still end up at your destination even if they don't. If the Thargoids cause the misjump you both end up at the same interstellar point unless they just want the one ship. (Maybe firing anti-tachyons at the ship so make it leave witchspace early.) If the wormhole is "corrupted" then you both end up at the same interstellar point. The question then becomes if the NPC forcing a misjump should corrupt the wormhole or just corrupt the ship's individual journey.

In essence there is no "tube" just an entry to witchspace and the exit is only created when we arrive and we never in game see the journey in between. (Though a short bit of the hyperspace journey would be nice to see, if possible. Maybe a suggestion for Oolite 2.0).

The reason the clock isn't right is that it measures subjective time. If you are traveling faster than the speed of light most of standard physics goes out the window. In Hyperspace the local laws of physics are different but for the ships and their passengers the laws can not change otherwise they would cease to exist in their current forms. This then means the ship must ride inside bubble of normal space inside hyperspace. Inside this bubble time can be made as subjective as we wish with enough handwavium.

As to finding the time once they arrive, there are many different mechanisms that could be used.
1) Witchpoint beacon timing signal.
2) Position of the planets and main station.
for interstellar space:
1) Rough calculation based on the actual journey. Gets corrected if needed when you arrive in a real system.

[Switeck]

In my opinion, in hyperspace physics as we know it probably does not work. Whether everything is folded up into a series of strings, particles, or mere potentials (of energy, mass, velocity vectors)...it would mean those who pass through a wormhole cease to exist in their current forms while inside the wormhole. The universe as we know it is almost totally unable to interact with them. Issac Asimov even wrote a couple short stories about side-effects of hyperspace jumps, claiming that during the hyperspace jump the people involved are dead and visit the afterlife (hell or heaven) for a short spell. The length of time they stay as such depends on the distance of the jump...and the first jump was made to about 100,000 LY (literally outside most of the visible Milky Way) and then later back to Earth...leaving the ship's occupants dead for over an hour each way. They were very shook up by the experience. But in Asimov's tales, time passed by the rest of the universe wasn't much/any longer...so they didn't arrive back to a "they blew it all up!" experience like Planet of the Apes movie.

[Commander Wilmot]

If we know how far we traveled, and we know the amount of "real-world" time that a witchspace jump takes per ly; couldn't we just calculate what the current time is when we arrive?