A question of lore

[Redspear]

Or Stentor, whose "voice was as powerful as fifty voices of other men".

That does make more immediate sense. Thanks.

[Disembodied]

So the more a ship sucks, the 'faster' it becomes?

If two ships are in close proximity and suck in opposite directions at sufficient speed... could they create a singularity?

Well, spacetime is pretty stretchy, and of course "opposite directions" doesn't really mean anything in an 11-dimensional manifold. If you try to run two torus drives at full speed too close together, you won't get a singularity, but you will get a masslock …

I suppose, theoretically, if you had two roughly stellar-mass engines, and enough spare energy to turn their tori at operational speeds, you might start to get some serious warpage. You'd probably have to do it deep in interstellar space, though: a ship-sized engine won't grip the manifold if the local spacetime curves too much - as you approach a planet or a star, for example. I haven't done the calculations but you'd probably need to have several light-years of flat spacetime all around each drive before you started them up, too.

[Cody]

Priceless!

[Redspear]

Well, spacetime is pretty stretchy

As is the entirely tenous nature of my argument

and of course "opposite directions" doesn't really mean anything in an 11-dimensional manifold.

Or does it... If you can be opposite in 2, 3 and potentailly 4 then why not 11? As dimensions they might overlap but none of them can diametrically oppose, else surely they'd be the same dimension, right?

You'd probably have to do it deep in interstellar space, though: a ship-sized engine won't grip the manifold if the local spacetime curves too much - as you approach a planet or a star, for example.

Why not line 'em up so to speak (or optimise through x dimensions) and use them to help out? You don't need to be the strongest to 'win' in a tug of war, just to be on the strongest team?

I haven't done the calculations...

Yeah, I was kinda thinking similar about myself

[Cody]

Next up, galactic jumps: we know npcs can do it, but apart from one particular exception, it's never seen to happen (AFAIK).
For me, that exception is so long ago that I can't recall if it left a wormhole cloud that could be analysed or dived into.

Can anyone enlighten me? And how do we explain the fact that a galactic jump takes no time (according to the ship's clock)?

[Cody]

What about the Cloaking Device? Is there any lore as regards this mysterious piece of equipment? I don't recall any. It's unique in that it sticks to the player, not the ship - switch ships, and your Cloaking Device stays with you. How would one explain that, I wonder?

[Cholmondely]

Next up, galactic jumps: we know npcs can do it, but apart from one particular exception, it's never seen to happen (AFAIK).
For me, that exception is so long ago that I can't recall if it left a wormhole cloud that could be analysed or dived into.

Can anyone enlighten me? And how do we explain the fact that a galactic jump takes no time (according to the ship's clock)?

Initial thoughts.

The cost combined with the lack of information about where one is going and the difficulties of the return would preclude almost all but contractual visits, one would presume. Hence it might be extremely rare.

And I can't see why it would look any differently from a regular jump if one watched it. I would have thought that only a Wormhole Scanner would show it was different.

But the jump taking no time indicates that it is not so simplistic. As does the one-way nature of the journey. And, to a lesser extent, the one-use equipment.

It is easily explained outside the game as a product of 8-bit code and of Aegidian's decisions when he introduced the clock.

In-game logic is not so simple.

If the exception is the one I suspect it might be, I never saw the jump, merely being told that it had happened when I arrived at the last system in the galaxy.

[Cody]

I never saw the jump, merely being told that it had happened...

Ah... that'd probably explain why I don't remember it. Checking the missiontext.plist, that fits.

[Cholmondely]

Next up, galactic jumps: we know npcs can do it, but apart from one particular exception, it's never seen to happen (AFAIK).
For me, that exception is so long ago that I can't recall if it left a wormhole cloud that could be analysed or dived into.

Can anyone enlighten me? And how do we explain the fact that a galactic jump takes no time (according to the ship's clock)?

Just stumbled across this:

Taking this to the next level. Why is a galactic hyperjump instantaneous, ie no clock adjustment?

See following discussion

[Cody]

Sixty-four hours - yes, that is a good number!

[Redspear]

Technomancy?

What about inter-octant communications?

Sixty-four hours - yes, that is a good number!

Bit late here but... this is starting to sound familiar.

[Cody]

Bit late here but... this is starting to sound familiar.

Aye - and 64 squares on the chess board.

[Cody]

Generation ships - over 70,000 of them. Were they despatched from Earth/Sol Sytem?
If not, then from where? Somewhere in the pocket universe known as the Eight?

[Redspear]

Generation Ships Before the development of the WS Thru-Space drive... some of them into their 30th generation.

Two things there that suggest to me that:

• they left from very near to Sol
• They did so approx 600 years ago

As only some of them are into their 30th generation, I took a both mathematically convenient and also relatively short average generation time of 20 years.

...Therefore generation ships by approx 2500/2600, Thru-space by approx 2700 (the python)!

[Cholmondely]

Generation ships - over 70,000 of them. Were they despatched from Earth/Sol Sytem?
If not, then from where? Somewhere in the pocket universe known as the Eight?

I would not have thought so. The two well-developed versions of the lore - Selezen's & Cim's - both imply that the inhabitants of the Eight came from elsewhere. Neither seem to discuss the GS's - but Selezen's views would have been historically tinged by his wish to incorporate Frontier, and his current views would be influenced by E:D. The only real reference to them that I've noticed is Redspear's quote from the Manual (p30):

Generation Ships Before the development of the WS Thru-Space drive, in all its various forms, interstellar travel occurred in large, self-sustaining environment ships - Generation Ships - most of which have now been logged and their progress monitored. There are more than seventy thousand of these immense vessels ploughing their way through the galaxy, some of them into their 30th generation. The penalty for interference with such a vessel is marooning.

Our wiki adds this (Legends of Elite):

Generation ships
Generation ships are huge colonisation vessels travelling through normal space at near-relativistic speed, many have still to reach their destinations. Of those that have, none have attempted to decelerate and have made no effort to communicate with welcoming parties.

Generation ships were mentioned in the manual of classic elite, and even present in the ArcElite version (unverified, but I have seen pictures).

Schism is a short story by Drew Wagar based on generation ships. The short story Vendetta by Jason Togneri also features a generation ship.

Arexack originally wrote this back in 2006:

Generation Ships
Huge colonisation vessels travelling through normal space at near-relativistic speed, many have still to reach their destinations. Of those that have, none have attempted to decelerate and have made no effort to communicate with welcome parties. Generation ships were mentioned in the manual of classic elite, and even present in the arc-elite version (?unverified, but I have seen pictures).

The best bits of the oxp wiki page were written by McLane in 2009.