Oolite Bulletins

Switeck wrote:

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?

Switeck wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

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.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Switeck wrote:

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...

Switeck wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Switeck wrote:

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 wrote:

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

DaddyHoggy wrote:

[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]

Disembodied wrote:

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.

Disembodied wrote:

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 wrote:

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 wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

[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.