Hi there, new member here! Recently discovered Eclipse Phase and loving that this game probably has everything I ever liked in a scifi! XD
Okay, so my first questions basically come down to space travel. I have looked across the forum to answers for certain things to do with space travel, but what I was after wasn't really answered.
I know about acceleration and deceleration, coasting speeds all in Gs or fractions of them. I even have saved the stats of the ships with their masses in tonnes and max accel, delta-Vs etc from another thread here, which are pretty useful :)
I know from reading the threads here that there are people that know far more about space math than I do when it comes to how long it takes specific ships to travel to certain places, thanks usually to the type of thruster they use.
However I come from Traveller, where the accel/deccel of a ship is greatly simplified. I'd like to learn more about space math, but worded hopefully a little bit more understandable than the Project Rho website (yeah, don't link it for me, I know all about it! ^^)
I generally go here;
http://www.cthreepo.com/lab/math1/
and use the Newtonian constant acceleration calculator for however long I want my ships to accel/deccel then use the velocity as the coasting speed (obviously I subtract the distances travelled in the accel/deccel also).
This has served me well in Traveller, where the reaction drives have a quantifiable amount of reaction mass to spend per round of accel/deccel so you know when they are running low or what is the prime amount to spend.
In Eclipse Phase, I'm more puzzled, especially with Mass Ratios and Delta-Vs, but not knowing when a ship would run out of reaction mass (though thanks to ship stats I know roughly how much they'd hold).
If anyone could offer me a helping hand, that'd be great, I don't particularly want to handwave the reaction mass in a Scum Barge travelling between worlds (for example) and just say it moves 0.003G until halfway and then deccels the same way. I assume it would have some coast in the middle.
Thanks again everyone ;)
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Space travel mathematics
Fri, 2013-04-19 18:58
#1
zero
Space travel mathematics
Sat, 2013-04-20 23:51
#2
DivineWrath
If I recall correctly, the
If I recall correctly, the big ships don't slow down. It uses up too much reaction mass to speed up and slow down. They rather send smaller shuttles that carry important cargo which use significantly less reaction mass.
I don't know much about space math though. I haven't felt the need to read up on it... yet.
Edit: I forgot to mention a few things. The ships in Eclipse Phase don't fire their engines at maximum speed to get from destination A to B, then reverse thrust to stop so they don't accidentally crash land or leave the solar system. That is considered wasteful. Instead, they opt to try to use the gravitational force of a planet or significantly large object to orbit around it as a part of a trick to travel from A to B, then back to A, followed by returning to B... Its one of their better tricks to conserve reaction mass. Using this trick, they only need to fire their engines to make micro-adjustments to their flight path. Such a trick has something of an attitude like "We'll get there eventually...".
As such, trying to get to a destination is like catching a ride on a train or airplane. Often times you don't have a ship going from A to B, so you need to travel to some third location which has a ship going where you want to go.
Also some flight routes can travel in a list of destinations like A, B, C, D... so on until they get back to A. Its complex, and I'm not an expert in this stuff, so I expect that someone else would be better able to explain it.