How fast can astronauts fall?

[AtraUnam]

I need to know if there's a cap to how fast players can fall in astronaut mode and if there is one, is it based on the server speed limit? I need to know for completely sane reasons that have nothing to do with an intergalactic gravity tube system.

 

[Monchoman45]

I don't know how fast astronauts fall, but in the interest of intergalactic tube science, I'll just tell you everything I do know.

The first thing I did on mushroom fleet was blow up my first ship. I respawned in 0,0,0 with no cores. The closest shop is the spawn shop in 2,2,2. I am of the opinion that when I do ridiculously stupid things, that I should solve my own stupid problems - so I pointed myself at the spawn shop, in astronaut mode, and started "walking". I timed roughly how long it took me to travel .1km (100m) using the waypoint marker and got 20 seconds - about 2m/s - and then divided that by how far I had to go, which is how I found out that I am an idiot.

Mushroom fleet has double speed limit (150m/s) and substantially larger sectors (8km?). I've walked around considerably in astronaut mode on both mushroomfleet and singleplayer (where my settings are default), and never noticed any substantial difference in speed. This leads me to believe that server speedlimit doesn't affect astronaut speed. I don't have access to my starmade installation right now, but you may be able to find something in server.cfg that determines astronaut speed.

Fall speed is slightly different (and obviously faster) than walk speed, but I would bet they're related. Intuitively, I suspect that you either immediately reach top speed (if you are falling, you are always falling x m/s), or if you do accelerate, you reach top speed quickly. I would put my money on an easy number (like 5x walk speed).

For real science, there's this:


Fair warning that "apoplectic" is supposed to be "epileptic". They fall through twice, from :09 to 1:16, and from 2:12 to 3:19. That's 1:06 +- 1s, which is pretty good data - or would be, if we knew how big that thing was. It was built by BinHawkins2013, if he knows how big it was offhand.

Alternatively, you could build your own tube of known length (crystal spiral optional) and time yourself falling through it. I think you need at least 30fps to not lag, but I'm not sure about that.

I should also point out that no intergalactic tube system will beat out a decent jumpship (sorry). 10 second charges are fairly easy to get. At 8 sectors/jump, with 2km sectors, that's 1.6km/s. To be perfectly honest though, if you actually built an intergalactic tube network, I'd probably use it at least once.

 

[Mered4]

So, here's what I've learned when I built the Titan Gate, my 1km diameter Stargate, and its corresponding gravity elevator.
The elevator is about 1100m in length, and goes through the gate itself. Hilariously, it's quite easy to *accidentally* pass through the gate while using the elevator, which has lead to some interesting accidents.

However, there IS a top speed for falling. I can't remember what it is off the top of my head, but it took a little while to accelerate to it (about 200m or so). I think its around 60-70 m/s, but I could be wrong. I know it isn't more than 100m/s for sure, but beyond that I haven't a clue.

 

[AtraUnam]

Damn. I was hoping falling speed would have no hard cap so that if you fell far enough you could end up going at several km/s.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Is it different from ship falling speed? I lost my main ship to a glitch, I logged in and it fell through the planet, came out the other side, and kept falling away. I spawned a new ship core but was not able to catch up, it was drifting faster than my core at the speed limit!

Sorry if off-topic but it could be an interesting data point for those interested in gravity and falling speeds.

 

[Monchoman45]

Server speed limit governs speed under thrust, and not speed from gravity. If you jump into a black hole system and let yourself fall, you can easily reach several thousand m/s regardless of server speed limit. You'll continue going that fast until you try to move yourself; doing so will fix your speed to the server speed limit. Whether or not this is a bug is up for discussion, it is at least really cool.

I suspect that this applies to all gravity-related speed - whether from planets or black holes - but that generally, no one observes it on planets because most of the time you hit the planet and stop. The reason we have a speed limit in the first place is that collision detection is buggy at high speeds. The faster objects are travelling, the more likely they are to not collide at all and pass through each other (referred to as tunneling); in your case, your ship probably fell through the planet before the plate had loaded, but your guess is as good as mine for why it ended up flying out the other side faster than the speed limit.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Made this a while ago. Evidently, quite fast.

 

[AtraUnam]

Made this a while ago. Evidently, quite fast.

Thank Schema we don't have fall damage... actually, Schema add fall damage.