Speed km/h

[TheSavage0ne]

speed should not be in km/h it should be something else like AU/h (Asternomical units), or planets are only like 20 miles away from eachother, which is very inaccurite. an AU is the average distance that the earth is to the sun, and it is a lot harder to tell if that is accurite or not so i think that that would be better. or it could also be changed to km/s

 

[Poodleinacan]

You mean lightyears.

 

[Keon]

This wouldn\'t work. Let\'s see why: Let\'s say a fast ship moves at 10 AU / hr. We go top speed for 1 second. Using your AU/hr, you are already many kilometers away. You can\'t manuver anymore when you go that fast. You would be going so fast, collision detection could not work.

So I know what you are thinking. \"But just call it AU/hr, let us still move the same speed\"

No. Let\'s say we can go 60 AU/hr, or 1 AU per minute. Let\'s go at full speed for 1 second. 1/60 AU away now. The sun is 93,000,000 miles away. Let\'s just say it\'s some number of 100,000,000 km away, or 100,000,000,000 m (100 billion m). Now, no matter how slow AU you are going, it\'s going to be several billion m away in one second. But, really, we barely moved. Maybe one rung of the shop, if we were near that in game. So, we need to conclude that one block is actually about a million kilometers. The exact math may be wrong, I\'m tired. But the point is the same.

 

[Keon]

No. He does not.



AU is the distance from Earth to Sun. It is much more reasonable for interplanetary travel.



Still, the point remains that neither would work and you will just have to deal with the fact that this is inherently unrealistic.

 

[Bering]

I agree, km/h is too familiar and it breaks immersion. Considering that the speed limit on highways in Canada is 100 km/h, one quickly realises that a starship goin 50 km/h doesn\'t make any sense

Renaming the speed units and changing the scale, like 0.05 AU/h would make people it much harder for most people to realise that the number doesn\'t really mean anything.

Or, name it \"SPU\" for speed units, or \"SUPS\" for speed units per seconds or something silly like that

 

[Keon]

2000 kilometers per second? No thanks.



How about we rename it in m/s, the sensable unit. The number of blocks traveled in a second. (New speed cap is 13 m/s, btw)



That would be the only change of speed that makes sense. You can\'t try to make this in scale, because it just isn\'t in scale.

 

[TheSavage0ne]

The problems with AU/h are noted which is why i also sugested just switching to km/s which is fairly realistic, better than km/h

for people who will probably not know, km/s is km per second while km/h is km an hour.

 

[Vas]

I prefer meters per second, I don\'t mind the fact that everything is closer. Think of it more as a micro universe instead. AU/h is to fast, it would be faster than light. Unlogical.

 

[Keon]

You don\'t understand. A sector is a few kilometers. I play on a server with the max speed at a 1000km/hr. That\'s fast, but almost too fast. It helps that we have 5 players max. It\'s hard to stop at a shop because it goes by so fast. THIS IS .2 km/s! Imagine, if you will, anything faster than that. Stopping? Out of the question. Fighting? No way. Yeah, that\'s what you\'d get.



You cannot change the units and expect the end result to remain the same.



Now, I wish more powerful servers used 50 m/s. That\'s faster than 50km/hr by a factor of 3 or so. And it feels more spacey. But, no. You can\'t expect to get orbital speeds if the game is not real size.

 

[MrFURB]

This has been a rather hot topic lately...

Truth is, it is just as awkward to have realistic measurements on an unrealistic game as it is to have unrealistic measurements in a unrealistic game. The solution? Either make the information displayed have significance in-game or create an arbitrary measurement that players won\'t try to validate logically. Both solutions have already been suggested in this very thread.

You could make the information useful as it is by having speed/distance be in m/s (Takes less messing around with decimal places than km/h) or change it into some abstract measurement like SPU for speed units.

 

[TheSavage0ne]

Making up a measure unit is entirely fine with me, it is just strange that planets are a few miles away from eachother.

 

[Artikae]

Use warp drive blocks to make a warp drive so that you can get around easily.

Interplanatary travel problem is solved!

 

[Schlumpf]

Its only an optical issue, thats all.



I would use snellwese per Peridion, short: S/Pe

Case closed since nobody would know how fast this in our known systems is. ;-)

 

[Mercur1c]

I\'m pretty sure blocks are 1m^3 so you couldn\'t just change the speed designation. You would have to do math and end up with .0000000000... AU/s.

 

[Winterhome]

Your high speed engines would differ from your combat engines.
In combat, distances would be up to 5-20km. Getting to a combat zone requires usage of your FTL engines as a high speed method of transportation.

 

[Fum]

Use furlongs per fortnight. The speed limit would be over 83000 then.

 

[Parky]

To be honest, I think the units are alright as they are.

I don\'t think much of it, as it\'s just a game. It doesn\'t really matter if planets are very close to each other, as it\'s just a game.

 

[CorneliousCrowe]

Here is what I think: This is a block universe, and distances are measured based on these blocks. Its always been assumed that the distance should be relatable to our universe, like say 1 block length = 1 meter. this is how its measured in minecraft and it makes a lot of sense, but why does it have to be related to our world? I say @Schlumpf had an excellent suggestion, since the problem is an optical one (maybe the name was a little ummm...)

Why not use \"Atomic Block Units\" (ABUs) for small measurements and simply \"Block Units\" for larger measurements. 1 ABU = 1/16 of a block, since in a pixel universe no object can be constructed with less than one pixel. item sprites are technically 0 pixels wide if im not mistaken, but later in the game this might be changed. Also maybe in a block universe, true 2d objects are possible. Larger distances may be measured quite easily as well:

a large ship = 400 x 200 x 100 BU.

a planet = 4200 BU

You could even throw some larger measurements from the Metric system on there:

4200 BU = 4.2 kBU

The speed formula is also easy: 50 km/h = 50 kBU.

Within the game there is no reason to use standard earth measurements, because they wouldn\'t make sense within the universe.

Haha, I just had a cool thought on space travel. Maybe the way the FTL drives or portals or whatever is implemented could work is by reducing the ship from its 3d form into a sprite form causing it to change from 3 dimensional to 2 dimensional, and effectivly reducing its mass to 0. No mass is a free ride to faster than light travel!