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As you can tell from the title of this thread, I'm a geek. Yes, I accept that. But I've been wondering for a while how does Eve Online's warp drives and stargate networks compare to the warp drives of Star Trek, eyeballing STO as well. I vaguely remember some post in the past touching on this lightly but haven't been able to find it, so I decided to post this for shiggles.
Now, a couple of facts (based on a 365 day year):
1 lightyear (traditional) = 63197.79093 AU. Speed of light = c. Number of seconds in one year = 31536000
In Eve's AU/second, 1 AU/s = 499.004784 c
According to online sources, based on calculations done at different parts of the different series, the warp factor can be either a cubic modifier or to the 10/3 power, i.e. velocity V = w^3 * c or V = w^(10/3) * c (the latter being slightly faster). I always thought it was a logarithmic scale, but whatever.
The calculations would get messy to show on here, so I'll just give the results and I'll compare to both Star Trek formulas (I'll refer to them as the Cubic and Fast ones). I will ignore the unusual things that happen getting close to warp 10 in star-trek, I will only use the two warp formulas shown above.
So: Eve's 1 AU/s = Warp 7.93 (cubic), 6.448 (fast).
Eve's slowest known ship warp speed (for a freighter), 0.7 AU/s = 349.303 c = Warp 7.04 (cubic), 5.794 (fast)
Eve's most common ship warp speed, 3 AU/s = 1497.014 c = Warp 11.44 (cubic), 8.965 (fast)
Hmm...already hitting TNG's pivotal Warp 9 max speed .
Eve's fastest known warp speed on a specially rigged Interceptor, 15 AU/s = 7485.07 c = Warp 19.56 (cubic), 14.53 (fast)
Time it would take to travel 1 light year in Eve Online with a stargate or jump drive: a few seconds.
Time it would take to travel 1 light year at Star Trek's Warp 9: 12.016 hours (cubic), 5.777 hours (fast).
Where's the any key?
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Impressive!
You sir are an example to us all.
i agree on that hahaha
BestSigEver :P
I prefer Babylon 5s way of doing faster than light speed. In effect it is not faster than light speed but rather works by bending space so that two points become much closer together and this is done by using jump gates.
The reason this is so much more believable is because it has much more support in science. Space is bent around mass and if you have mass which is really high (both in therms of amount and density) then space could bend on itself, in effect making two points much closer together. E.g. a wormhole.
Faster than light speed is however much more difficult to explain. For mass to reach close to speed of light it would have to be propelled by infinite amounts of energy. More over, a person in a space ship which travels close to speed of light would experience time at a much slower rate than someone who is not, meaning he could be in the ship for a few hours but his buddy at a space station would experience that time in days so you would have weird time sync issues with people travelling around the speed of light. Then you have ofcourse the acceleration required to reach those speeds, which would rip apart any biological being made out of mass.
Finally, the ships in Star Trek, are travelling much faster than speed of light, which is theoretically impossible where as creating jump gates, which bends space, is not. The main issue with that however, is that it would require massive amounts of mass, talking giant star type of mass here concentrated to a much smaller space and you have to use some way of keeping it stable (dark matter is suggested here), however it is theoretically possible. Mass travelling faster than light is however much more dificult to explain, even on a theoretical level.
But assuming you would somehow have this infinite amounts of energy to reach those speeds it is still much more feasible for a stationary gate to amass the mass and density needed to create an artifical wormhole than a moving space ship producing that amounts of energy. It is a contradiction in itself because for creating infinite amounts of energy you would need infinite amounts of mass which would then increase the energy needed to propell that same mass because the more mass you have the more energy is needed to move that mass. It is just not feasible on theoretical nor practical level.
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But in Star Trek they don't travel faster than light through normal space, but through subspace...whatever that may be.
I enjoy Star Trek very much but I'm no expert in all this. But to me subspace travelling sounds like their little solution everything that makes warp speeds impossible, such as the time problem.
Alright, not sure what sub-space is and how much support there is in modern science for it but it does sound more similar to creating some sort of space-time bend instead of travelling faster than light.
Still sounds more credible that a huge stationary object would be able to create that space-time bend rather than a moving star-ship because the energy/mass needed for that would still be enormous.
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I just read that OP and my miniscule cerebelum exploded maybe that should be in science weekly ? are u secretly Steven Hawking,Sheldon Cooper ,Einstein reincarnate,Samantha Carter kudos to ya but i need a lie down as my brain hurts !!
I'm not a physicist but the relative differences in size in comparison to the thing you are bending (a ly of space) is miniscule. I would guess its like an ant lifting the mass of the world vs an angry ant lifting the mass of the world or something in understandable terms (if it was to scale the ants would collapse into themselves and turn into black holes!)
Wow, fucking rad. I wish I could math.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
Overall very interesting. But you left out the favourite Warp of the day in STs ever changing Warp formula
In case of your TNG example:
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For warp factors up to 9, the revised formula became:
Or, to calculate speed in terms of c (up to warp 9), the formula would be:
In this case, warp 1 is equivalent to c (as it was in the 23rd century scale); warp 6 is approximately 392 c.
Above warp 9 the exponent was increased above "10/3" exponentially, approaching infinity as the warp factor approaches 10.
This scale was used from TNG onwards.
Using this warp factor formula, a trip from Earth to Alpha Centauri (4.33 light years) would take:
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http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Warp_factor