EVE General Discussion

As was pointed out elsewhere on the forums, the physics in EVE are based on a super-fluid, rather than a vacuum.

Super-fluids can be affected by electromagnetic forces in a manner that causes it to become resistive. Our ships drives systems would be constantly emitting such electromagnetic waves, and by tuning those waves, or emitting them in specific directions, we would gain "traction" on the surrounding space thus allowing the ships to turn.

Well a popular excuse for why we have under water physics is because the warpcore is always on and is attached to some sub space whatever and causes you to have a kind of friction, which is why we don't casually fly around at 35kms and need to keep our engines going all the time to go a constant speed.

The same type of question could be raised for engines: in space, a ship need to turn on its engines to reach the good speed. Then, without any gravity the ship's speed is constant. Except for some corrections, the ship don't need to use its engine all the time. See the movie Apollo XIII, they used the engines only to give an impulsion between the Moon and the Earth. All the time the engine is off.

So logically, in Eve, our ship's engine must be turn on/off a lot. It is always the same problem is all sci/fi movies/video games.
I think the Battlestar Galactica is near to the real space physics.

Real spaceships use gas ejectors at their fuselage to be propelled in the opposing direction: if they want to go left, they use the gas ejector at its right side. This happens because of the linear momentum conservation principle, but I guess the differential equatios are harder to explain than just saying the ship blows some air to move around.



They don't need an atmosphere to work.

You set a new heading and the game engine proceeds to rotate your ship model according to a predefined rotation based ob where you were pointed and where you want to point.

Seriously, CCP ****** their physics hard in the beginning because they lacked the budget to do it properly. Then they came up with this fluidic space nonsense to cover for it.

It needs to be redone in the worst way.

For every action there is an opposite but equal reaction.
It does not matter if you are in space or not.
Point a thruster in one direction and you will move in the opposite direction.

This is a part of one of Newton's laws of conservation.

My favourite answer so far!

Then why do ships have exhaust emitting engines? If these electromagnetic engines really do emit exhaust, then why can't we see the exhaust of the maneuvering/control thrusters used to turn the ship?

Incorrect. The reality is that the engines flicker on and off at a very high rate. Reason being, that if you have multiple ships turning space around at the same instant you wind up ripping space apart. Imagine if a vinyl record[1] had two holes in it and two turntables[1] were trying to spin the record at the same time in different directions.

Instead, every ship interleaves their flickering so that one and only one ship in the entire universe has its engines in the on state at any time.

Incidentally, as the number of ships in close proximity increases, the ships begin to experience the perceptual phenomena known as "lag" (aka the "slideshow" effect) as each ship's flicker rate is reduced.


[1] For our younger viewers, a vinyl record is much like a CD but is much bigger and, instead of a beam of light, an actual needle is used to 'read' the data from it. A turntable is simply a motor that spins the disk in a manner similar to a CD (but at a much slower speed.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record