EVE Fiction

Warp is standard propulsion at greater then light speeds. The star gates 'fold' space making huge distance be able to travel instantaneously. FTL speeds are great for inter system travel. But how many light years is it between the Sol system and our nearest neighbor? Years.

Hope this makes since. It's late here. I'm tired, and don't want to dig out my copy of Eve Source at the moment. If no one clears things up more for you I'll take a peek into the stargate section of the Source and respond coherently tomorrow.

Game mechanics. Some things have to simply be modified for simplicity and usability of the game. Otherwise, you would have to position your ship inside of the gate in order to use it. You would appear inside of the gate on exit. As would everyone else who used it before and after you. Ships would occupy the same space. Problems would ensue.

At the end of the day Eve is a game. And not every aspect of it can or should be expected to be explained away in fiction. For everything else

Then it's simple. The offset from which you show up after jumping through a stargate is a trajectory miscalibration. Cheers.

Warp clearly isn't conventional propulsion, as warp disruption effects do not affect your standard (reaction drive) propulsion. At least, we don't need to reach anywhere close to 100% light speed for in-system warp. That alone makes things MUCH easier for theorycrafting.

Warp drives apparently operate in the same way an alcubierre drive would, by curving the space in "front" of you and "behind" you (the "warp bubble" effect) and litterally moving space around your whip rather than the ship itself, thus circumventing the implications of reactionless drives and those pesky newtonian laws. It would also easily explain how MWDs work and why they light up your sig like a christmas tree.

This would also explain why you can't warp to something that is right next to you: you would kill yourself (see below).

Which brings us to jump gates. Those seem to operate on an entirely different principle which, for a reason that few people actually think about, would make a lot of sense:

You need to keep in mind that curving and compressing space implies compressing the energy within said space, which is subsequently released upon decompression... This is what's called an explosion.

In fact, any type of FTL device would effectively be a much more devastating weapon than any laser, railgun or missile could ever be. [or, alternatively, the same principle could be used to handwave explain smartbombs: two or more layers of curved space, one that is decompressed outwards to do omnidirectional damage, and another whose purpose is to protect the ship and simultaneously redirect its own energy into the fold of the first one as a control mechanism.]

It's already good enough that we have warp drives that don't accidentally every planet we warp to, because interstellar warp drives could potentially blap whole entire systems and whatnot.

Aside from that, the interaction between ships and stargates fit more with the "win-rar-package" type of "FTL". As in: there is a breach of continuity between your pre-jump state and your post-jump state. For example, if you try reloading your weapons while jumping, you'll get a message saying that the action could not be completed as your ship is not in the same location it used to be.

It would make sense if the stargate worked much like flash-cloning does, by taking an instant image of your ship. By deconstructing your ship and then reconstructing it in the other system, you eliminate the main problem of FTL travel: anything with mass requires an infinite amount of energy to reach light speed.

The solution: don't send anything with mass. Send a signal via a controllable micro-wormhole or some other form of FTL communication (which, by itself is still very problematic, but much less so than accelerating mass faster than light), which would only need to be a map of where all the atoms composing your ship need to be to reproduce it at a given time. Yes, such stargates would decompose your ship and 3D-print it in another system with entirely different atoms. So it technically wouldn't be the same ship.

Yeah. You wouldn't just jump to another location. You would jump to another material composition.

Another point to support this possibility is the central role that stargates play in the cloning system itself. The brain image of a soon-to-be-deceased capsuleer is transmited via the stargate network to the medical facility where his/her clone is located.

Oh, and, finally, this would mean that micro jump drives are not appropriately named, as they would be more of a mid-range between MWDs and proper system-wide warp drives.

PS. I won't even get started on acceleration gates. They are basically supposed to be gigantic railguns mass accelerators that can fire battleship-sized loads at warp velocity...

EVE ships actually warp much, much faster than 100% of lightspeed. they measure their warp speeds in AU per second: an AU is about eight and a half light minutes. Which means that even battleships at a paltry 2AU/s have a warp cruise speed of about 1000C.

A Cheetah can do more than twelve thousand times the speed of light.

Incidentally if you're a fan of Star Trek, then warp 9.8 (hellishly fast in that setting) is about the same speed as a cruiser gets up to.