EVE Fiction

Nothing can move faster than light in a vacuum, even gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light. So how are our ships able to pick up signatures that might be up to 100 light minutes away in real time?

1AU is roughly the distance from earth to the sun*, and the sun is about 8* light minutes away from the earth. So extrapolating, 14 AU is around 2 light hours! With D-scan set to max, it should take at least around 2 hours for our scanners to passively acquire information about what's around the pilots ship, double that for any active sensor (since the scan pulse needs to return to the sensor) and yet the results are returned instantly.

Is there a way to explain this discrepancy beyond 'space magic'?









*The distance between the earth and the sun varies a little
*8.3 min

Or you can explain it away with the hypothetical Tachyons, elementary particles that travel faster then light, but never slower, that way you can have near-instant info about anything if you got a device that can emit them & receive them again.
As everything has mass, it creates a tiny gravity well, and they react on that, allowing you to 'scan' stuff.

Note in RL, tachyons are still very hypothetical, none has ever been detected (and as they travel faster then light, it's going to be hard anyway) However, as long as they don't travel at lightspeed or slower, they are not in breach with what we know.

Considering how fluid routers work (quantum entanglement), not likely.

Alternate theories: Tachyons, or the D-scan is not an actual scanner but a GPS-like locator system sponsored by CONCORD.

That is a terrible analogy. Fluid routers do not send out signals.

Cell phones work by sending and receiving radio signals over long distances. These radio signals travel through the air, and can thus be detected, intercepted, and interfered with.

Fluid routers are like string can phones. They are connected directly, via quantum entanglement, to one or more central hubs. The quantum entanglement effectively means that the fluid router is about as detectible as an internal component in the network hub in Yulai.

I'm not sure it counts as 'space magic' (well, except possibly in the Arthur C. Clarke sense) but I think it is fair to say that the denizens of New Eden are working with a science that has at least a slightly different model of the physical universe than our present mainstream science uses.

I mean, it's a great question and I don't think we have a defined answer, even though it's fairly clear that the means to passively/semi-passively/actively scan at distance with FTL returns is there.

I will point to one snippet of interest from the Interstellar Travelling article:



I'm not saying this is necessarily related to how D-Scans work (and I'm not even sure if the character in that fiction article is using the term 'cosmic string' in the sense our physicists would) but it's certainly another demonstration of FTL scanning technology which, in this case, operates at vast distances.

D-scan work because God wills it.
Long live the empire

Since we can displace one ship from one place to another that is light years away (jump portals, cynos and stuff) almost instantly, I'd like to think that scanner works by spamming matters all over the 14 au range, then when matters encounter something tangible they warp back to your ship, very awesome matters eh?

Like your ship is warping somewhere but interrupted by a warp bubble kinda thing. That is how the matter is warping but encounter something tangible and stops?

I am not a science guy, this is the perspective of a filthy peasant. Matters that behave that way must be sentient and it's mass close to non-existence I guess.

I totally get this, Im still asking anyway incase there actually was a good answer. D-scan is an awesome tool and I cannot imagine playing EVE without it.



Tachyons might explain it, I'll be honest. I thought that was something star trek made up. I'll need to read up on them some more.

If D-scan worked more like a GPS-ish locater then how would you explain it still working in wormholes? Theres no CONCORD in w-space, there isn't even a local beacon. Yet running a D-scan in the system will yield immediate updates to the results.





Please. Everyone knows if you fitted that many handwavium capacitors to a single unit it would create an unmanageable resonance cascade feedback loop. I mean sure if the main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots of the stator; every seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversible trem'e pipe to the differential girdlespring on the up-end of the grammes, you might be able to get a workable prototype. But you would still need to contend with the side fumbling problem in the ambifacient lunar wane shafts! You would need something that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters.
It's a nice theory but I'm not sure how well it would work in EVE.

There is no automatic local comms beacon or CONCORD security response, but CONCORD"s tracking and recording systems are omnipresent even in W-space: These are the same systems that track kill records, inhibit deployment of certain POS modules, and otherwise regulate capsuleer activity.

Electricity through a wire moves faster than light.


Quantum Entaglement moves faster than light because it "knows" what the other particle is doing.

Maybe all D-scanners have hull particles built in them and can tell where the item is in system but only up to max distance. I like the space magic idea. Some things are better as a mystery.

It moves -slower- through a wire. It's called propagation delay.