EVE General Discussion

So I have been playing around with the formulas to calculate travel times. I know the alignment is the time to change direction and reach the 75% speed to enter warp. However, I cannot find the time it takes to go from full stop to Max Velocity. For instance, how long would it take me to reach a station when I drop out at the standard 15 km distance in my Reaper (which has a 433.33 m/sec max velocity)? I cannot seem to find the numbers, and I am at a loss as to how this would be calculated since I do not have an acceleration rate which I would use to find the information on. Has anyone else been able to calculate this?

Keep in mind that ship mass (affected by some mods) and agility (also affected by some mods) will change the numbers.

With higher mass your align time will decrease.

With lower agility your align time will decrease.


Additionally, it will work in reverse too.
Higher mass and lower agility will make a ship slow down slower too.

Align time is based on what I call effective mass. Mass X agility modifier = effective mass. I don't know the calculation beyond that. Acceleration is faster than deceleration, which can make the align time from an undock impossible to predict, but it also lets you do some manual flying to improve your times. As far as actually calculating travel times, I wouldn't be too hopeful since the route information doesn't give you AU's. You'd have better luck running a few different long routes and figure out the median time per system. Also, don't autopilot. I feel like I shouldn't have to say that, but don't.

I am looking to calculate using auto pilot because I primarily want to know how long it will be for travelling if I am travelling from one system to another and need to click and forget.

Leitmotif, please.

Here's the formula for time taken to reach speed V, where I is inertia and M is the mass of the ship.

http://m.imgur.com/wNgeZ7r?r

Technically it does take infinite time to reach max speed, but it gets exponentially closer to max speed as time goes on.

For what it is worth, my experience is that max velocity matters more than acceleration, as 15 km - 2.5 km = 12.5 km is plenty for most any ship to reach max velocity.

Example: The Charon is the slowest freighter, but AFK it is faster than an Orca which accelerates faster.

The time to go from full stop to any velocity:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160228093248/https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Acceleration


Should you want to look at a MWD calculation, which is even stranger:

365 m/s Rifter Base Velocity * (1 + Navigation 5 * 5%) * (1 + 500% MWD bonus * (1 + Acceleration Control 5 * 5%) * (1500000 MWD thrust / (1067000 kg ship mass + 500000 kg module mass))) = 3185.8886 m/s

Obligatory:

http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/66437/1/rounding.png

It takes roughly 10 minutes for any ship to come to a complete stop after the velocity reads 0.0 m/s. When that happens, the ship model tends to "flip", because the client doesn't know what direction to point it.

A long time ago I napkin math'd this with a stopwatch and some cryptic comments from Fozzie for a web tool I wrote. I no longer remember the exact math, but you can see the resulting JS lib with pretty extensive commentary here: http://xyjax.com/js/EVEn_old.js

In particular check out the flightTime (and the comments right before it about the mathematical basis), rawFlightTime, flightDistance, rawFlightDistance, tauFlightDistance, accelTime, and rawAccelTime for the stuff directly related to accelerating to max speed. There's also warp acceleration/distance/time stuff in there too...

EDIT: In particular, the equations I assumed (or found?) for sublight travel were
/**
* Linear motion is fluid drag.
* K = agility * mass / 10^6
* V(t) = Vm*(1 - e^(-t/K))
* S(t) = Vm*t - Vm*K*(1 - e^(-t/K))
*/
and I just hacked up the derivations from there.