EVE General Discussion

So, I'm bored at work and decided to crunch some numbers. I was wondering how fast EVE Warp drives were, and how that relates to real-world distances and time scales. I was pretty surprised by the numbers:

Assuming your ship travels 3au per second:

1 au = ~8.7 light minutes.
3 au = 26.1 light minutes in one second.
26.1 light minutes = 1566 light seconds
1 year = 31,556,926 seconds.

Thus, it would take a 3au/second ship 20,151.2937 seconds to traverse a light year. This would mean relatively slow, 3au/sec ships traverse a light year in 5.5975816 hours.

Assuming you were cap stable, from Earth, you could get to Proxima Centauri in 23.5 hours.
Wolf 359 would only take 43.5 hours. Sirius would be just under two days, while you could easily make Procyon in a little over two and a half days.

Assuming you were in the fastest ship possible (I believe interceptors can get ~24 au/sec) the game really changes:

24 au = 12,528 light seconds.

Thus:
31,556,926 light seconds / 12,528 light seconds per second = 2,518.91172 seconds to traverse a light year.
2,518.91172 / 60 = 41.981862 minutes per light year. Or 0.699697699 hours to travel across a light year.

You could get to Proxima in just under 3 hours, Wolf 359 in just under 6 hours, and Sirius in just under 8.

Of course, at that speed, it would still take you about 200 years to get to Andromeda.

At that rate, I wonder why there are jump gates at all, though I imagine shaving off hours (or days) of time is worth it in the grand scheme of things.

Note: it's possible that in my late, work-addled brain, I've messed up my math somewhere and I'm really off. That said, I think it's a fun thought experiment, and thought I would share my goofy results and work-procrastination results.

Would I be able to dock before DT?

8/10 post (gave ya minus 2 for wasting the bosses money)

I have often wondered about the need for star gates, too. Especially since installing one sounds like a rather expensive endeavour, and what little of the lore I read mentions how systems were only colonised after gates were installed.


Your math seems fine, BTW. I get ~ 5.85 hours per light year at 3 au/s.

The lore mentions the need to lock onto a gravitational source before you can warp to it. (Which makes you wonder why/hook bookmarks work.) If a distant star doesn't provide enough of a gravitational source for inter-stellar warping, then I think Eve's ship drives will be limited to in-system travel.

Anyway, here's some lore/reading:
Interstellar Travel
Old Man's Star

Are you calling me fat?

B!tch

my ship fold space no travel time at all its called event hor...end is evil read not for public use.

Very interesting read, thanks Op :)

Now all we need is the Spice, melange and a few navigators, then we can travel through space without motion........
hehe

Given the same navigation technology, capsuleers would probably use much shorter routes. We could use navigation maneuvers far beyond the abilities of mortal pilots. We could also afford to screw it up, once in a while, since all we would lose is a ship and a clone.

Nah… EVE light is just very very slow.

Too bad Star Trek Voyager wasn't a Hurricane