EVE General Discussion

After playing for a few months, I've become somewhat familiar with EVE's lore and science, but I don't think I've yet found an explanation for the limited use of warp drives.

As far as I understand, warp drives allow FTL travel by creating a series of vacuums in front of the ship, etc., reaching speeds that are measured in Astronomical Units per second. 1 AU per second would be about 500 times faster than the speed of light. Also, objects operating under a warp drive don't become ephemeral, because ships flying with MWDs active can still physically interact with other ships. So if all these assumptions are true, then why aren't warp drives ever utilized as kinetic weapons?

For instance, in the Empyrean Age trailer, some guy crashes a Nyx into a station at subwarp speeds, but the station survives relatively intact. If the guy in the Nyx had simply kept his warp drive on for an infinitesimal fraction of a second longer, then the station would have been literally and completely obliterated. Hell, someone could just strap a warp drive onto a missile and destroy any ship that has a large gravity field in one hit. I mean, even a frigate is capable of destroying a planet if it was travelling at a fraction of the speed of light. Warp drive missiles would pretty much obsolete every rule of conventional warfare in EVE, expanding maximum ranges from kilometers to solar systems.

Even if there's something like an EVE Geneva Convention to prevent the weaponization of warp drives, there are factions such as the rogue drones and Sansha's Nation that would hardly bother with the ethics WMDs.

TL;DR - Why can't ships warp into planets, stations, or other ships?

Because this is a game, And in the interest of the game staying alive there are boundys and lines.

Because while the warp drive is active their mass is dropped to near absolute zero. If they maintained the same mass they would be unable to accelerate to those speeds. Attempting to exit warp at those speeds would result in the ship shredding itself as its atoms revert back to normal mass. The larger the ship, the greater the effect, so a Nyx might go so far as to tear a part atom by atom, creating a beautiful corona as those atoms dissipate their energy and static charge on the station's shields but doing no actual damage. A smaller ship might shred in a manner that creates larger pieces, effectively sand blasting the target, but that would likely not be enough to damage the structure.

That's not how warp drives work, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

Okay, I'm actually pretty satisfied by that answer. Thanks for preserving my suspension of disbelief :D

damnit.

I doubt it.

Warp drives make things phase through matter. Just look at what happens when you warp through a planet.

Even if microwarp drives work by having you warp for microseconds at a time, you're not actually going at those immense speeds.



And all the what ifs are good :) take a 'simple' question, and turn it up to 11. (I'll build you an Amp that goes to 12 for 20,000 quid, btw)

Same argument as a punch by Superman. I saw it on YouTube, I think.

more exactly:

warp (in EVE) functions as a "trans-dimensional" way of travelling. you create a matter-less space on which the ship is the centre, and you move said bubble thru space unfettered. this is why you go thru planets, stations, stars and you don't transform into a pancake in the process.