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[Makkal]

Is the time it takes for me to travel from point A to point B the same amount of time it takes my character?

[Gaven Lok ri]

Yes.

[Makkal]

My thanks.

[Esna Pitoojee]

While in space, I believe the generally accepted answer is yes - i.e., ingame align times, warp speeds, gate jumps, titan bridges, etc etc are all acceptable as IC claims.

The moment you drop out of space, however, things become a bit trickier.

First there's docking - I personally consider the instantaneous way it occurs ingame to be non-IC, in part because it is possible to reach a docking radius while your ship is still physically kilometers from the station. Of course, even that aside, going from "pulling into the docking bay" to "in your hangar, with your ship hooked up to the stations' systems and ready for cargo unloading" in under ten seconds is a serious stretch (nevermind that some stations appear to be kilometers long on the inside - I'm looking at you, Amarr stations).

Then there's cargo. In some instances it kinda sorta makes sense that it'd at least go quickly - a cargo container being loaded aboard an industrial, for instance. In others, it's more difficult, particularly when loading lots of small things or entire fitted ships into a maintenance bay; these things would probably take a decent amount of time realistically. Regardless of the scale, I do not personally consider it canon that we can instantaneously load and unload stuff from our ships.

Fitting, of course, must take longer than 'instantaneously' as well - especially when you are looking at equipment for larger hulls. Moving frigate-sized turrets on and off of my dreadnought in under a second? Yeah, no.

Depending on you computer, getting out of your pod can actually take a little while ingame (lolcarbon), but even then waiting a minute or two to go through the entire process of decanting the pod, detaching the connections, getting out, washing off, and dressing up seems a little fast to me still. I'm more in favor of this taking 5-10 minutes for a veteran pilot going through practiced motions, maybe faster if you're scrambling in a rush.


A final addendum to my initial point about in-space actions: I realized that there is one thing I would consider highly non-canon in space: Anything involving in-space used of a ship maintenance array or fitting service. The reasons are the same as I describe for docking and fitting above: These things happen instantaneously ingame, with our ships vanishing the second we leave them despite the size. Even with frigates, I just can't rationalize a jumbo-jet sized object being prepped for launch from a hangar, launched, our pod inserting itself into the ship, and systems being connected and brought online... in less than three seconds, at most.

Disclaimer - my opinions here, yada yada.

[Gaven Lok ri]

Nanites cover a large amount of the hand waving needed to explain your maintenence qualms, there.

I think its better to assume eve technology works as fast as it happens in game, and take that reality as the fact that must be explained. Otherwise you run into serious temporal disconnects.

[Katrina Oniseki]

I think its better to assume eve technology works as fast as it happens in game, and take that reality as the fact that must be explained. Otherwise you run into serious temporal disconnects.

Serious temporal disconnects will be encountered anyways.

When you dock your ship, you're immediately able to hit the "Enter Captains Quarters" button. Presuming you have a decent computer, it should take you anywhere from 5-30 seconds to load your CQ.

You've just gone from sitting inside your pod, to standing on the gantry next to it fully dressed and dry with your hair done up and makeup still on.

- Perhaps you spray yourself with drying nanites.
- Your makeup is impervious to smudging.
- You fly in the pod while dressed

Okay... but what about the time it takes for your pod to exit your ship and dock over at that gantry, and for the physical doors of the pod to open, and your character to walk up the ladder. All of that, plus the rest... in 30 seconds? Sure, you could handwave that, I suppose... but at this point it's less 'handwaving' and more 'flailing your arms about desperately'.

See... eventually, there comes a point when adding all this handwavium and shoehorned lore is actually detrimental to immersion. When we watch a television show and the scene changes, we don't immediately start trying to shoehorn aliens and teleporters to explain how Bob has shown up at Sally's house mere seconds after saying goodbye to Jim at work. Instead, we automatically assume the TV show has excluded the mundane aspects of the commute, and everything flows smoothly. Why can't we do the same for EVE?

Why can't we assume that certain mundane aspects of the scene changes have taken place, without trying to explain down to every little detail how it could be possible that getting from station dock in Jita to a noisy bar in nullsec takes only seconds? Is it because there are other players involved? I suppose the time difference might raise eyebrows, but I personally find it far less annoying to simply advise my RP buddy to "timewarp" instead of having to go through the motions of spraying Jovian pixie dust onto everything in my hangar.

In short, I think we just need to step back and leave the nanites alone.

EDIT:

When I reference the concept of 'too much handwaving' in the above post, I'm referring to adding various bits of extraneous and superfluous lore into scene changes. I realize that simply assuming the commute has happened normally is also considered handwaving, however I consider that to be an appropriate amount instead of overdoing it.

[Karmilla Strife]

Ship travel, ie warping +jumping i'd consider the same. The docking stuff seems fast. I'm not a stickler for being in local for my RP, but I like some delay. IE. if Esna asked me over to do some crash at the Esnaharem, I'd say sure but wait a few minutes before RPing there.

[Katrina Oniseki]

Ship travel, ie warping +jumping i'd consider the same. The docking stuff seems fast. I'm not a stickler for being in local for my RP, but I like some delay. IE. if Esna asked me over to do some crash at the Esnaharem, I'd say sure but wait a few minutes before RPing there.

That's always a nice option of mine, but sometimes I prefer to jump right in without having to wait in real time. To counter that effect, I actually RP the time difference to help soothe any ruffled feathers. As an example:

Katrina Oniseki enters the Esnaharem some time later, hair still wet from the post-capsule shower she made sure to enjoy.

Notice how I've both added a vague reference to the time difference, and a direct reference to how Katrina may have taken her sweet time in the shower. This helps give a sense of time to those who might wonder how long it took in the back of their heads. It notably avoids any hard numbers, such as "half an hour later".

[Gaven Lok ri]

Its less dealing with it in RP chat contexts that presents a problem and more in understanding the world as a living RPing world. RP chat often seems a bit disconnected from the rest of EVE as is, people often RP scenes that cannot be happening given the exact actions their character is taking at the time, so those scenes must be happening at a different point in time. The getting in and out of pod issues are much less tied into pressing time concerns than the act of repairing a ship and undocking.

If you push too hard on the Docking and repairing actually takes longer line, then you suddenly have a whole set of timestamped kills and deaths that are not just invalid but impossible to reconcile.

Similarly with the maintenance arrays. I find it *less* handwavey to say that they really work as fast as they seem to than to argue that the in game results of battles could not have happened the way they appeared in game.

[Rok-Yuni]

Yeah, as mentioned above really...

in space, everything is basically as-is... (except looting/cargo (see below))

when dealing with the docking, cargo transfer etc it's more apt to think of these things as viable game mechanics rather than fact.

For instance. looting from a cargo can in space.
they could have made it so you had to scan a can to see what was in it without spewing it's contents into space.
They 'could' have given us a pretty little animation of our ship's cargo drones heading to the can, taking from it 'stuff' and putting said stuff into our cargo hold... but that would make each looting take 30 seconds or more.

Docking... it 'could' be shown in a more logical and realistic manner, taking time, and needing clearance, with multiple docking ports on each station and (much like the X universe) needing a clear bit of space near the docking port.

the issue of course is one of gameplay.

would anyone really play eve that much if docking took 5-30 minutes (or a few hours if you're going to jita.)
would anyone really loot from missions/rats if you had to scan each wreck, then wait for your drones to move each item to your cargobay...

so. TL;DR.

Travel time is (near enough) correct.
handwavium is needed for the little things.

-Rok

[Lyn Farel]

There is a magical narrative device which is called time ellipsis, and that solves all of these petty issues imho. The tricky thing is to understand each other when someone starts to use it, as Kat said above.

Katrina Oniseki enters the Esnaharem some time later, hair still wet from the post-capsule shower she made sure to enjoy.

[Louella Dougans]

if you're talking about "taking an interbus shuttle" somewhere, there are some fiddle factors.

1. Unregistered stargates - these appear in many missions, they are operated by various groups. An interbus shuttle may have access to a gate network that provides a far more direct route.

2. Interbus rapid shuttles - the known Interbus Shuttle variant has an extra +10 m3 cargo space compared with the normal shuttles. It is feasible that there are other variants, e.g. with a bigger engine, allowing much faster warp.

[Katrina Oniseki]

There is a magical narrative device which is called time ellipsis, and that solves all of these petty issues imho. The tricky thing is to understand each other when someone starts to use it, as Kat said above.

Katrina Oniseki enters the Esnaharem some time later, hair still wet from the post-capsule shower she made sure to enjoy.

♥