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[Shiki]

I tried to search for this, so apologies in advance.

Hypothetical dilemma: I want to perform astronomical experiments outside the astrosphere of a class F stellar object. For a relatively even number, let's say our system has an astrosphere with a radius of 150 AU.

My trusty Tengu has a warp speed of 6.1 AU/s, so it can cover that distance in roughly 24.6 seconds. However, because of the limitations of the drives aboard New Eden's starships, without a fixed gravitational signature upon which to lock, a stable depleted vacuum bubble cannot be formed. No point-and-click warp. Well, let's fit a 10MN MWD and perma-run it beginning from the outermost moon of the outermost planet. If we call the remaining radius 50 AU, then the trip to the exterior of the star system at a cool 1.143 km/s would take 22.83 years. Too slow. According to the JPL, even Voyager 1 clips at almost twice that pace.

Awhile back, the Amarr interstellar ships were capable of a nimble 0.0002 AU/s, about 26228 times faster than my Tengu's MWD velocity but 30440 times slower than my Tengu's warp velocity. When that wasn't fast enough, the jump gate construction ships pushed it up to a blinding 0.0006 AU/s, 78686 times faster than my Tengu under MWD and only 10146 times slower than its warp drive.

So, what happened to these ships, and our ability to traverse interstellar space willy-nilly? Were they able to engage their warp drives without the gravitational lock ('second star to the right...' and all that), or were they able to lock onto simple gravitational signatures from several parsecs away? Neither of these seem likely. The vessels in question, IIRC, would be 300-700 years old.  Additionally, with the advent of jump drives and proliferation of jump gates, accessing areas of open interstellar space must have seemed a less desirable prospect. While the plans for these ships and drives must still exist, regular commercial hulls are not designed for use with such specialized equipment, and retrofitting an appropriately-sized hull to accommodate these systems would probably prohibitively expensive if not a design impossibility.

I'm looking to you gentle readers, who know PF (and possibly physics/mathematics) much better than myself, to help me fill in the gaps.

Make ship go fast.

[Esna Pitoojee]

I've long been aware of a fanon convention that warp cores exert an inertial 'drag' on our vessels; although this is primarily used to explain away their weird submarines-in-space "flight" that our ships go through, it also has implications for what you are talking about here:

Using the above fanon idea, a vessel built without a warp core (or, possibly, with the warp core shut down) would theoretically only be governed by its own engines, general relativity, and the danger of collisions at relativistic velocities. However, it would also lose the ability to make short-duration warps within a system once it has arrived at its target - an acceptable trade for a vessel solely intended to operate outside of a star system's effects, or make the trip to an as-of-yet un-gated system.

Looking at PF sources for a moment, the gate-builder ship depicted in 'Old Man Star' does not appear to use a warp drive in any fashion. The chronicle explicitly states that newer version of such ships use Jump Drives to reach uncharted systems in repeated 'hops'; older versions cruised at up to 30% of C. In theory, making another short 'hop' into the insterstellar void would probably function the same way.

Finally I have to wonder about the statement that warp drives cannot function without a gravitational signature on which to lock. There are plenty of cases of agents telling us that they will 'give us the coordinates' to warp to, and bookmarks may work the same way; both suggest that a coordinate some distance from a solar system could be designated to warp to. I would suggest that our inability to do 'point and click' warps has more to do with limitations placed on our ship systems by CONCORD than anything else.

[spoiler=BONUS TRIVIA]In the early days of EVE, it was possible to use various unusual module setups to get ships up to ludicrous speeds and cruise them way out of a solar system; I used to have an image of an interceptor comfortably doing 12 AU/s on MWD, and I have heard multiple-MWD scorpions could break well past that.[/spoiler]

[V. Gesakaarin]

Well the existence of Black Rise would seem to imply that colony/exploration ships are still in existence and used. There's probably entire sectors of space that have been mapped but not linked to the existing jump gate network. As for the warp drives themselves I think the difference in design is that the ones used for intersolar use are designed to be high-speed and high energy consumption and the colonial/exploration ships use low-speed and low energy consumption designs. I don't think the prohibitions on warp travel have to do with gravity lock-ons (you can still warp to empty space like safespots or deadspace) but rather with the energy required to create the warp field/bubble.

If speed and distance are functions of the energy required to create the field then I suppose the options are to either go fast over short distances or slow over long distances because the ability to go fast over long distances would require such an amount of energy no one has a reactor able to create such a warp field.

[Shiki]

This helps a lot, thanks very much.

I think I got my wires crossed on a couple passages from the wiki.

All starships are equipped with a jump drive device. The jump drive creates depleted vacuum by repeatedly 'compressing' vacuum between two polar discs, draining all energy neutrons and quarks out of it. A laser-locked field is then created to hold the ever-increasing depleted vacuum bubble until it has enveloped the whole ship. When that happens the ship is able to enter FTL speed.

Here I was thinking that their use of 'jump drive' was akin to the warp we use to bounce from celestial to celestial. Upon rethinking it, this must be some mechanism that allows a ship to interface with existing jump gates, neh?

Once the ship has attained FTL speed, it is very difficult for it to act or react to the world, such as for communication or scanning purposes. Numerous experiments were made, for example with compactified dimensions radio, but without success. The unpredictable nature of quantum mechanics made it very difficult to create a stable enough vacuum bubble to allow for precise time measurements due to fluctuating speeds. Finally, a solution was found. It was discovered that gravity capacitors similar to the control system used in jump gates were able to pick up gravity signals from 'normal' space while the ship was at FTL speed. By locking the capacitor onto one of these signals, the ship travels to it. (...) The only problem is that these capacitors can only efficiently pick up signals from gravity wells of certain size or above, with the minimum being a small moon or a cluster of asteroids. (...) Furthermore, it is now possible to construct 'fake' gravity wells on space stations and jump gates, which can be detected and thus homed onto by the gravity capacitor that is part of a ship's jump drive.

At first I thought this meant that a ship's navigational computer needed some form of celestial with a unique gravitational signature in order to create the warp bubble, or the ability to 'pinpoint' a place in space relative to a star (a la bookmarking). It seems though that this again has more to do with the placement of jump gates as 'receivers' of the incoming warp bubble.

So, the jump drives mentioned (which are not warp drives, derp) generate a 'drag-less' warp push which allows the construction ships to traverse interstellar distances without the need to generate extreme levels of energy. That seems a tidy answer to me.

[orange]

Why can our ships warp to planets, moons, stations, bookmarks provided by agents, etc and not just in a straight line/random point?

The real wrinkle in creating a theory is explaining the capability to warp around wormhole space when presumably these were not previously mapped.  Presumably, our ships have sufficient gravimetric sensor arrays to establish all the large objects (>10^10 kg, bigger than a Titan) in a system with a fairly quick scan.  In addition, they have sufficient computing power to calculate a warp across said system taking gravitational factors into account.  Perhaps most importantly, most of the places we can warp are defined by a primary gravitational signature/reference.

Not to a random point?  Well, it lacks a significant primary gravitational reference.  Similarly, a straight line is a random point, just out in front of you.

Why can we warp to the bookmarks?  Because now we are warping to a previously triangulated position relative to the other bodies.  The position is relatively small (<10^10 kg) in mass and requires either effort to fix (scan down) or a previously established scan.   Without a mass at the location to first establish where to warp, the only option is to warp between known points.  However, the option exist to establish bookmarks along a straight path between two known points, thus creating safe spots.

All the above is conjecture to establish why we can't warp anywhere we want.

Now, why can't your cruiser or even frigate go as fast the big ship or even the low-tech Voyager?  Because the ship is designed to make velocity vector changes in a matter of kilometers versus 10s or 100s of kilometers and not break apart due to the stress of said changes.

Let's say you are hauling ass at 1 km/s in your Tengu and decide that you want to turn 90 degs.  This requires a 2 km/s total change!  -1 km/s the direction you are going and 1 km/s the direction you want to go.  This has to be applied to the whole ship!  As the thrusters accelerate parts of the ship, the structure has to overcome local centers of gravity (CG) and component inertia that are impacted by the acceleration change in different ways.  Structures can become semi-rigid when acceleration through the CG is not evenly distributed.

Eve simplifies it, gives us a resistive soup that creates a drag on the ship.  Otherwise, such a maneuver would be best achieved by flipping our ships 180 with attitude control thrusters, and slowly rotating the "nose" in the desired direction as the initial directional velocity decreases.  Also, this all assumes local space without significant gravitational influences.

Sorry, that was probably mostly jargon.

[Shiki]

Sensible jargon.

So in the past, the empires built ships capable of building the jump gate network. Once they were in place, there was a shift to the mass production of short-range warp-capable vessels which were sturdy enough to handle complex vector manoeuvres over short distances, since these craft were more suited to local trade and defense. The other design more or less dropped off the grid as they were less suited to the emerging structure of the empires.

Going to have to make some changes to the stuff I was writing. Glad I asked here.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

[orange]

The construction/colonization ships are also ships we as capsuleers are unlikely to use.

[Ollie]

[spoiler=BONUS TRIVIA]In the early days of EVE, it was possible to use various unusual module setups to get ships up to ludicrous speeds and cruise them way out of a solar system; I used to have an image of an interceptor comfortably doing 12 AU/s on MWD, and I have heard multiple-MWD scorpions could break well past that.[/spoiler]

[spoiler=BONUS TRIVIA BONUS][/spoiler]

[Gaven Lok ri]

Possibly worth noting that when EVE was released prop mods stacked. So max velocity was a tad higher in game when the original tech articles were written.