Ship movement

[clement (OP)]

In another thread which partially discussed movement of ships and stations, the statement that ships do not move in Aurora was made by UnLimiTeD.

Keep in mind Aurora has no actual movement, ships can be assumed to move in spacetime bubbles.

I wanted to understand what this meant without hijacking that thread, because it did not make any sense to me and others in the thread agreed with him.  Could someone explain what was meant by the above statement?

Thanks

[sloanjh]

In another thread which partially discussed movement of ships and stations, the statement that ships do not move in Aurora was made by UnLimiTeD.

I wanted to understand what this meant without hijacking that thread, because it did not make any sense to me and others in the thread agreed with him.  Could someone explain what was meant by the above statement?

Thanks

Read the Starfire books (Crusade, In Death Ground, The Shiva Option, Insurrection) by David Weber and Steve White.  A lot of the ideas in Aurora come from the game Starfire upon which the books were based (the books are set in the backdrop of Starfire campaigns).  The basic idea is that they're inertia-less drives, hence the "bubble" statement - there's a drive field surrounding the ships that ....

John

[andrea69]

I guess he means that in Aurora you don't have a continuous movement of ships, but if at time 0 you are in position X, after the time increment you will be in position Y, without any real movement from X to Y.

[clement (OP)]

Thanks,

Being a developer, I was thinking about that statement with respect to implementing the game engine, not with regards to any sort of story fiction.

I was curious about how that statement implied the Aurora engine treats ships moving in space with respect to both time and other objects in space. I had expected that the change in position of a ship would be as andrea69 described in a situation where there is no other object attempting to interact with the ship. But that if an indirect or direct fire weapon was targeting that ship, its movement through each x/y coordinate for the minimum time increment would be modeled, at least in the time increment where the weapon was fired, or about to hit.

[sloanjh]

The physics in Aurora is that ships move on continuous paths - they don't dematerialize in one location and rematerialize in another.

The game engine discretizes time in order to simulate this.  If you've specified too big a timestep so that it will miss a collision, it tries to detect this situation and cuts the timestep in order to get the correct, continuum answer.

So Andrea69's statement upthread "without any real movement from X to Y" is incorrect - the reason that ship hop around on the map is because the timesteps are finite, with a lower bound of 5s.  Ships should be assumed to have moved along a continuous path from X to Y during the timestep.  This is very similar to the situation that is required in orbital mechanics codes e.g. for a comet - when the comet is close to the sun you need to take smaller timesteps, or conversely you take as big of a timestep as you can get away with without discretization errors screwing things up.

Did that answer your question?

John

[clement (OP)]

Yes, I assumed that the way you described it was the way Aurora was handling movement, I just wanted to make sure.

Thank you

[Scandinavian]

As late as 5. 60 it does have a couple of exploitable quirks in the collision detection system.  For instance, if you hit the "30 days" increment, and set sub-pulse limit to "auto," Aurora will make a 6 h sub-pulse to begin with, unless an NPR has set a shorter time step.  Which can allow you to dodge Precursor mines, because they don't seem to trigger a shorter time-step, and by the time you're six hours away from the planet, their sensors will have forgotten about you.