Realistic Portrayal Size of Our Solar System at the Speed of Light

[Boildown]

I found this video today and thought it was interesting, especially when considered in the context of Star Citizen:

I then Googled to verify its accuracy, and it seems accurate.  For example, Jupiter is said to average 5.2 AU from the Sun, and that equates to right around the time taken to get to Jupiter in this video: https://www.google.com/search?q=5.2+AU+in+light+minutes

Of course, if you really were traveling at the speed of light, no photons could catch up to you and impact your retina, and you wouldn't be able to "see" anything. Also you'd not experience the movement of time, due to time dilation. But disregarding relativistic effects, this video is fascinating.

Reaction in spoiler:

Spoiler

The sun itself is friggen huge.  It takes a long time for its bulk to stop dominating the view. I mean, we're not exactly moving slow here. The view is moving faster than is physically possible for any object with a non-zero rest mass to move. Yet the sun just hangs there, barely reducing in size for a long time.

And on the other hand, the planets whiz by super fast. Planetary systems are tiny.  And then you get to the asteroid belt and realize that its many minutes thick. Solar-system scaled asteroid belts are vast.

Now for the Star Citizen part.  Multiply the times it takes to get anywhere by 5 to get how long it would take to go from place to place in Star Citizen in a realistically sized solar system, to account for Star Citizen's .2 times the speed of light ("c") quantum drive speed.

Its clear to me more than ever that the decision to have .2 light speed to be the maximum quantum speed was a pretty bad one on a solar system scale.  Yet on a planetary scale its way too friggen fast.  You can go anywhere around Jupiter in mere seconds, and that's a huge gas giant.  Nevermind inner planets, like Earth.  Travel time will be completely trivial as long as you don't need to go between planets.  And yet travel between planets will seem super slow.

Of course CIG is going to reduce the size of solar systems.  Drastically, most likely, as I think they said you could cross a system in 20 minutes? 40 minutes? I forget the quote. But IRL it takes 43 minutes to get to Jupiter, and Neptune is SIX times as far away as Jupiter (Neptune being the INNER most object that could possibly mark the outermost boundary of our solar system that CR might have been referring to).  If you do the math, with Neptune being ~ 250 minutes (rounded for back of napkin math) away, and then multiply it by 5 to account for .2c being the maximum speed, and then put that in a ratio with 40 minutes being the longest flight to span a solar system, then we can guess that Earth's solar system will be ~ 1/30th the real life size, in Star Citizen.

But now we have a new problem.  And that is that the planets will appear to be friggen huge, unless they fake something.

Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter and https://www.google.com/search?q=arc+seconds+to+arc+minutes

Basically, the moon is around 30 arcminutes in diameter as viewed from Earth.  Happens to be around the same size as the Sun.  Lets say they keep the planetary systems the correct-ish size but reduce the solar system size by 30 times.  This means Jupiter will appear to be 1/2 to 5/6th the size of the Moon as viewed from Earth in the game! Venus will appear even larger than the moon when its closest to Earth in its orbit!

Remind of you No Man's Sky at all? It should.

I could go on. (For example, if they shrink the size of planetary systems by 1/30th too, then the Moon will be ridiculously huge as viewed from Earth's surface. Etc, etc.)

CIG can't have everything both ways, and are going to run into serious solar system design issues, and they'll be forced to fake more and more of it the more they try to develop the game without using as many realistic concepts as possible from the start. They'll be forced to shrink the planets and moons to be unrealistically small, forced to make the planets shrink unrealistically fast as you quantum drive away from them, forced to make planetary systems even smaller than real life, which will exacerbate how .2c is too fast at a planetary scale, which will cause them to have to make yet another change, which will require another change to compensate for that, and another, etc.

Instead they need to make the solar system more realistically sized and increase the speed of travel between planets, while decreasing quantum speed within planetary systems.  Just make it take a long time to accelerate from 0c and don't make the limit be .2c, make it far faster, like 2c or 5c. Yes, FTL, but who cares? They aren't modeling relativity here (I can't yet think of how the game will break down if they don't model relativity).  So maybe it takes you a minute to get up to .2c, but it doesn't stop there, it keeps getting faster until the planets are reasonably "spaced" apart by travel times.  And instead of Neptune taking 4 hours it'll take 20 minutes, yet it won't be completely trivial to move within a planetary system either. This will also seem more realistic because you'll actually have a concept of acceleration when moving at quantum speeds, instead of going from 0 to .2c in 4 seconds, like now.

That would be a far better design than Chris Roberts' flippant .2c declaration that is forcing them to fake half of the Star Citizen experience, when it would be so much easier to make it realistic instead.

[Rellim]

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html 

[GeraldEvans]

I don't even have the kind of time needed to scroll to Jupiter, much less Rupert.

[faquarl25]

This website states that earth is closest to jupiter when it 33 light minutes away with means a journey of 160 minutes. They are obviously means that CIG will drastically shrink the solar system. 

http://pages.uoregon.edu/jimbrau/astr121/Notes/Jupiter/jupiterradio.html

[Rocket Man]

The planet they have showcased in their tech demos (3.0) is only 1,000km in diameter (~1/3 diameter that of our moon).

[GeraldEvans]

The planet they have showcased in their tech demos (3.0) is only 1,000km in diameter (~1/3 diameter that of our moon).

Which makes it a planetoid. Just large enough for hydrostatic equilibrium to make it a sphere.

[LeroyJenkins]

Okay, so the travel time between inner planets is a few minutes at the speed of light, but since our speed cap is 0.3 times that speed, we're looking at over 15 minutes to move between planets when they're at the minimum possible distance from each other. And if we're unlucky and the planets are at their furthest point from each other, Earth to Mars caps out at just shy of 70 minutes.

 

And that assumes we're at warp speed.

@Boildown I thought that warp speed was states as being 30% of the speed of light, not 20%. Meaning they still need to crunch it significantly, but that your times would be off.

[Rellim]

We already know they will crunch systems so that travel times aren't going to be like that. Trying to make those kinds of calculations is pretty pointless right now. 

[CheeseNorris]

Well. It's a game. Nuff said?

[AdmiralBoom]

On 1/11/2017 at 9:54 PM, Rellim said:

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html 

I love the internet precisely for stuff like this.

[GeraldEvans]

Leroy, the fastest ships will QD at .2c. Slower ships will not attain that rate. On the other hand, when you're playing Euro Space-Truck Simulator 2947(7, right? We're going with 7?), you should expect to spend some time actually space trucking. Otherwise you're playing a flash game of Microsoft Excel Simulator 666, named for it's creator in the fiery pits of damnation.

[Rellim]

Talking about truck sim, they crunch the distances between cities over there too. for obvious reasons.

[RangerBob]

I don't expect them to make it 1:1 scale. In fact I thought they (CIG) noted as such.

[Boildown]

11 minutes ago, GalacticGhost said:

I don't expect them to make it 1:1 scale. In fact I thought they (CIG) noted as such.

The entire paragraph starting with "Of course CIG is going to reduce the size of solar systems." deals with this, and the next few deal with the fallout of doing this.

 

On Friday, January 13, 2017 at 1:32 AM, LeroyJenkins said:

Okay, so the travel time between inner planets is a few minutes at the speed of light, but since our speed cap is 0.3 times that speed, we're looking at over 15 minutes to move between planets when they're at the minimum possible distance from each other. And if we're unlucky and the planets are at their furthest point from each other, Earth to Mars caps out at just shy of 70 minutes.

And that assumes we're at warp speed.

@Boildown I thought that warp speed was states as being 30% of the speed of light, not 20%. Meaning they still need to crunch it significantly, but that your times would be off.

In Star Citizen, its called "Quantum Drive" and it caps out at 20% of the speed of light (i.e. 0.2 c) as stated by Chris Roberts in 2013: http://starcitizen.wikia.com/wiki/Quantum_Drive_Engine

An interesting thing is that in the forum post, he cited engine limitations as the reason for the .2c limit.  But now that they're on 64 bit dimensions for the universe, I bet that technical limitation no longer exists.

 

[Boildown]

On Wednesday, January 11, 2017 at 8:26 PM, Boildown said:

Its clear to me more than ever that the decision to have .2 light speed to be the maximum quantum speed was a pretty bad one on a solar system scale.  Yet on a planetary scale its way too friggen fast.  You can go anywhere around Jupiter in mere seconds, and that's a huge gas giant.  Nevermind inner planets, like Earth.  Travel time will be completely trivial as long as you don't need to go between planets.  And yet travel between planets will seem super slow.

 

Quote

Instead they need to make the solar system more realistically sized and increase the speed of travel between planets, while decreasing quantum speed within planetary systems.  Just make it take a long time to accelerate from 0c and don't make the limit be .2c, make it far faster, like 2c or 5c. Yes, FTL, but who cares? They aren't modeling relativity here (I can't yet think of how the game will break down if they don't model relativity).  So maybe it takes you a minute to get up to .2c, but it doesn't stop there, it keeps getting faster until the planets are reasonably "spaced" apart by travel times.  And instead of Neptune taking 4 hours it'll take 20 minutes, yet it won't be completely trivial to move within a planetary system either. This will also seem more realistic because you'll actually have a concept of acceleration when moving at quantum speeds, instead of going from 0 to .2c in 4 seconds, like now.

 

Its almost like they read and agreed with much of my post, see here:

 

Really happy they decided to make the acceleration curves the way they're describing it.  Its not yet clear that they're sticking to the .2c limitation, hopefully they aren't.  Some ships _should_ have a max quantum speed that's faster than others.  But even if they only make the speed changes via the acceleration (or jerk) equations from ship to ship, but keep the absolute max speed the same for every ship, it'll probably be fine if the ramp up and down varies enough. And its clear to me now that they understand and agree that there was a problem, which is 2/3rds of the battle.

[LeroyJenkins]

THANK GOD FOR THIS. I probably would have liquidated my account if they had made travel times even remotely realistic. Doesn't matter how much fun I have at the endpoints if I have time to tab out and play a match of League of Legends in the meantime. Might as well not tab back in if I'm just gonna be in transit for 45 minutes again.

[LtAttack]

sooo i would hope that we would travel faster than 0.2c.....0.2c is pretty slow actually

It takes 8.3 minutes for light to travel from the sun to earth (from the observer being on earth). However, to the photons they instantly travel that distance XD

Soo assuming that a ship is traveling 0.2c from the sun to earth (insert time dilation math here *i actually thought i would never use these equations again after i got my degree in physics XD*) The person on the ship would see 40 minutes count on his watch till he arrived at earth.....However, the people on earth waiting for him would see their clocks go by 41 minutes........

needless to say, at the scales of the solar system, you have to be going much much faster for relativistic effects to really save you any time XD
at 50% the speed of light the guy on the ship would make the trip in 14 minutes (from his perspective) while those on earth had to wait 16 minutes
at 80% the guy on ship would make the trip in 6 minutes, while those on earth would wait 10 minutes
at 90% it take him 4 minutes, people on earth 9 minutes
As you get close to the speed of light, the amount of time dilation exponentially increases

Remind you the times above are just from the sun to earth....that is not even half the solar system in radius, let alone diameter or even to the next closest solar system in the milkyway galaxy

I support the fact CIG made the decision to go with scaled down universe.....it is a game after all, it would take literal years to travel from 1 place to another unless they let us go the speed of light (which be cool but then kinda defeats the purpose of having a 1:1 scale universe then). Needless to say im happy with the curves they are adding to the quantum jump, as it would shorten very long distance jumps considerably, but not make short distances instant either!

[LeroyJenkins]

We've had this discussion numerous times before. 35 minutes per AU is abysmal when you consider the fact that the outer edge of our solar system is just shy of 40 AU away from Earth (Pluto sits at about 39.5 AU from the sun) and our solar system's "diameter" would end up being about 80 AU. Just glad they finally addressed it.

[Wrathpole]

On 11/11/2017 at 12:53 AM, LeroyJenkins said:

We've had this discussion numerous times before. 35 minutes per AU is abysmal when you consider the fact that the outer edge of our solar system is just shy of 40 AU away from Earth (Pluto sits at about 39.5 AU from the sun) and our solar system's "diameter" would end up being about 80 AU. Just glad they finally addressed it.

Isn't everything at 1/4th scale though, so... 20 AU for the "Sol" system?

[LeroyJenkins]

In reality, at .2c the trip from Sol to Earth would take around 2500 seconds, or 41m 40s. 41 minutes and 40 seconds to travel 1 AU. Consider that the two jump points (Sol-Davien and Sol-Croshaw) are 17.5 and 50AU from Earth, respectively. Strangely enough, the starmap says the shortest route to Croshaw is through Davien. 4 jumps to save 7AU. But both JPs in this system will see decent traffic because it's Sol.

730 minutes (just over 12h) from Earth to the Davien JP, and 34.7 hours to Croshaw. Even if they squish the distances by a factor of four, that's still 3 hours to the nearest system from Earth. 3 hours of warp tunnel. Not actual gameplay. So they need to do more than just squish distances. This scaling warp speed is a godsend because it prevents the game from turning into Warp Tunnel Simulator 2020. Might still take 10-15 minutes to reach the edge of a solar system but that's a manageable number. The eight minutes it took them to get from the moon to ArcCorp was using the static speed still but that's still going to be a thing when you're not moving between planets since the distances between moons and their parent is astronomically (heh) smaller than the distance between planets.

 

This way, average jump times are under 10 minutes regardless of distance, with some abnormally long jumps only pushing the time out to 20, maybe 25 mins. And 5 minutes in warp is actually useful time since you can move things around on your ship, scan ahead for threats or points of interest, make sure your equipment is in order, etc.

[Mage]

On 11/11/2017 at 4:37 AM, LeroyJenkins said:

THANK GOD FOR THIS. I probably would have liquidated my account if they had made travel times even remotely realistic. Doesn't matter how much fun I have at the endpoints if I have time to tab out and play a match of League of Legends in the meantime. Might as well not tab back in if I'm just gonna be in transit for 45 minutes again.

I suspect you're going to be disappointed with travel times. It certainly seems like it's going to be a very long travel time to other systems. Planets to moons, not huge, but there's certainly going to be a lot of travel time involved.

From what I can tell, just by using the 1/8th scale, and working a few things out f rom the CitizenCon demo, it's going to be around 6 minutes per AU. That can obviously be tweaked, but I would be shocked to see it under four minutes per AU. In a space game, the size of space needs to be a factor. I'll be very, very disappointed if it isn't.

[Boildown]

What I've read repeatedly on reddit, and I'm not sure of the primary source of it, is that solar systems will be 1/10th scale.  So if you do the math, you'll travel as if you're doing a Newtonian 2c in real life distances.  That's assuming they're sticking to .2c max speed, which they might not.

The planets and moons will be 1/4th size according to the same posts.  Which means they'll appear 2.5 times too large in the sky.  They'll have to do some magic so that Jupiter and Venus aren't visible as a disc instead of a point in the night sky.  The moon and sol will be "wtf?" huge.  Obviously since we have no preconceptions about how things "should" look from other planets (or except for about 10 people, from the Moon), this is only really a problem when they put Earth into the game.

[LeroyJenkins]

@Mage I'm fine with the longer jumps taking around 20 minutes. But The distances on the starmap (at least within Sol system) are accurate to reality and at a flat .2c traversing even the inner planets would take hours. That's why I'm glad they decided to go with a dynamic warp speed that scales with distance so that the ridiculously long jumps aren't that much longer than the short ones. I think (hope) it'll be rare to have a single jump that lasts over 25 minutes. And just because I want a SENSE of realism doesn't mean I want to spend two hours in a warp tunnel before I get to any actual content.

[Mage]

13 minutes ago, LeroyJenkins said:

@Mage I'm fine with the longer jumps taking around 20 minutes. But The distances on the starmap (at least within Sol system) are accurate to reality and at a flat .2c traversing even the inner planets would take hours. That's why I'm glad they decided to go with a dynamic warp speed that scales with distance so that the ridiculously long jumps aren't that much longer than the short ones. I think (hope) it'll be rare to have a single jump that lasts over 25 minutes. And just because I want a SENSE of realism doesn't mean I want to spend two hours in a warp tunnel before I get to any actual content.

Yeah, I totally understand that view. I personally do think travelling long distances should take a long time. Maybe I should clarify what I'm talking about. The distance between Earth and Arccorp its roughly 75AU. A Star Citizen AU is not the same as a real AU. So they only have it 'real' sized with AU, but their AU, in KM, is actually 1/8th the scale. At least that's what they said and what is consistent with the jump time in the CC17 demo. So, with that in mind, the trip from Earth to Arccorp (which, from memory, is six large jump points away) will take between three and four hours (I worked it out much more accurately, but I don't have access to the notes right now). That seems like a long time, and maybe you're just talking about one planet to the other type jumps rather than multi-system travel, but anything significantly less (like 20 minutes from anywhere) than this will take logistics and planning out of the game, pretty much. The price of being too far from him will be dramatically reduced. I want to have to plan for long trips, to know where I must stop for fuel, to be able to do multiple jobs along the way. I don't want large orgs to be able to assemble their entire fleet in 20 minutes. That'd suck, in my view. Although, like I said, we might well be talking about different things, as I jumped in a little late in the conversation.

[LeroyJenkins]

Here's something that would be interesting to see ingame:
Eris and Sedna are two dwarf planets in a region of space within our solar system called the "scattered disk" - basically, the region of space well outside Neptune's orbit but still well within our sun's gravitational field which is estimated to extend to around 200,000 AU (about 3.1 light years). Most of the debris between Neptune and the outer limit of this "bubble" (known as the Oort cloud) is left over from the protoplanetary disc that formed around our sun in the early days of the system's formation.

Eris's orbit has a perihelion (nearest point to star) of around 38 AU and an aphelion (most distant point) of around 97.5 AU.
Sedna's perihelion is estimated at 76 AU, and its aphelion at around 936 AU (its current distance from Earth is around 85 AU and it's on its approach to the Sun. It moves so slowly that its orbital metrics have to be estimated from previously taken images that happened to capture the object before it was recognized).

Oh, also - Ceres, the dwarf planet within the asteroid belt, that happens to be about the same size as the demo planet (945km diameter).

I'm not saying that we need a scale model of everything within the Oort cloud buuuuuuuut Eris and Sedna are definitely within the realm of possibility, granted they've yet to debut a full star system of any size yet.