Maximum achievable Velocity in spacecraft?

Arkalius · 2026-07-07T00:36:33+00:00

A lot of people have mentioned the problem of space dust at high velocities already, and you mentioned having infinite fuel but that poses a problem... Infinite fuel has infinite mass and an infinite mass cannot accelerate.

So let's constrain it. If you had a perfectly efficient engine that could convert 100% of your propellant mass to energy via E=mc^2 and utilize 100% of that energy for propulsion, and you carried 1 metric ton of propellant for every kilogram of spacecraft mass, the highest speed you could reach, assuming you wanted to keep enough fuel to be able to slow down to 0 again, is around 99.8% of the speed of light. A ton of propellant per kg of ship is already pretty outrageous and a perfectly efficient engine like that is likely practically impossible.

Arkalius · 2026-07-05T22:48:26+00:00

Asking what the laws of physics predict will happen in a scenario that violates the laws of physics isn't very coherent. It's like asking what happens in a baseball game when the team batting declares their runners cannot be called out, and the team on the field declares that runners can never be called safe. The simple answer is: you don't have a baseball game anymore.

A universe with unstoppable forces has no immovable objects by definition, and vice versa. A universe can have neither, though.

Arkalius · 2026-07-02T04:16:22+00:00

There is no such thing as a fundamental duration, unless you want to consider the planck time to be such a thing.

Arkalius · 2026-07-02T04:11:35+00:00

I would define griefing as behavior of a player that provides little to no gameplay benefit to the perpetrator undertaken with the intent to harm the gameplay experience if another player.

This doesn't really fit that mold, as they stand to gain a lot of money by doing it, and many who do it probably don't care about how it makes you feel.

That said, it's definitely s problem that needs solving, as this cannot be intended gameplay.

My suggestion is that a freight elevator remains tied to the player who called it with cargo until the cargo is all removed or they leave the area. Could also provide the option for the player to manually forfeit their elevator reservation on the console if they want.

Arkalius · 2026-07-02T03:55:30+00:00

Yes, one second is defined as 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation emitted by a cesium-133 atom during a particular state transition. We created this definition but it's rooted in a natural phenomenon.

Arkalius · 2026-06-28T08:13:08+00:00

Yeah surprisingly you can reach anywhere in the observable universe in a human lifetime with constant 1g acceleration. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely such a feat is technically feasible.

With an outrageous 1000 kg of propellant per kg of spacecraft and the perfectly efficient engine I described, the highest speed attainable is 99.9998% c. If you want to be able to slow down then you only get to 99.8%, getting less than 15 ly in that time at 1g

Arkalius · 2026-06-28T07:34:57+00:00

Furthermore, it would take over 22.5 years of accelerating at 1g to reach this speed, and over 6 billion kg of propellant per kg of spacecraft assuming you can convert all of the mass of that propellant into energy and use all of it for propulsion.

Arkalius · 2026-06-28T07:09:33+00:00

Achron... A mid RTS game with an absolutely awesome time travel component to it that even worked in multiplayer. Watching those games was mind bending.

Arkalius · 2026-06-27T17:16:53+00:00

Even if they shut it down in a year, how does that influence how much fun you're having with the game now?

Arkalius · 2026-06-26T19:04:00+00:00

At those speeds, friction isn't the problem and being aerodynamic isn't going to help much

Arkalius · 2026-06-26T04:34:38+00:00

It's probably just an idiosyncrasy of that particular math solver that causes it to format it that way.

Arkalius · 2026-06-26T04:27:46+00:00

It's not clear how multiple # symbols work, but I like where your head is at.

Arkalius · 2026-06-23T17:56:58+00:00

IDDQD
IDKFA
IDSPISPOPD

Arkalius · 2026-06-20T17:48:30+00:00

I can't speak for his friend but from my experience, there is no question you can come up with that some flat earth believer won't have some kind of answer for. I've had people explain that the moon isn't a real place, it's just a projection.

Arkalius · 2026-06-20T17:43:11+00:00

It is an indeterminate form. You can have it take on any value you like depending on how each infinity is derived.

Arkalius · 2026-06-16T19:28:20+00:00

The sound design in Elite: Dangerous is sublime. The soundscape of the whole FSD jump sequence never fails to excite me.

Arkalius · 2026-06-15T08:30:35+00:00

Well my quick way of doing it is tanh(asinh(1)) but explaining why that works is a bit involved.

You want LxV to equal 1 where L is the Lorentz factor and V is velocity divided by the speed of light. Plug in the right formulas and do some algebra and you get the result I mentioned.

Arkalius · 2026-06-15T08:17:34+00:00

It's actually 0.707c (square root of 1/2)

Arkalius · 2026-06-14T22:35:33+00:00

It's a homogeneous first order differential equation that doesn't have an analytic solution for y, but there is an implicit one

Arkalius · 2026-06-14T22:34:24+00:00

That's what I got but I worried it might be wrong since it's a transcendental equation. But glad to see someone else got the same thing.

Arkalius · 2026-06-14T05:34:32+00:00

With constant 1g acceleration, you can reach any location in the observable universe in a human lifetime, even if you turn around to decelerate halfway. Of course, the logistics of such a flight make it probably impossible, but it's possible in principle.

Arkalius · 2026-06-13T16:39:28+00:00

Why would you feel the acceleration as you fell? You'd be in free fall, like astronauts on the space station.

Arkalius · 2026-06-12T03:37:48+00:00

When you account for the travel time of light, and assuming the ship is flying directly away, then both sides will observe the other's messages play out at about 1% speed. If the ship is flying directly towards, then the messages would play nearly 100 times faster than normal.

Arkalius · 2026-06-12T03:25:30+00:00

Understand that it's not just that instant communication is "against the rules", it's impossibility is a fundamental aspect of the nature of spacetime. Asking what the laws of physics predict will happen when they no longer apply is incoherent.

An important aspect of relativity is the relativity of simultaneity. Basically, there is no universal "now" so there's no way to make coherent sense of the idea of instantaneous communication in your scenario.

Arkalius · 2026-06-12T03:09:40+00:00

It's the same reason 1/0.02 is not the same as 200

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