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[jocan2003]

I loved space engineers but it stopped working on my computer like 20 updates ago. I've tried looking up why (It starts but my screen goes black and then nothing happens. It's still responding, however and will close on command) but nothing conclusive came up.

Any other GPU intensive game works? If not it could be your power (PSU dieing) being too low. Also on another note.... I had a similar issue but the problem wasnt my computer, it was my whole damn power system in the appartment that was defunct, if i start the microwave i blow a fuse, if i start the oven and im streaming my computer to the TV it goes out sporadicly, not enough amps flowing in my appart so either something blow up or stop working a few miliseconds.

[EvilTwin]

Also, Czech education regarding light and the sun is iffy. 

So, one could say the school system of the Czech Republic is... still stuck in the dark ages?

[Flying Carcass]

Also, Czech education regarding light and the sun is iffy. 

So, one could say the school system of the Czech Republic is... still stuck in the dark ages?

Boooo! Booooo!
/throws fruit

[BurnedToast]

Well, with planets some "superscience" sort of travel will be necessary, unless every planet is going to be 100 km from each other.

They don't need any sort of "superscience" warp drive or FTL at all.

Right now our ships are slow. Really, really, really slow. High end sports cars actually drive faster than our spaceships go. The only reason they are slow is physics issues, to be more specific collision issues - it only calculates physics 60(iirc) times per second. So if you're moving 100m/s that's 1.6 meters per physics step. Small blocks are 0.5 meters, so if you hit a 1 small block thick wall at max speed with a properly designed small ship you can already warp through it right now (in theory, I have not tested it). Increasing the speed limit will make that much, much worse.

So all they have to do is add some sort of "travel mode" that when enabled, adds a large bounding box to the front of your ship and uncaps the speed. If anything hits, or ends up inside the bounding box it just disables travel mode and rapidly slows you down to the current speed cap. If they wanted to be real fancy, they could even make the size of the box adjust every physics step, based on your speed. Even if they capped the ultimate max speed at lightspeed, the bounding box would only have to extend ~5,000 km in front of you. That sounds huge, but if they clumped asteroids together in fields which were spaced far apart from each other so that space really was mostly empty space, then even traveling at lightspeed would not cause a big problem. Things like time dilation would have to be ignored but I think that's acceptable.

Then we could have an actual, real, to scale solar system to play in, as well as adding fun new engineering challenges... like maybe thruster/fuel pods for interplanetary travel, or even just making carriers have a practical purpose instead of being just for fun like they are right now.  Spacing the gameworld out like that would also have a huge amount of upsides, it feels like such a waste that 99.9% of every game world is practically impossible to explore right now.

The only downside I can see is people would be able to "emergency brake" by unmerging a single armor block or maybe even just jumping out of the cockpit. They could disable merge blocks and stop people from exiting seats while in travel mode, but it could probably still be abused somehow.

But I don't know if they are even considering anything like that, or if they think 104.4 m/s is "good enough".

Fun facts: if I did my math right, with 100 m/s^2 acceleration, given the game's simplified physics you could hit lightspeed in ~12.5 days. Since our infinite worlds are not actually infinite, you couldn't reach that speed without running out of space though. If you were somehow able to instantly reach lightspeed, it would take you almost 2 hours to travel from one end of the gameworld to the other (about one hour to travel from the center to one edge) so the world would still be pretty big even if you made ships with massive acceleration.

[jocan2003]

Sad thing with this idea is that in mutliplayer we already see that 1.6 meter step increment, when host is moving at full speed while you are on foot inside the said ship you tend to clip backward. The travel speed mode would also require no free floating/live person not buckled or inside a cryopod. Another thing to consider, what happens if somebody get out of the seat/pod while in travel mode? disable the ability to exit seats and such? that could work and only keep under 100ms speed walkable.

[BurnedToast]

Sad thing with this idea is that in mutliplayer we already see that 1.6 meter step increment, when host is moving at full speed while you are on foot inside the said ship you tend to clip backward. The travel speed mode would also require no free floating/live person not buckled or inside a cryopod. Another thing to consider, what happens if somebody get out of the seat/pod while in travel mode? disable the ability to exit seats and such? that could work and only keep under 100ms speed walkable.

The only downside I can see is people would be able to "emergency brake" by unmerging a single armor block or maybe even just jumping out of the cockpit. They could disable merge blocks and stop people from exiting seats while in travel mode, but it could probably still be abused somehow.

Another option would be to make it so astronauts don't disable travel mode, so that you can still walk around in single player. Walking in ships in multiplayer is, like you mentioned, completely broken anyway so this won't really make it any worse and it's pretty unlikely you will randomly run into an astronaut in deep space so it shouldn't cause any collision problems.

[n9103]

Not trying to nit-pick, as I feel it's a reasonable flaw in the nit-pick of the original statement, but achieving any substantial fraction of lightspeed would be super science.
The current record for a manned space craft is only about 11km/s. Meanwhile c ~ 300,000,000km/s
That's about 20 million times faster than anything we've ever built. If going over a million times faster than anyhas ever gone doesn't count as superscience, then I don't know wtf could count.

FTL on the other hand, sorta fits more in the magic than science category for the time being, as there are no signs it's possible, and many signs it's not.
That teleporter stuff doesn't count, since at the distances they've achieved, the speed of light is indecernable from instantaneous, when accounting for measurement errors.

[NullForceOmega]

Light speed is 300,000 kms, three hundred thousand, not 300 million.  it's 300 million meters per second.  And the only issue with hitting it is available reaction mass, we can accelerate without any difficulty other than requisite time to reach C (4-5 Gs of acceleration is a human limitation that can be decreased by flooding the cabin).

[n9103]

Light speed is 300,000 kms, three hundred thousand, not 300 million.

Ah, yes, my bad on that point. 20 thousand times faster.
The rest still stands.
Theory != Actual

[BurnedToast]

Not trying to nit-pick, as I feel it's a reasonable flaw in the nit-pick of the original statement, but achieving any substantial fraction of lightspeed would be super science.
The current record for a manned space craft is only about 11km/s. Meanwhile c ~ 300,000,000km/s
That's about 20 million times faster than anything we've ever built. If going over a million times faster than anyhas ever gone doesn't count as superscience, then I don't know wtf could count.

FTL on the other hand, sorta fits more in the magic than science category for the time being, as there are no signs it's possible, and many signs it's not.
That teleporter stuff doesn't count, since at the distances they've achieved, the speed of light is indecernable from instantaneous, when accounting for measurement errors.

Well, ok, yes and no.

Yes, it's some kind of superscience because like NullForceOmega said it's a problem of reaction mass (and energy), and it would require quite a lot of one or the other (or both) using our current level of technology, depending on what sort of drive you built.

However, it's "superscience" that's already in the game. 50m/s^2 using currently existing unmodded ingame thrusters would be difficult (especially on large ships) but not impossible. Using a gravity drive (which 100% is unrealistic "superscience" I wish they'd remove) it's pretty trivial to achieve.

So I guess, I should be more accurate and say it wouldn't require any more superscience than our already existing thrusters that apparently run on space magic, or the physics breaking gravity drive.

[Sensei]

The engines in space engineers run on electric charge alone. I say, hand wave with something like particle accelerator mumble proton mass mumble mumble ten coulombs at relativistic velocity mumble and then you go really fast!

[NullForceOmega]

Caterpillar drive.  All E.M. all the time.

[BurnedToast]

.......and after all that, we just get a magical "superscience" jump drive that teleports your ship after all.

So much for the semi-realistic nature of the game (though I suppose that was already long gone, between gravity drive, spaceballs, and the silly way we mine).

I'm actually not too upset, I think overall it's a good thing for the game. Now they can work on clustering resources so they can focus where the players interact to certain points on the map. You can hide your base 100000000 km away so it does not get raided, but if you still need to fly to the asteroid clusters, you still need to interact with other players which means PvP etc.

Now they just need to sort the netcode out.

[Sergius]

It was inevitable. Either you have a jump drive, or everyone lives within the same tiny asteroid cluster. Then trying to force multiple planets into that. Spending a month on sublight to travel to Mars or whatever is out of the question I think. Only other alternative I can think of is time acceleration, which in multiplayer is weird and would effectively be like a jump drive anyway.

[BurnedToast]

I hope this change mean they are willing to consider shields too.

The square-cube law means armor is absurdly impractical at protecting your ship. Doubling the guns will double your firepower... but in order to double your protection you need to multiply your armor by *8*.

Without a shield generator of some sort the optimal ship design will always be "a wall of gatling turrets as large as your computer can handle" because the only thing that matters is firepower.