That’s fascinating. so what I understand is that the drives used basically create gravitational forces in front of your ship to pull it along?
How does that affect things like inertia/momentum? Would the iconic battlestar galactica slide still be possible?
Hi Lomdok,
Yes, as part of our mission to get the science right (as much as possible) we’ve been in contact with Miguel Alcubierre at the UNAM Nuclear Sciences Institute, as his concept is very much our preferred method of travel across longer distances.
I know we also considered Bussard ramjets as well as Casimir vacuums, Heim theories and some of the Lorentz-symmetry-violators; but it all rapidly gets a bit complicated for my poor brain to process. At the end of the day, that’s why Stew (our resident PhD theoretical physicist and Keeper of the Backstory) is here to help guide us through 
Regards,
SC
Technically you could mimic any sort of inertial movement you wanted - you could also pitch and yaw to your heart’s content. The best thing is that you could fly within the limits of human reactions even when actually moving at very high speeds - so it allows for good old fashioned dog-fighting without the threat of having to navigate relativistic effects - cos let’s face it, when it takes two days to slow down, no one’s getting an adrenaline rush.
@GM_stormcrow - I am Spartacus…or maybe just Stew 
LOLOLOL. Now my post makes no sense at all. You need a "GM " in front of your name XD
I read the other post as well.
However, the “forward velocity” is just not how it would work. You would have a velocity vector, full stop. Then you could choose to apply acceleration in an arbitrary direction - with forward being a conveniently simple version of that. However, the feel of the game now is driving a car - you keep going in the direction you are pointing in. Think hovercraft instead - you keep going in the direction you are going and then accelerate to change direction of movement. Changing direction is by turning quickly to face the other way and then accelerating while slowly losing the speed and regaining speed in the new direction.
And a speed dial? Sigh! The speed is relative to what?
Speed relative to the mothership might be convenient and possible - but do you keep track of the relative motion of the different motherships? Because there would be no reason whatsoever for ships arriving to a battlefield to match speed and more likely than not, they would both be accelerating - one to get away and one to catch up. Or do you count speed relative to the moon, orbiting earth at a speed of 1.023 km/s(wiki)? Or relative to Earth, orbiting the sun at 29.78 km/s?
Please replace the speed dial with an acceleration dial, keep track of velocity as a vector and acceleration as a vector and do NOT keep a speed limit. Then I might be interested in playing. If you feel a need to protect planets against impact, maybe have an automatic retrieval teleporter activate when a ship get too far from its mothership - that would bring back any stray players spending too much time moving in the wrong direction as well as any gaining too much momentum.
I did not listen to the talk about relativistic effects, simply because within speeds where you still have time to notice ships going in another direction in the time it takes to pass them you could be nowhere close to 300.000 km/s. (According to wiki, the current speed record on land was set in October 1997, and is 1227.986 km/h or about 0.3 km/s.)
Good luck with the game, though.
Hi Nesse,
We’re well aware of pure Newtonian physics and vector geometries! But, unfortunately, pure Newtonian motion isn’t fun for the vast majority of players.
You say “if players stray from the mothership a certain distance etc”; but what you’re currently seeing in AoA (ie a team vs team arena combat system) bears little relation to the full game we’re developing, which you can read about here.
What we’re currently demonstrating is a tiny - but critical - fraction of the full sandbox MMO game under development; a fraction that we’ve chosen to express in terms of a team vs team arena combat system.
In the full game, we might allow specific Newtonian physics arenas - essentially arbitrarily bounded areas to minimise interaction with the outside world. These would be large arenas where players can optionally choose to move to a pure Newtonian system, and we’ll allow them to fit multi-directional thrusters on any surface of their spaceship, so they can experience the fun/nightmare of balancing vector, orientation and rotation with differential thrust - much like the classic 80’s game “Asteroids”, except in 3 dimensions rather than 2!
But I’m pretty sure that’s a minority preference. And we’re definitely not going to allow full Newtonian mechanics in the full, larger sandbox MMO universe - for obvious reasons. And in such a sandbox, universe-sized MMO, relativistic effects certainly have to be dealt with.
Best,
SC
A dogfighting/fighter vehicle would likely operate via a computer interoperated fly-by-wire type system and a maximum speed is required to provide nimble course correction, else the engines would not be able to compensate for a rapid change of direction.
Perhaps a bomber would work at such high speeds; but then only against a stationary or orbiting target where its future position was known; however then the brief microsecond deployment of weaponry would require such precision it would have to be automated and not under human reflex control.
Full Newtonian manual control moves into eventual direction changing; the slow pondering of 2001: A Space Odyssey vs frantic action of Battlestar Galactica/Star Wars/Star Trek.
Following the idea through, this would probably result in a lot of abandoned ships, continuously travelling into the vastness of space. If you were accelerating for 10 mins in one direction; perhaps distracted, perhaps just flying the wrong way, it would take you 10 mins to slow down, 10 mins to return to the place where you started slowing down; if you knew what you were doing you’d start decelerating and in 10 mins be back in you start position (30 mins for 10 mins of flying the wrong way)
More likely a player won’t have started to slow down until they were near their destination so after 30 mins you’d be travelling twice as fast, which would cause you to overshoot; 20 mins more to slow down, and another 20 mins, assuming that the opposite acceleration was applied at the right time - overall 1 hr and 10 mins to correct.
Dogfights would likely become a yoyo affair where players occasionally met; and every target course correction would require a re-estimation of where will this ship be in 30 mins so I can intercept at extreme velocity; an a “can I headshot and destroy this ship in the split-microsecond it passes me” type engagement.
At this point the in space portion of the game becomes waiting and not doing much; with the occasional impossible to react to split second engagements; which would mean most of the time the game wouldn’t be very entertaining; when our aim is to provide entertainment for our players valuable time.
In a single player game we could always speed up time in these “slow bits”; but we can’t do that in a massively multiplayer game - where everyone needs to be progressing into the future at the same rate.
For our specific case as @Stew points out we aren’t using Newtonian mass ejection as our propulsion
I’m stretching but the ships “exhaust” would be unhappy space-time recovering from severe gravitational tidal forces in the opposite direction of the ships travel - like a car running over a bunch of glowsticks.
Of course if @Stew says that’s wrong; I’ll argue its computer added visual cues to aid human wetware in spaital comprehension much like positional sounds “external” to your ship would be.
I have a relevant comment:
I one saw a documentary on scifi spaceship dogfights and what they would be like. The theorists pointed out that standard winged flight and the traditional thrust/drag/lift/weight model of flight would become completely irrelevant. Wings are absolutely redundant.
The result, they theorized, would be basically cubes that would zig-zag around and turn at speeds that would create enough g-forces to kill someone.
I present this as another argument as to why the limitless acceleration thing doesn’t belong. I agree with both the theorists and with the dev team on their reasoning.