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[shikamaru317]

Ryuu96 said:

shikamaru317 said:

They definitely have FTL in Starfield, the distances between some of the systems in Light Years are quite big, I know that in order to get the visit all systems achievement you have to build a ship capable of a 27 Light Year jump, which is the longest jump in the game between 2 systems. Your character obviously isn't spending like 108 years one way to travel to a single system (.25 light speed is the fastest you can safely go through conventional propulsion without experiencing significant relativity effects as I recall, and at 0.25 light speed a 27 light year jump becomes 108 years). Even just a jump from Sol to Alpha Centuari, one of the shortest jumps in Starfield, is like 4+ light years, which at 0.25 light speed would be a 12+ year journey one way. 

I don't think they have super fast FTL in Starfield, but they have to have FTL, it's the only way that the map size could work at all. Starfield FTL is likely a good bit slower than 24th century Star Trek Warp Drives, as known space by the TNG-VOY era of Trek is like 12,000+ light years across, with the Federation alone being 8,000 light years from one side to the other. 

True it's still basically FTL. What I meant more is that the ship itself isn't actually moving at FTL speeds, I believe how Todd described it, it's folding space in front of you to make the distances shorter, so like if you had point A in the corner of a table cloth and point B in the opposite corner of a table cloth then lifted it by the centre, point a and b become closer together. Doesn't really matter though because I don't believe there's any other way, a ship physically moving at FTL speeds is basically technologically and scientifically impossible so it has to be warp drives, wormholes, etc.

But FTL comms is a whole different ball game and doesn't exist with the current technology level in Starfield.

They should be capable of ship to ship FTL comms in Starfield, if you can open a wormhole large enough for a ship to travel through, you can easily open one tiny enough to send a communications signal through. However, you'd obviously need to know the fairly precise location of the ship you are communicating with, because your tiny comm wormhole would need to be opened within like a few minutes of distance from the ship you are communicating with, or else the signal would never reach them before they move away.

In theory though, a radio station could work by having a retransmitting communications buoy in orbit of every planet and moon, the radio station could open up a tiny wormhole to each planet and moon each day, and send a compressed data stream through to each buoy containing the entire day's radio broadcast from the previous day. Then those buoys would send the signal out as a typical slower than light radio wave broadcast, which could be picked up by ships that are traveling at slower than light speeds within the vicinity of each planet and moon, and then also sent down to radio towers on the surface of the planet via satellite communication so that you could also pick up the broadcasts on the surface. You'd be getting news a day late, but it would be better than no news at all. Or they could use the same principle but with a week of compressed data sent through the wormhole to each buoy instead of a day, if opening a wormhole to each comms buoy each day would be too expensive, but obviously the longer you make the window, the more out of date news broadcasts will be.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 24 September 2023