Elite:Dangerous Lore. Moving in the Galaxy

But how do We get Around

Conventional drives are used to manoeuvre a ship up to around 500 metres per second (just over a thousand miles per hour). Combat, docking and most other activities use this form of propulsion.

Frame Shift Drives (FSD) or ‘super-cruise’ – for which incidentally we owe a big debt of gratitude to our Design Decision Forum contributors – is a drive that warps space-time locally around the ship. Acceleration to superluminal speeds is possible by effectively appearing to shrink space around you. This allows us to have super-high accelerations without turning pilots into a mush on the back wall of the cockpit… We refer to this mode of travel as ’super-cruise’. It allows you to free-form travel the real distances within a star system (and between them if you really want – though it will still take an inordinate time) without taking up your whole evening (or weekend... or month!).

Earn enough credits and you’ll be able to upgrade your FSD with an extra unit that gives it an upgraded warp capability to perform full hyperspace jumps to span the massive distances between different star systems.

Of course, there are tradeoffs. The additional mass and energy demands of the FSD compromise your ultimate level of agility and performance in a dog-fight against someone who is loaded out without one. But you can console yourself that you can explore the system, mine and trade and maybe have bigger and better weapons. The situation, both positive and negative, is further exacerbated if you opt for the additional capability and mass of a hyperspace-capable drive.

As you set your destination, you also need to be aware of mass-locking. This effect is already present in an early form in Alpha 3, whereby you can’t jump to any of the scenarios if you are too close to any large structure.

Hyperspace

A hyperspace jump cannot be engaged by a ship that is too close to a massive body, whether space port, moon, planet or star. You’ll need to use your conventional drives to put some distance between you and it to escape the mass-lock effect.

After a significant charge-up period your ship’s hyperspace drive warps space-time and you travel almost instantaneously to the primary star of the destination system, whereupon you are spat out of hyperspace at super-cruise speeds, kicking out an extraordinary amount of heat; this announces your arrival in no uncertain terms to anyone who may be glancing at their scanner.

Super-cruise

When already in super-cruise, the drive charges up much faster than for a hyperspace jump.

An FSD can also be targeted and attacked and may malfunction, temporarily preventing its use. You can purchase and fit various different FSD modules, with different fuel consumption, range, speed, control and charge time performance envelopes.

Speed limit

The theoretical speed limit whist super-cruising is two thousand times the speed of light, but in practice journeys will likely not see your ship travelling more than tens of times the speed of light. Top speed varies during a journey, being affected by the proximity to the mass of nearby stellar bodies. This prevents a ship from accelerating past an upper speed threshold, and imposes a temporary localized slowing effect as you can feel the effect of mass-locking starting to kick in, which also helps smooth your arrival.

You can drop out of super-cruise at any time, though your ship will suffer dangerous and debilitating effects if you drop out whilst travelling too fast (temporary loss of control, damage, etc.); such an event is called a crash-drop. Flying too close, too fast to a stellar body or phenomena can also cause a crash- drop. In extreme cases (e.g. flying towards a planet at hundreds of times the speed of light) the ship may suffer catastrophic damage when it emergency-drops out of super-cruise.

Depending on where you are and what you have been and are doing, no two super-cruise journeys will be the same. If fitted with a suitable module, aggressors can interdict you by targeting your FSD and pulling you out of super-cruise. Or you may detect an intriguing signature on your journey yourself that you decide to explore and exploit. Both aggressor and the target are dragged out of super cruise, back to normal space near to each other. Interdiction attacks can also purposefully (or inadvertently) drag nearby vessels into the engagement, creating the potential for tactical formation flying in super-cruise.

As we begin to roll out beta releases, there will be an increasing variety of ‘passive’ events, NPC/phenomena and player-to-player interdiction.

Watch this space for more details… and bon voyage!