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   | |  | | ![]() Since there seems to be a difference of opinion about whether the vimana drive should be used (automatically or manually) for in-system travel, perhaps we could discuss it a bit.
A few points/concerns (feel free to bring others up, of course):
1. Apparently it takes you 55 grams of lithium and a lot of time to travel 0.6 LY with the in-system drive*, but with the vimana drive, it takes almost no lithium and about 5 seconds. If it's possible to vimana 0.6 LY with accuracy, why would the drifter be programmed to use the in-system drive instead?
2. Given that the vimana drive is precise enough to get you near enough to a star that it fills most of your viewscreen, it should probably be capable of getting you just as close to a planet, unless the sun's large gravity has something to do with it (in which case you should still be able to vimana to companion stars and substellar objects).
3. The drifter using only its in-system drives can travel *faster* than the speed of light, and even when travelling slower than light, ignores relativity, and this needs to be fixed or explained somehow. (I haven't measured the speed yet or implemented a way to automatically do so, but it's obvious if you're travelling 0.6 LY in less than 7 months  ) We probably don't want to simulate relativity, since that would eventually put everyone's in-game clocks years out of sync.
* = I didn't test it how long it takes or how much fuel it takes to travel 0.6 LY in-system, since I didn't find any planets/moons/etc that far away personally, so that figure is from someone else. I did check how long and how much fuel it took to vimana 0.5 LY, with the expectation that it would take not much longer to go 0.6 LY with the vimana drive.
My current solution is for the vimana drive to activate for distances over 20 dyams, but only long enough to get you within 20 dyams, at which point the in-system drives take over. This saves fuel and time, and preserves relativity and so forth (unless in travelling 20 dyams the SD speeds up enough that it ought to experience relativistic effects), but would be a problem for anyone who thinks reaching faraway planets should be a challenge - it currently travels 10,000 dyams in just a few seconds.
A solution to the relativity problem could be either (a) in-system drives use some sort of vimana travel and thus avoid relativity (but then why are they slow, etc?) or (b) putting a maximum cap on in-system travel speeds to avoid relativistic effects, which would also make a 0.6 LY trip take so long as to be completely impractical. | |  | |  |
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