This is an attempt to describe a possible theory behind faster than light travel in the Elite dangerous universe. It has a lot of speculative elements in it.
I'm glad you mentioned the name, I love what they chose for it, it fits really well and in multiple ways, frameshift is also used to describe the process of mutations in evolution as well, so in a way, a frame shift drive is a drive that brought with it a frameshift mutation in the scope of humanity, a leap forward.
Really the FSD is a good idea, granted we don't know how it's supposed to operate, but if you can shift your reference frame with respect to the speed of light, you can achieve apparent faster than light travel without the necessary timespace dilations.
What I find interesting about your Theory is that it resembles the Hypre-Space bandwidths the ship's in David Weber's Honor Harrington series use. The Hypre-drive is limited in massive gravity wells so every star has a no go out to a certain distance called the Hypre-Limit, similar to your stretched space near stars. ED, you pop up right next to the star. Personally, I imagine the FSD generates wormholes(Einstein-Rosen bridges). In Super-cruise, it is in a lower power setting and you are surfing the wave of a continuously opening a closing wormhole while you sit in a pocket of normal space. To quote Montgomery Scott, "I never thought to think of space as the thing that was moving." In your comfortable pocket of normal space your position closer or father from the opening event horizon determines your rate of acceleration or deceleration, adjusting pitch roll and yaw changes the aspect of your FSD and drives the opening/closing wormhole. In your pocket of normal space, you do not feel the effects of acceleration/deceleration or time dilation. When you High Wake to a target system, the FSD opens a complete wormhole through hyper-space anchored on the gravity well of the distant star. You enter the wormhole and the computer collapses the wormhole just short of the star. I'm not saying this is a sound theory, or the right theory. Just how I think about it when I'm playing.
"Attention passengers, as we engage our FSD, please keep all arms and legs in the vehicle; last week a man stepped out for a smoke, and we are 40% sure he came out in Wyoming."
I always figured it actually raised the resonance of the ship to be a higher "freqency" than that space around it. Hence the low energy vs high energy "wakes" Was kinda surprised you didnt go into speculation about the usage of the term, still rad regardless! Cheers!
I dont understand what you just said but i want to, how do i do that? Also by frequency are you talking about the de broglie hypothesis? And i don't really undertsand the part about resonance... The only place i heard this term before was when i was studying the mesomeric effect in organic chemistry... Is it related to that?
That's a very interesting theory. The current White/Alcubierre drive theory we have proposes inertial warp bubbles, which have no propulsion method, and so to travel at superluminal speeds, they have to be formed at superluminal speeds already. This frameshift drive theory you have proposed solves this problem in an ellegant way, and I really like it. Of course it may not explain fully what happens during supercruise, but it is canon that the frameshift drive acesses higher dimensions while jumping from a star to another.
Physics also allows for the warping of space time in a way that would move space around the ship, kind of like the warp drive in the new Star Trek movies. The ship would ride the moving space like a surfer rides a wave and travel far faster than the speed of light. The extra dimensional travel is also a good possibility 👍🏻
@6:36 "I realize this is out there to say the least and doesn't have much to do with science anymore"... I can imagine Orville and Wilbur Wright saying something similar in the early 1900's
this was a very good video I think that the examples you provided could be understood by anyone regardless of how well they understood physics before watching the video. Spectacular video.
A hyperdrive goes to another dimension, a Warp drive warps space and time to move the universe FTL while the passengers are in there own frame of reference, Jump drive is a fancy teleporter, and a Frame shift drive goes to another dimension!
Nice little story but you got problems with your take on the drive, it is a real thing you know? The FSD is simply a renaming for FDevs little sci-fi world of the Alcubierre drive. the way it works s not as you explained, it uses negative energy to compress the space ahead of you and expand it behind you, it’s actually much simpler than what you tried to do, it’s like how a surfer rides a wave, all they do is adjust their directions and amount of energy used. They best way to beat the cosmic speed limit is not to try and challenge it but rather to never move at all in the first place, you use space itself to move you because space it self can do what ever it wants with no limits, it is currently already expanding faster than the speed of light. also if you never noticed the thrusters are off when your fsd is running in the game which is another dead give away that it’s the case. there is no special made up science involved and it’s not far out at all, there is no trans-dimensional travel or anything over complicated, the reason why it’s called a FSD (Frame Shift Drive) is because you are simply shifting your point of reference in space and time to achieve “FTL” travel without the unwanted side effect of time dilation. It’s really very cool and reality is much stranger than fiction could even hope to be.
No you are right, I am aware of the Alcubierre drive and how it works (well in theory of course, it would be cool to have it work in practice). My intention was to try and reunite supercruise and jumps under the same driving principle. The Alcubierre drive is not ideal for explaining the jump part unless the jump works on a completely new principle. Also I just really like multi dimension theories haha! So at the end of the day, it's up to interpretation, thank you for your valuable input!
So if I understood right there is a two different technologies in FSD, one is used for jumps between systems (as it explained in video) and one for supercruise (as in Alain Suarez's comment). Jumps between systems takes the same amount of time, independent how far you jump. Then supercruise takes some time to speed up.
I'm jumping onto a really old thread here, but I don't see the dissonance between supercruise and jumping from one star to another. Why does the jump always have to end at a star? Why can't it end at any arbitrary point in space? Well, for one, stars make for really good navigation points, sure, but for another, what do stars have? Mass. A lot of mass. More mass than any other type pf body in space, next to black holes. And what effect does mass have on its environment? Gravity? What is it that limits the capabilities of the FSD? Gravity. The bending of spacetime. I found your analogy of the bending of space to be semantically backwards: I think it makes more sense to visualize the space near larger masses as *more* crinkled rather than less. It's the crinkling that inhibits the FSD. It doesn't "slow" it down. Ingame, when you're thousands of lightseconds from the nearest massive object, you can accelerate from mere km/s to hundreds of ls in an instant, and back, with ease. It's when you're trying to do that near a mass that you have a hard time. That's the unifying rule between the loop of shame and "goddammit I need to get off this planet so I can jump to a star behind it". Stars aren't just navigational anchors, they're also safety bumpers. They stop our ship from just careening off into god knows where. They provide an endpoint to an exponentially growing consumption of the energy required to make that trip. They anchor the discreteness of quantum physics into the formula that determines how far we can jump and how much fuel we need to expend to jump there. I believe that's also why your speed readings during a jump fluctuate so erratically and violently: Your navigation system isn't on the fritz. The display might not be capable of handling it, but your ship, through the FSD, is, in fact, taking a controlled path, increasing and decreasing the rate at which it shifts space around you the same way you manually do it in supercruise, with the same limitations. Supercruise and star jumping use the same principles on different scales. You don't need to propel yourself through another dimension to do it with the FSD. I would go so far as to say that witchspace, if it is in fact a different dimension entirely and not merely a tunnel illusion, is a coincidental byproduct of traveling at superluminal speeds.
Ok first off, the FSD is not ONE technology, it's TWO technologies, because the drive is composed of TWO drives, the Supercruise drive and the "Witchspace Displacement Engine" AKA Hyperdrive. Supercruise works by bending and warping space allowing SPACE to move faster than the speed of light. This essentially is the Alcubierre-White "Continuum Displacement Engine" drive that you can read about in real physics, and was predicted by the scifi series "Star Trek". Super cruise is essentially a Warp Drive. The Hyperdrive, opens a conduit into Witchspace, a higher dimensional plane that exists along side our normal "Universe", the engine opens up an access point and sends a ship into these higher dimensions, because of the higher dimensions, it allows for the taking of a more direct path through Witchspace aka Hyperspace, where the corresponding distance to normal space is many MANY times greater than what we think of as normal space, allowing the crossing of lightyears of "Normal Space" in a conduit that for all intents and purposes is the same length. The FSD is a combination of human design, the supercruise drive, and reverse engineered Thargoid hyperdrive, the Witchspace Engine. This is why Thargoids pop in and out of normal space and you never find them running around in supercruise, because Thargoids DO NOT POSSESS SUPERCRUISE TECHNOLOGY. So because of this Thargoids have highly refined hyperdrives that allow them to pinpoint drop at their destination, not just drop out at the star or most massive object in a star system. What this also means is that the safest place you can be in a Thargoid situation is in Supercruise.
As einstein once (probably) said: imagination is more important than knowledge... Well im not really sure if he actually said it but it seems to fit here
I know this video is several years old, but hopefully you'll have realized that supercruise and jumping to another system are two very different things. You're likely mostly correct on jumping to another system, but supercruise is a very different thing - an Alcubierre Drive, which essentially warps spacetime around the vessel but you're not actually moving - the space around you is, which is bringing you along for the ride, hence why from your point of view you can exceed the speed of light relative to things not attached to your local patch of spacetime.
part of the point of the video was to try and reconciliate the fact the two seemingly different modes of transportation (jump and supercruise) are possible because of the same piece of tech (the FSD module). So if this is the case is it possible the FSD does something fundamentally identical in both cases, but with different magnitudes. Of course it is speculation within speculation so anything goes.
@@matthewjouffray I get that, but hasn't a lot of this been confirmed by Frontier and is thus canon? Regardless, the Alcubierre Drive is an actual theoretical thing that is pretty much exactly what supercruise is, and doesn't have anything to do with what hyperspace jumps do: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
Think of it like a car on a road that encounters a mountain. Sure you can follow the contour over or around the mountain, but its faster to go through it via a tunnel.
This is a great hypothesis, but unfortunately, 4th-dimensional travel still requires as much or more distance to be covered than 3d space. The exceptions to this are, ironically, when in a gravity well (in other words, the moment it becomes a non-euclidean plane), or if you need to move through some obstacle occupying the fastest route. This *isn't* what the frame shift drive is doing. In fact, it's basically the opposite. The less gravitational influence on the FSD, the faster you can go, and you can exceed c by factors of up to hundreds and thousands. 4D travel alone will not allow you to do this.
I hope someday humanity can reach beyond the solar system and experience all the crazy planets and star systems that are out there. Even if we are incapable of FTL, even at .9c, traveling to the nearest star would only take a few months for astronauts or cosmonauts onboard the near-lightspeed spaceship. I guess the frameshift drive doesn't violate causality because the spacecraft stops existing in the normal 3D universe. It also wouldn't be going FTL in the folded space but since distance is different there, an inch in fold-space could be a light-year in 3D space.
Good video, here is my theory tho. The farme shift drive would work as something that in theory is possible, nothing can more faster than light speed right, well we know space can more, the space itself, the theory is that we can contract the space in front of your ship and expand it behind,now here is where frame shit comes in, you are moving slowly if you measure your sped to your space around you, but the space you are in is moving becouse of contracting and expanding, so while in your frame of view you aren't moving fast from anyone else's frame of view you are moving faster than light, those it literally shifts your frame of view, making it possible to go faster than light while not breaking physics.
Yes but there's a problem: how does it calculates the position of stars and planets beforehand if you are looking at them at natural light speed. Or maybe it's a predictive machine, altough sometimes you move several c speed and change from 30c to 20c in seconds: shouldn't the position of objects in space rewind somehow?
Well inside the elite dangerous universe the frame shift Drive is nothing more than a type of hyperdrive because there are many types of hyperdrives in Elite dangerous it's just everyone uses the frame shift drive now because that's the current hyperdrive technology of 3297 and onwards. And they frameshift into hyperspace or witch-space as it's colloquially known in Universe.
Tbh thpis is really not as sci-fi as you would thing quantum physics as shown that sub atomic particles can move in a way that 3rd dimensional objects cant on a diffrent plain and can exist two separate places at once no matter how far away.... even if in a completely diffrent galaxy
