I am familiar with the old/basic stutterwarp rules and concepts, also I found a lot of different interpretations all over the net.
My current question (among many others) is about Threshold. It seems that everyone uses these concept as "fix drop frontier" just as if every system had an invisible sphere, size depending on it's star's mass, that suddenly affects stutterwarp drive efficiency when entered.
As far as I understand physics, no such sphere with a clear cut border could exit. If the efficiency effect is related to the star's mass, then it has to be linear (distance to mass) and not an absolute value that draws a red line somewhere in space where efficiency makes a sudden an huge drop. The efficiency should decrease in a linear way while approaching the star. So a ship doing 100m jumps would experience a slight reduction in efficiency on every next jump even outside the Threshold (going against zero eventually) and the Threshold would be an "almost Deadzone" towards the star.
Calculating with such a linear efficiency would be impossible without computer assistance (which ships ingame most likely have). For gaming purposes we can't handle linear efficiency. Is that the reason why two fixed efficiency drops are being used?
Or is there some (probably weird) explanation and the Threshold frontier actually does exist within the game universe's reality? This would be against the hard scifi feel of the game, wouldn't it? It feels like "a game mechanism creates a magic law/effect in the game universe". Or maybe not, to us gravitation is also pretty much like magic in some regards. Hm...
Please help me out, if I am totally mistaken here. I don't want to make the game more complicated, but I would love to have a nice explanation of the Threshold from the ingame point of view. Something better than: it's a mystery.
Btw, how does that fit to the concept that gravitation actually is not tied to distance? Gravitational force is the same over any distance. It seems gravitation is not what affects drive efficiency. Mass? Doesn't make the efficiency drop any clearer. I guess it is unknown, as is the exact nature of gravitation.
My current question (among many others) is about Threshold. It seems that everyone uses these concept as "fix drop frontier" just as if every system had an invisible sphere, size depending on it's star's mass, that suddenly affects stutterwarp drive efficiency when entered.
As far as I understand physics, no such sphere with a clear cut border could exit. If the efficiency effect is related to the star's mass, then it has to be linear (distance to mass) and not an absolute value that draws a red line somewhere in space where efficiency makes a sudden an huge drop. The efficiency should decrease in a linear way while approaching the star. So a ship doing 100m jumps would experience a slight reduction in efficiency on every next jump even outside the Threshold (going against zero eventually) and the Threshold would be an "almost Deadzone" towards the star.
Calculating with such a linear efficiency would be impossible without computer assistance (which ships ingame most likely have). For gaming purposes we can't handle linear efficiency. Is that the reason why two fixed efficiency drops are being used?
Or is there some (probably weird) explanation and the Threshold frontier actually does exist within the game universe's reality? This would be against the hard scifi feel of the game, wouldn't it? It feels like "a game mechanism creates a magic law/effect in the game universe". Or maybe not, to us gravitation is also pretty much like magic in some regards. Hm...
Please help me out, if I am totally mistaken here. I don't want to make the game more complicated, but I would love to have a nice explanation of the Threshold from the ingame point of view. Something better than: it's a mystery.
Btw, how does that fit to the concept that gravitation actually is not tied to distance? Gravitational force is the same over any distance. It seems gravitation is not what affects drive efficiency. Mass? Doesn't make the efficiency drop any clearer. I guess it is unknown, as is the exact nature of gravitation.