View source for Talk:Frame Shift Drive/@comment-1969007-20180424030147/@comment-63.145.88.222-20190326204702

The "Frame Shift" references your 'local reference frame', the 3-dimensional area of space you are immediately occupying, changing to another. You are 'shifting' your local reference frame from that of the ship, to that of the targeted stellar mass. It's like picking up a chess piece and placing it down elsewhere on the board. You have changed its coordinates through an outside force (your hand) moving it (chess piece) from one square (local reference frame) to another (target reference frame) without altering the initial inertia.

In the case of the ships in Elite however, the outside force is a bubble wrapping around your ship and expanding the space in front of it while at the same time contracting the space behind it. Because of this bubble of warped space, you are outside the normal spacetime and therefore cannot have a reference point until you reenter, so your reference frame immediately shifts from one, to another wholly different. Just traveling in a straight line will do the same thing, eventually, but this method is both faster and more energy effecient.

After all, every jump point I've ever targeted has been over a year out, and my ship consumes over a ton of fuel per hour, so at most my Asp Explorer can fly for 32 hours before running out of fuel. I'd much rather sacrifice 8 of those tons and travel 60 light years than consume all of it and theoretically travel 5.




'''TL,DR: WARP 9 Mr. Data!'''