light units

Paslowo · Post by **Paslowo** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 5:14 pm

Another future request, would it be possible for me to toggle light seconds/minutes to just plain old distances? It would be like distances 10,547,473.

Oblivion · Post by **Oblivion** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 7:52 am

Quick, which one is better to read? "18 light seconds" or "5396256 kilometers"?

Dup. i see it now. Great! And thanks a lot for the little table.

I'm not too well versed on measurements you see.

Zeog · Post by **Zeog** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 9:36 am

paslowo wrote:Another future request, would it be possible for me to toggle light seconds/minutes to just plain old distances? It would be like distances 10,547,473.

Actually, hard coding all that in the engine is not the way I'd like it to be, but that's how it currently is. These things should really be adjustable and give the option for different texts and languages without recompiling. As far as I understood, the new GUI (coming with ogre) will provide scripting support for these kind of things.

@Oblivion: Well, light travels at 299792.458 kilometers per second in vacuum (by definition). Therefore a light second is 299792.458 kilometers. (To convert the distace of a lightyear into kilometers, find out how far light travels in a year by multiplying a light second with the number of seconds a year has.)
Using other measurements of time to convert large number of kilometers into light units up to the famous and often used lightyear seems quite convenient and, in the contenxt of this game, appropriate to me.

Oblivion · Post by **Oblivion** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 9:45 am

@Zeog:

multiplying a light second with the number of seconds a year has

gives me a headache already.

I agree wholeheartedly tho. Better to see smaller numbers with larger measurement units than to view the whole string of gazillions in kilometers.

And light measurements would undoubtedly be used more often in ftl space age.