Walter wrote:Reluctantly, I have to disagree with Loriath: I don't believe the gravity wells at each end of your journey are part of the equation, much as they might do in the real universe.
It's an implementation of the formula we learnt at school: d / v = t.
Because the d and v are constantly changing (unless you fix your speed to below the maximum), so is the t. At some of the changing values of d and v, the t can appear to be stable, but it's always the result of the calculation.
The information you are given is just reporting on the remaining journey time at that instant: if you continue travelling at this speed you will reach your target in this time.
Of course, if you do continue at that speed you will smack into your target rather than land gracefully.
You definitely become affected by nearby objects, it just works a bit oddly and rather simplistic.
Closer you are to an object the less efficient your drive gets.The slow down warning is actually displayed when you are going faster than your proximity to a stellar object would normally allow and your FSD's performance pretty much cuts, can't slow, can't speed up until you are within "parameters" again.
Its also not about physics, but game mechanics (I'm mostly guessing here).
Supercruise in ED cannot be time dilated like space games of old since it's multiplayer. So what they do instead is compress\dilate space (hence why cruise and normal are seperate instances), the further you are from an object the more compressed distances can become, closer you get, the game decompresses so you will still be able to manoeuvre with some precision, and fine enough correlation so you can drop into normal space.
Anyone can test this by simply flying about 800 000 ls - 1 000 000 ls away from a star into the black you can pretty much stop instantly from 1000C to 30km\s in seconds. And speed back up again the same way.
But come crashing at max speed into lhs 3447 and your throttle becomes unresponsive and you scream past.
It's from what I guess that you have broken into one area's compression into another with too much velocity so the game needs to correct it, or something. They could easily increase I suppose the area compression is affected but I think FD decided it's a little more engrossing to have to manually handle the approach, and I believe they are correct, it's adds a little bit of thought and skill to cruise which other wise would just be "point and wait".
The game's FSD is now capped at 2001C , but for example heading to Hutton orbital you only get to about 950C at most.
Head out into the black where you move towards other stellar objects however you can reach top velocity in half the time it takes to reach Hutton.
And as for d/v=t, remember in ED and space in general all the things move, including planets and bases, it's just they move a lot slower than our FTL driven space ships.