Hey, nice thread this one... I think I finally was able to visualize it.
Last week I found a very interesting article by Sean O'Neil, in which he details a method to render interplanetary scales on OpenGL, without loss of precision.
Now, OpenGL (and the video card's Z buffer) are limited to 32-bit precision floating point numbers... so that means that at 15000km distance from origin, you lose precision at the one milimeter level.... That caused planets on a sun-centered simulation to twitch and drop out of orbit due to these precision errors.
The solution he proposed was to, instead of actually placing objects at their real positions, to record these positions as double-precision numbers, and contract the scale of the universe depending on each object's distance from the observer.
This way, distances and sizes are scaled down, once the distance starts to reach the maximum threshold. This goes on up to infinity. So while planets will appear be very much farther away, they are just infinitesimaly close to this artificial outer border.
Why did I go through all this? Because it helps to visualize the effect. Only, instead of distances and sizes, you're talking about time and speed.
So, If I understand correctly, the closer one gets to C, the more your ship will seem to lose acceleration to the folks back at mission control.
To you and your crew, things around you will seem to speed up, and happen faster.
Actually, if the universe were a physics simulation (which some scientists say there is a good chance of being true
), this would be a neat way to prevent things like collision errors due to objects going too fast. :thumbup: :hmm:
Whoever coded the Matrix actually did a pretty good job then
(except for the occasional bug every now and then... but that we can blame on the marketers who hired him)
Cheers