Starfield · a faster-than-light explorer
You are flying a real relativistic rocket — then cheating past lightspeed on purpose.
The ship has real momentum and a six-gear drive, and none of the gears break the speed of light — they just push γ higher, until the sky is black except for one point of light dead ahead. What the game cheats on is the acceleration and the hull, and it shows you both numbers while it does it.
▸ Launch flightThe ship has momentum
Nothing here is on rails. You carry a real velocity, and thrust adds to it: W pushes your momentum the way the nose is pointing, S pushes it the other way, and letting go of both leaves you coasting forever. The arrow keys turn the nose and nothing else — so you can look wherever you like at full speed while still travelling the way you were. The green marker is where you are actually going; the crosshair is where you are aimed. When they come apart, that is momentum, and closing the gap costs thrust. B is a full stop, and it works from any speed at all.
A gear is an acceleration, not a speed
Changing gear never changes how fast you are going. It changes how hard the engine can push, and how fast it is allowed to push you to. Drop into a low gear at speed and you keep every bit of that speed — the engine simply stops being able to add more. That is what makes gear 1 usable for creeping up on a planet and gear 6 usable for crossing to another galaxy.
Nothing here is faster than light — not even gear 6. The same equations run all the way up: your speed climbs toward c and never reaches it, while γ grows without limit. Gear 2 sits at 99% of light, where your clock runs seven times slower than home and the road ahead is contracted by the same seven — which is what crosses a solar system in a minute. Keep pushing and the cone of sky ahead keeps tightening, the starlight blueshifts out of the visible band, and by the top gear the sky is black except for one point of light dead ahead. That is not an effect; it is what those speeds look like.
So where is the cheat? Two places, and the panel shows you both. The acceleration — the felt g-force readout is honest, and it is openly in the millions. And the hull: above 99% of light the readouts still report the microwave background burning ahead of you and the interstellar medium arriving as a particle beam, numbers that would end you instantly, and the hull simply does not care. Below that threshold they bite, and the walls are real.
Thrusters
Real spacecraft speed — metres and kilometres per second. Slow, precise, and the only gear fine enough to work close to a planet.
up to ~900 km/sRelativistic
Honest physics all the way to 99% of light. The sky crushes into a cone, the clocks come apart, and space contracts ahead of you — which is what crosses a solar system in a minute.
up to 99% of lightInterstellar
Where real travel starts and the hull stops being real: the nearest star is about forty seconds out, at γ ≈ 3×10⁶.
0.1 ly per second of your lifeFast transit
Two light-years a second. Neighbouring stars in a couple of seconds.
2 ly per second of your lifeGalactic
The black hole at the centre of the galaxy is thirteen seconds away.
2,000 ly per second of your lifeIntergalactic
Andromeda in five seconds — and the home clock notices.
500,000 ly/s · γ ≈ 1.6×10¹³Controls
| W | Thrust — pushes your momentum the way the nose points. Release and you coast. |
| S | Retro-thrust — pushes your momentum the other way. Hold it past a standstill and you back up. |
| ← → ↑ ↓ | Turn the nose. Your velocity does not turn with it — that is the whole flight model. |
| Q E | Roll left / right. |
| 1…6 | Select a gear directly. |
| [ ] | Shift down / up a gear. |
| J | Punch it — jump straight to top gear. |
| B | Full stop — kills your velocity from any speed, including one the current gear could never reach. |
| Shift | Boost — accelerate and brake twice as hard. |
| A D R F | Strafe sideways / up / down for fine aiming. |
| Tab | Star chart — pick a destination to be guided to. |
| K | Rebind any control. |
| P | Pause. |
What the panel is telling you
- Ship time vs Home time. Two clocks. While you are genuinely below lightspeed they come apart — your clock runs slow, everyone back home ages faster. That gap is the honest heart of the game.
- Felt g-force. The real acceleration a pilot would feel right now — honest even when the drive is cheating. In the high gears it reads openly in the millions of g. Nothing is hidden; the cost is just shown.
- Speed. A percentage of light in the honest gears — you can never reach c, however hard you push — and light-years per second once the drive cheats. At high γ you cover far more ground per second of your life than the percentage suggests, because the distance ahead of you is genuinely contracted.
- Closing on. How fast you are travelling toward the nearest world. Zero when you are parked, which is the number that tells you whether you are about to hit it.
- Hull. Fly too close to a star and its heat burns you. Watch the bar.
Curious where the physics stops and the cheats begin? The ship carries an honesty ledger — the “where we cheat” button — listing every fudge with the arithmetic. The relativity underneath is written up in The Geometry of Spacetime.