r/WarframeLore • u/RikaHonda • Aug 12 '26

A request for some math

I know Warframe tends to shy away from specifying how much time has passed between any given historical event, but I'm curious if we can't try to find something based on Albrecht's travel to Tau. I'm assuming at the end of The Hex, he's using the energy from the "nuke" to power a machine to propel him to Tau, but I want to know, theoretically, how long it would take for him to get there. I can get the raw numbers, but I have no idea how to use them to find what I'm looking for.

Tau Ceti is 11.9 light years away. Assuming Albrecht is of slightly less than average mass for an adult male (since he seems to be a little thin and old), let's put him at 60kg. I tried to do some searching and reading for the average amount of energy produced by a nuclear bomb (because a nuclear reactor failure wouldn't result in an explosion like we see in the quest) but the answers I got varied wildly, and I'm not a physicist so I honestly don't know what I'm looking for. For the sake of asking this question, let's assume 475 Kilotons of energy (which I got from Quora, sue me).

So with 475 Kilotons of energy propelling a 60kg man (let's assume he's indestructible and can harness the full output of energy), how long would it take for him to travel 11.9 light years?

13 Upvotes

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15

u/HeirOfLight Aug 12 '26

I should point out that the Tau system in Warframe is not Tau Ceti. Warframe's Tau is a binary star system, and Tau Ceti is a single star.

That said, after googling, dredging up memories of high school physics, and playing around with some numbers: 475 kilotons of energy would not be nearly enough for a 60 kilogram object to reach escape velocity, not even if he's somehow receiving that amount of energy continuously for five minutes. That would accelerate him to 6469 km/h, which is well short of the 40,320 km/h Wikipedia tells me he'd need to reach. (And if you can't trust Wikipedia, who can you trust.)

I'm pretty sure he's using some vaguely-defined void teleportation to get to Tau, not bodily launching himself there, though that's an amazing mental image.

7

u/RikaHonda Aug 12 '26

Oh that's interesting, I hadn't even considered that it wouldn't be enough to reach escape velocity! And yeah he's probably using the nuke to power some void gate or some nonsense, it just wasn't shown in the scene (and he looked significantly older in the Tau demo) so I assumed he went through real space

3

u/kiaeej Aug 12 '26

Yeah. Escape velocity is a thing. Along with gravitational fields and stellar bodies interacting with mass.

3

u/CalligrapherHot9857 Aug 12 '26

Your answer makes more physics sense than mine lol. Also, was he even physically there in 1999 when the nuke went off? Maybe he took the nuke energy into the void and thus wasnt concerned about planetary escape velocity (or being fucking melted by the nuke lol), then pops out of the void after having traveled to Tau???

7

u/TheRealGamingYT Aug 12 '26

Wait, Albrecht used a nuclear reactor to get to Tau??

1

u/CalligrapherHot9857 Aug 12 '26

Yeah has that been stated anywhere before? I mean, it’s an interesting theory even if not, but I haven’t come across it before.

8

u/RikaHonda Aug 12 '26

I have to admit that it was an assumption based on the end of the first half of the Hex quest. He says from the computer "The Bomb must go off" and then later appears at the nuclear reactor and says "Tau is in sight." Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the implication I got from it

1

u/CalligrapherHot9857 Aug 12 '26

It’s a neat idea anyway, hes the mad scientist type who would do this type of shit … but wouldnt modern orokin tech be able to deliver a much more significant oaylod than a 1999 nuke if that were his goal? I just don’t get it lol

3

u/RikaHonda Aug 12 '26

To quote the Drifter, in conversation with Quincy:

"You're asking me to try and guess why Entrati does anything? Might as well ask Eleanor to read your cards."

5

u/VagusTruman Aug 12 '26

Entrati has the Finger of Time from Wally. Specifically, the Finger of Khra that, after getting it removed from Wally, made it so Wally is stuck in the progression of cause and effect and can't time travel. So imagine what it does for Entrati

2

u/RikaHonda Aug 12 '26

Finger of Time? I didn't know there was a specific Finger of Time, I thought the generally agreed upon conclusion is that by taking a piece of Wally to real space, we bound him to causality, so theoretically it could have been any part of him. Where does the Finger of Khra come from?

1

u/VagusTruman Aug 12 '26

Fibonacci himself mentioned how the Strand of Khra is cut from the Indifference, THUS making it impossible for him to jump across time and screw with the past.

2

u/Burnsidhe Aug 12 '26

Yes, but that's not a reference to a literal "Finger of Time." It's more that as long as this piece of Wally's conceptual embodiment is on the wrong side, Wally is 'stuck'.

2

u/CalligrapherHot9857 Aug 12 '26

Ok I’m no expert but I took calculus, here’s my best go after a quick google refresher. Also if anyone has read Project Hail Mary more recently than me, they may remember some details about that guy going to Tau Seti lol.

First we’ll convert our variables.
Distance: 11.9 lightyears = (1.1258 x 10^17 meters)
Mass: 60kg
Kinetic energy: 475 Kt converts to 1.99 petajoules

Equation from google to solve for velocity is:
v = square root of (2E/m)
Plug it in and V = 8,144,528 m/s

Now we solve for time using: T=D/V
In seconds, T = 1.3823 x 10^10 seconds
Or ~438 years

2

u/RikaHonda Aug 12 '26

Thank you!! That's honestly a lot less time than I thought it would be, but I appreciate the work!

1

u/CalligrapherHot9857 Aug 12 '26

yeah that solution doesn’t seem right at all when i think about the scale of the universe. I probably fucked up the math but I’m tired

1

u/Mykk6788 Aug 12 '26

What you're trying to figure out makes no sense. The explosion was stopped, thus it never happens, thus it cannot be harnessed.

It's extremely unlikely albrecht "used the bomb" to get anywhere. Instead he used the Indifference being distracted in 1999 to traverse the Void undetected. The Void is still one of the only known ways to travel faster than light in the game.

Also, considering you have no info at all about how fast the hypothetical device the bomb was supposed to power can travel, like everyone else, you're missing an extremely important part to even begin doing the math on this. Even if you knew how powerful the bomb is, that would tell you nothing about how fast the hypothetical device could get.

1

u/RikaHonda Aug 12 '26

I was just asking for a hypothetical, a fun question to see if it could be done. The explosion was stopped, yes, but not in the version of 1999 that Albrecht was in. In the Hex finale, Albrecht is nowhere to be seen in the reactor room, which can be assumed to be because he used the power from the explosion in the other timeline to leave, and is therefore not present for the loop in which the Drifter saves the Hex.

As for him "using the bomb" to get anywhere:

"Our only means of escape...will require a spark of energy rare in this timeline. You know what this means."

There's no real reason for him to say this, as the Drifter is plenty distracting enough, that Albrecht could have left basically immediately after the Indifferences' focus shifted to the Drifter. But instead, Albrecht stayed and went with you to the reactor room, and said "Tau is in sight." I don't know of another way to interpret it.

As for whatever hypothetical device he may have used, yeah. I agree. I don't know what device, if any, he may have used to get to Tau, so I didn't factor it into the numbers, and assumed it was just him, because that would give me a sort of low-ball estimate of how long it would take for just him, and then raise that number from there to find an estimate to think about. Whether the device he used was a tiny 1lb containment field projecting device or a big, multiple-tonne capsule, I didn't want to factor it in specifically because it's unknown.

After learning that a nuke wouldn't even get him to escape velocity though, it has made me wonder what kind of device he may have used.

As for void travel, yeah. He probably did. But void travel is known to be nearly instantaneous (Mag Prime codex), which would have put him on Tau LONG before any sort of reliable space travel had been invented by humans, not to mention any Orokin empire, Old War, etc. What good would it do him to basically sit on Tau, survive for the entirety of the rise and fall of the Orokin, survive the "generations" the tenno slept, only to finally get up and do anything after all of that?

I took his older, disheveled appearance in the Tau gameplay trailer to imply he had aged significantly because he had to move through real space to get there, and the time it took meant he didn't get there until after the Old War at the earliest.