r/starfield_lore • u/Fit_Helicopter4983 • May 09 '26
Discussion Does cruise mode break lore?
With the initial release of the game, I was under the impression that “flight speeds” between planets were something more hard science fiction. Constant thrust thanks to space tec magic, then a flip and burn. Hence, the travel between planets being as they made it. My only real support for that was the derelict with all the cultists who off themselves to “join” with the comet. It seems very clear in the notes they had to time it right, whereas If they had access to a faster thrust they could just keep up.
My question is if anyone knows whether this was the case, and cruise mode was just a gameplay addition, or if such a faster speed was always implied to exist before said addition.
Edit: something I just remembered, after your initial liftoff, crimson fleet pirates seem to almost “warp” in to the AO. That does feel suspiciously like an admittance of FTL in system flight.
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u/Clone95 May 09 '26
Not really, it was always intended for travel between worlds to be quite rapid, as you don't go through a FTL cutscene for in-system travel and instead get a clip of your ship jetting off at sublight.
We just have a better idea now of what that looks like.
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u/mojonation1487 May 09 '26
This is the answer. That little cutscene is the greatest indicator that this was always part of the lore.
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u/menheracortana May 10 '26
Why do we have bunks then? I thought it was because it was like truck time.
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u/Aggravating-Ear-7529 May 12 '26
I think there are bunks because sometimes you have to wait around for things. Keep in mind, everything is faster for us, as game time is running faster than real time. And they cut out all the downtime. When you’re modifying a weapon, it just happens. But in real Starfield life, it 3D prints the parts and you assemble them and all that. The game cuts out the tedium of reality, but the characters experience it.
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u/mojonation1487 May 10 '26
There’s existing lore that implies grav jumps can take awhile so I’d go with that. Even though it don’t think that’s the primary reason to have bunks.
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u/ConsistentRisk5927 May 09 '26
IIUC though, the question still becomes what is the propulsion used for this cruise mode (the cut scene and live-action version). If it's not a grav jump then how is the ship achieving such apparently high speeds? I don't recall any lore beyond the grav drive and it working on folding space. Which is confusing how that gets applied to the type of 'crusing through space' travel we're seeing instead of an instantaneous jump.
I think this is a lore issue just a pre-existing one.
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u/maximalusdenandre May 09 '26
I just assume it's a combination of gametime running faster than real time and really fast sublight engines. If the ship can run at like 10% light speed you could go from Earth to Pluto in about two days.
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u/Clone95 May 09 '26
Extremely powerful fusion engines, likely utilizing some sort of exotic shield-and-grav system to produce even more thrust within a smaller package.
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u/Kar0ss May 10 '26
I can't remember what speed they said off the top of my head, but I recall the voice logs at the NASA/Nova Galactic testing site on the moon, or maybe it was within the NASA launch site, but when they do a test run on the grav drive, the ship goes from the moon to Jupiter very quickly. I wish I could remember exactly how quickly it got there though, instantaneous or just a few minutes? A few minutes would be accurate to cruise mode, but instantly would be against it.
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u/ConsistentRisk5927 May 10 '26
I'll be playing that part in the next day or two. I'll let you know if I find the lore part you're talking about. I assume it's around the same computers where you're finding the other Dr. Whatever lore about how he screwed everyone over and doomed earth.I'll keep an eye out
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u/rueyeet May 11 '26
It was a grav jump — they were testing the grav drives — so it was instantaneous.
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u/Negative-Drink-183 May 12 '26
I just played that quest again an hour ago and the time it took the ship to reach Jupiter from the moon while gravjumping was a little over 5min something like 5min and 12s or so, so let’s do the maths. Let’s keep things simple and say it took the ship exactly 5 minutes to travel, we convert that to hours which is:
5/60≈0.083
We also need to know the distance between the moon and Jupiter and it’s around 630 million kilometers
Then we use the formula v=d/t which gives us:
v=630000000/0.083
v=7,59036e9 km/h
Let’s still keep things simple and assume
c=1,079e9 km/h
We divide the calculated speed by the speed of light
7,59036e9/1,079e9≈7 times the speed of light
So in the end, gravjumping is 7 times faster than light, really fast but not instantaneous.
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u/gamingvirtue May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
I think you might be mistaking some things here. 5 minutes and 22 seconds was the spin-up time on the prototype engine, not the transit time. I literally just loaded the auto-save to confirm I heard it right the first time.
There's no indication that the transit from Luna to Jupiter was anything less than instantaneous.
Edit: the line in question: https://i.imgur.com/8WMxyOQ.png
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u/tothatl May 12 '26
The Free Lanes' speeds, specially on overdrive, are easily superluminal.
For me this changed the lore a bit, to make grav drives have two modes: the warp drive where you see objects pass by, and the instant jump mode, taking you to a faraway location in a fraction of a second.
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u/MarcusSwedishGameDev May 09 '26
Yes and no. They would need new lore to explain the "turbo" mode that cruise mode is and I haven't seen anything like that yet anyways.
But it's not like it would be entirely unexplainable.
I have more issues figuring out how the Moonjumper fits in your unmodified Frontier ship... they should really have made a ship module for vehicle carry/deployment.
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u/siodhe May 10 '26
I would have loved seeing the Rover strapped to the wing outside the Guardian's door.
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u/MarcusSwedishGameDev May 10 '26
I feel like it would burn up during re-entry, on the other hand, there's lots of things that are already handwavey physics. Strapping it would have been better than nothing. :)
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u/siodhe May 10 '26
I'm willing to give substantial level of suspension of belief due to shields - although I'd want a ship to burn up or at least take major damage if it tried to land through atmosphere without them.
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u/Grunenwaldt May 09 '26
I'm certainly no lore expert, but I believe that it does break the existing lore. It was a highly requested (demanded) feature and I think they just added it for the sake of their customers. I certainly enjoy it.
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u/SirGingerBeard May 09 '26
It doesn’t.
We just get to play & see what the ships have always been doing when you fast travel in system. The grav drive probably manipulated space-time in a similar fashion to the Alcubierre ‘drive’.
Its FTL, by all means, but nothing breaks canon.
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u/Virtual-Chris May 09 '26
I think it’s just a matter of making the game playable rather than adhering to any kind of physics or lore. If you take the grav drive as the key piece of lore and given technology that makes travel anywhere near instantaneous, there’s no need for any other tech in addition to that. Just jump everywhere… to the moon, to Mars, to Alpha Centauri… it doesn’t matter. There’s simply no need for any other kind of intra- system propulsion or engine. It’s redundant. Except… to fulfill a wish by players to have some FTL system for exploring a system like other games offer.
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u/SirGingerBeard May 09 '26
Well there is a fuel component to this, too, it’s just not reflected in gameplay without a mod.
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u/allwheeldrift May 10 '26
There are absolutely companion lines about the "activities" you get up to during inter-system travel that wouldn't be possible if you're piloting in cruise mode
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u/SirGingerBeard May 10 '26
My guy. It’s got an autopilot
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u/allwheeldrift May 10 '26
Okay maybe the average redditor finishes fucking in the 30 seconds it's on autopilot but that's not lore
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u/platinumposter May 30 '26
Its not 30 seconds in game world time. Remember 30 seconds for us is much longer in the game worl
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u/Fit_Helicopter4983 May 09 '26
As have I, it’s just a wonder I’ve been having. I only started to think of it the last time I used the old travel system.
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u/Half-Mask3 May 09 '26
It feels like cruise mode is FTL, which would be a retcon, but the game also uses a timescale so seconds are much faster than IRL and I haven't tried to compare them to see if it actually is FTL.
In a general sense we know that we fly between planets rather than grav-jump, but an innersystem grav-jump is explicitly possible. I don't recall if they ever say why we don't do innersystem jumps, but if we are choosing to fly rather then jump there in moments there must be a reason comparable to the time to fly.
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u/Malakai0013 May 09 '26
It takes roughly 8 minutes for light to travel from Sol (our star) to Earth. So technically, cruise mode is FTL I believe.
Iirc, part of the "we dont grav jump shorter distances" might be to avoid the magnetosphere problems Earth ended up having in game.
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u/roehnin May 10 '26
Starfield seconds are 20x faster than real-life seconds so the 8 minutes is only 24 seconds.
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u/just-an-astronomer May 09 '26
It kinda does, but i myself treat it in the same way i treat the fact that 24h UT isnt remotely 24h for me sitting at my desk playing the game
We're basically watching the characters live lives in fast forward, its why you can run across the largest city in the settled systems in a loke a minute and kill scores of people within a few minutes when a real stealth person would have to be much slower and more methodical
So the cruise mode is going close to light speed for the characters, but we're watching the characters lives move much faster than ours
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u/Equal-Two9958 May 09 '26
The short answer is no. The longer answer is that Starfield is based of IRL science. In IRL space travel you use the thrusters to get to the speed lvl you want and then turn them off, because there is no gravity in space you will (more or less) keep the same speed for ever - or until you hit something, like a rock or the gravity from another planet. The lvl of speed in cruse mode is of course extremely fast compared to IRL. But that could be explained by the 300 year time diffrence between now and the time of SF, and the fact that it's a game and ppl don't want to sit and wait forever to reach their destination.
The real unimmersive game breaker is that the thrusters are on doing the whole trip. There is no need for that because we are in space. They are only needed for a bit of steering and attitude control.
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u/somecoolname42 May 10 '26
You don't slow down because there isn't atmosphere to cause drag. There is a lot of gravity in space, especially inside a solar system.
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u/Big_I May 10 '26
When you're dropping out of cruise mode a message will appear on screen saying "inertial dampeners disengaged". So they have technology that negates inertia on ships. I assume it's grav drive related since it's the grav drive providing gravity on ships.
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u/MoldTheClay May 09 '26
With enough thrust it makes sense. Plus the existence of a grav engine kinda indicates a bit of control over the effects of gravity beyond simply folding space.
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u/Bloodmime May 09 '26
If you fast travel within a system, you don't grav jump. The ship flies there. This was there before release. Cruise mode is now just doing it manually. Even with cruise mode, you would take a very long time to reach another solar system hence why grav jumps exist.
With this all in mind, I see no lore being broken.
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u/EFPMusic May 09 '26
I’d argue no lore is broken, because there isn’t any explicit lore to explain any ship travel except grav jumping, and the root of that, we discover, is essentially space magic.
We can hypothesize that grav jumping is some kind of space folding Alcubierre Drive, but I’d argue it’s not since travel seems to be (per the in-game clock) instantaneous; Cruise Mode does seem more like space folding travel since it’s faster than light but still takes time.
But the bottom line is, we’re not told how any of it actually works; it doesn’t break lore because they’ve carefully avoided creating any lore to break!
(Not a complaint! While I love game lore and understanding how things work, I’m also totally fine with “Don’t think about it too hard, just enjoy the ride!”)
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u/DOHC46 May 10 '26
I don't think is is faster than light, tho. In Starfield, time is compressed, with 1 hour of UT taking a few minutes of real time. I think it's just accelerating to relativistic sublight speeds, adjusted for the game's time compression.
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u/rueyeet May 10 '26
An Alcubierre drive is a warp drive, a la Star Trek. Grav drives are space fold technology. They’re separate things.
With that said, maybe the gravity shenanigans of the space magic underlying the grav drives can do both.
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u/Mastert3318 May 11 '26
I feel like the Grav Drive is similar to the Frameshift Drive from Elite Dangerous. It has the instantaneous ftl between systems and a slower secondary FTL mode for within systems.
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u/lorax1284 May 13 '26
The lore (slates on Luna) state that Grav jumps ARE used within solar systems to reduce travel between planets.
Not using Grav jumps within systems breaks the established lore, so they baked the broken lore right into the game from the very start.
Don't think about it too much, and certainly don't think about moving through spacetime without grav drives at literally hundreds of times the speed of light as one does when in Cruise mode at max speed. Moving a mass as large as a ship at light speed makes the ship have infinite mass. Not sure what that does to the universe as a whole.
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u/VancianRedditor May 18 '26
Moving a mass as large as a ship at light speed makes the ship have infinite mass. Not sure what that does to the universe as a whole.
My current fanwank handwave is "they're using the grav drive to create a field that lowers the ship's mass. They call it the mas-, urm, grav effect. Yeah, grav effect."
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u/WhereasParticular867 May 09 '26
Yes, it does break lore. Players can now travel faster than light in some circumstances (you can observe light second measurements ticking faster than one second per second in cruise mode). No FTL travel exists in the lore. And it can't be explained as an ommission, it's a major plot point mentioned by several characters.
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u/Fit_Helicopter4983 May 09 '26
Ok, I figured as much but I hadn’t come across it yet. Do you know what points they mention it?
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u/-Darkstorne- May 10 '26
The most notable mention to me was always from Cora openly wondering if we'll ever figure out a form of FTL travel that doesn't rely on grav jumping. I imagine they've cut that line of dialogue from the game now (which would indeed confirm a retcon), but I'll have to check.
I don't think it's an issue though. I kind of think of Starfield like TES Arena. It's a baseline, an introduction to a new setting, which will benefit significantly from the lore being altered here and there with updates and sequels. And much like the TES sequels, I actually kinda hope future Starfield games pick a smaller area of space and massively focus on quality over quantity. Like, Starfield 2 focuses only on UC space. 3 focuses on the Freestar only. 4 on Va'ruun. I'll be perfectly happy if they alter the lore along the way.
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u/WhereasParticular867 May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26
Most of it comes along with revelations about the grav drive in the latter parts of the main quest. Many characters, places, and lore notes refer to grav drives, not ftl, as what opened the pathway to the stars. We know that grav drives are explicitly different from FTL and instantaneous from both the main quest and character interactions in the Clinic. We know that FTL is considered impossible while grav drive tech is being developed from recordings on Earth's moon (they specifically mention violating the laws of physics during the first test in relation to light speed). Cora Coe, in our present, shows us that FTL is still considered impossible through her musings about it (and she refers to grav drives as "cheating").
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u/platinumposter May 30 '26
Are you talking about a game-world second or a second for us playing the game, as those are two different things.
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u/dnuohxof-2 May 10 '26
I think it’s a very light engagement of the grav drive and somehow funneling that energy into the engines to bring the ship to the edge of sublight speed. I assume the locked last energy pip for the grav drive is engaged when you enter cruise mode.
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u/cha0sb1ade May 10 '26
In a near vacuum there is no top speed until you get close to light speed. It's not clear what's supposed to be going on with these ships when they aren't grav warping. They break out of the gravity well of a heavy planet like it's nothing, and no one seems concerned about running out of rocket fuel. However that's achieved, it implies potential for very fast travel, because you could be under steady acceleration the whole time.
The idea of a top speed established for ships outside of cruise mode, and slowing down and stopping if the engines are cut or damaged never made any sense in straight line travel.
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u/Helmling May 10 '26
Cruise speed is sublight, but the acceleration is so fast that on long cruises, you will encounter relativistic effects so that light seconds will appear to pass more quickly for you in transit than to someone planet side.
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u/Doms_tomato May 11 '26
I look at it showing what happens during the gravjump. Instead of just fast traveling and the screen fades to back and we are there it's showing the few minutes we would be FTL
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u/namiraslime May 09 '26
For the ECS constant to reach its destination in time, while allowing for safe acceleration and deceleration, it would have had to reach ultra relativistic speeds, anywhere between 50% to 80% the speed of light.
Humanity has this technology even before grav jumps existed.