Past the Speed of Light

Without going into too much detail, I’m working on a game. One of the integral parts of said game is that you rule a galactic empire, having to deal with speed-of-light delays between your colonies.

For debugging purposes, I created a ship that could travel faster than light. One of the ramifications of this is that it arrived at its destination, and then was able to create a colony that received word of the creation of an original colony.

Here’s a logfile:

Colony e5b formed.
Player recvd Colony e5b formed!
Colony e5b got message (0.0) Colony e5b formed!
3.17097919838e-06 0.0 1.4959999997e+11
++ Opened connection to 127.0.0.1:52379, sending greeting...
Message to be delivered in 0.0791317858955yr
Ship will be flying for 19285484.875s (0.611538713692yr)
Message to be delivered in 0.0yr

0.13528665652 0.601966741023 98797977505.4
...
0.673519152714 0.629773332851 -69553597599.1
Arrived at destination!
Colony 419 formed.
Message to be delivered in 3.26153980636yr
Colony 419 got message (0.0) Colony 419 formed!
0.807892567225 0.664797974393 52719255672.8
...
3.23784246575 0.642405806125 13575646097.4
Colony 419 got message (3.26151699645) Colony e5b formed!
3.37323693557 0.674383636046 -1.02979295778e+11
...
3.9138413242 0.672729053375 1.26840029864e+11
Player recvd Colony 419 formed!
Colony e5b got message (3.26151699645) Colony 419 formed!
4.04931823947 0.65659168686 1.43277662497e+11

On the lines which are just a triplet of numbers, the first number is the number of years since the start in a fixed reference frame.

When the simulation starts, the first colony (e5b) is formed. Then I launch a ship to a destination 3.26 light years away, but the ship will only take 0.6 years.

So, 0.6 years later, we see the ship arrive at its target and create colony 419. Piece of cake.

But then, 0.5 years later, colony 419 receives the message about colony e5b being created. The ship literally passed through the news of e5b’s creation, and when the ship stopped at 419 the message caught up with the ship again.

Then, another 0.7 years later, we see that the original colony receives the news of colony 419 being created.

Anyway, I thought that was cool.