WARNING! THIS POST CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS FOR INFINITE SPACE. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Man, it has been a while, hasn't it? Almost a year since my last post. And I can't even remember the last time I made a video game theory (still technically a hypothesis). What can you do? Life gets in the way of things. As you already know, this post contains minor spoilers for the game. If you want to avoid them, I suggest you try and play the game yourself. It's an epic story set in the far future where humans have pretty much mastered space travel. The story was what kept me hooked to the game even after its rather simplistic and quite frankly repetitive combat system lost it's charm. This is no small feat since my total play time ended up being 73 hours and 20 minutes after I finished the campaign and I got bored of the combat about 4 or 5 hours in. Enough about that let's just begin with the theory.
In the world of Infinite Space, humans have found a way to travel faster than light speed. Because of this, I'm going to completely ignore the impossibility of such a feat according to our current understanding of physics. So we know the ships travel faster than light but how fast is that? All the distance in the game is measured in MIL. I Googled it to see if it was an actual unit and it is! 1 MIL equals 1/1000 of an inch. Somehow, I don't think this is the same MIL as the one in Infinite Space.
How are we going to calculate how fast the ships go if we have no idea how far they travel? There's actually a way to do this. At a point in the game, we get to visit our very own solar system! Since we know the average distance between the planets of our own solar system, we can use that to calculate the speed of the ships simply by timing it while we play the game. I originally wanted to use the distance from the sun to the Earth but that proved very difficult for game-play reasons. So I ended up taking the distance between Jupiter and Saturn.
It took my flagship, a Belenus, which had a cruise speed stat of 176 around 5 seconds in real time to get from Jupiter to Saturn. The average distance between Jupiter and Saturn (I couldn't find the shortest or longest distances) is approximately 646,270,000 kilometers. If we consider it took the Yuri and the gang 5 seconds to cross this distance, their cruise speed would be 129,254,000 km/s. For context, the speed of light is 299,792.458 km/s. So the modded (lots of modules installed) Belenus goes around 431 times the speed of light. How fast is that? It's faster than any non-omnipotent character in the Dragonball Universe. It's also faster than most superheroes in both the Marvel and DC universes.
But this is just the cruise speed. What about the battle speed? When you get into a random encounter in the game, it seems that your actual distance from your destination does not change. So I believe the combat area is confined to a length of 1 MIL (Infinite Space's unit of distance). And since this is space, I think the actual battle area is 1 cubic MIL but the game represents the battle area as a linear distance instead of an actual area or volume. This is probably done either for simplicity's sake or for engine limitations or maybe even a bit of both. Regardless, 1 MIL is divided into 10 equal segments during battles. So using our assumptions, how big is 1 MIL? For this we go back to Jupiter and Saturn. In the game, the distance between the two planets is shown as 3478 MIL. So we can say that 3478 MIL equals 646,270,000 km. So 1 MIL should equal 185,816.5612 km.
To find out the battle speed of ships, I measured in how long it takes for the ship to cross 1 part of the 10 parts the battle zone is divided into. It takes about 5 seconds for my ship to cross this distance. This makes sense because due to my installed modules and crew members, my battle speed and cruise speed stats were equal (both were 176). So based on our calculations, it took me 5 seconds to cross 18,581.656 km (approx.). That would mean my battle speed is 3,716 km/s (Approx.). This is much slower than the speed of light but it makes sense for the ships to not engage in faster than light dogfights. This is still 10833 times the speed of sound (0.343 km/s) and it's much faster than the fastest rocket built by man.
Now, not every ship is as fast as the one I used. Some are faster and some are slower. To address this I have equated the stat values to actual speed based on my previous assumptions. For my cruise speed stat, 176 equals 129,254,000 km/s. So 1 cruise speed stat means a speed of 734,397 km/s.
Similarly, with battle speed, 176 equals 3,716 km/s. So a 1 battle speed stat equals 21.114 km/s.
Now that we know these values we can easily convert the stats into actual values of speed.
Now, why did I suddenly decide to make this theory? Well, similarly to what happened with the Mogeko Castle theories, I looked it up online but couldn't find any answers. Which isn't surprising since Infinite Space has a criminally small fan-base. So I decided to draw my own conclusions. Now, just like my Mogeko Castle theories this one has lots of holes in it too.
In my calculations I considered the traveling between planets in the game happens in real time. But judging by the fatigue meter in the game, this is probably not the case. So how long is a real time second in the game? When one second passes for us while going somewhere in the game, how long is that one second for Yuri and the gang? Well, Yuri and his crew does age in the game albeit for 100% plot reasons. So there is a 10 year gap between Yuri the boy and Yuri the man. While we progress the story as teen Yuri, he doesn't age until we get to the ending of the first half of the game. The same can be said about adult Yuri in the second half of the game. So I believe that each half takes place in the span of 1 year or less. So I think that 1 second in real time is most probably equal to 1 hour for Yuri. If the conversion was 1 day or 1 month, it would be kinda hard to do all the shit you have to do in each half of the game in a span of 1 year. But if 1 real time second was worth 1 minute or even 30 minutes, it won't make sense for the crew to get as tired as they do. So I think 1 second = 1 hour is a fair assumption. But if I go with this assumption, the cruise speed becomes 35,903.88 km/s which is much less than the speed of light. It could be that the game was referring to the warp gates when it said that humans figured out how to travel faster than light, but I don't think that's the case. In the game, the warp gates and their origin seem to be shrouded in mystery and they also seem to be similar to teleporters more than anything else. Furthermore, since Yuri literally travels between (small) galaxies (SMC and LMC), I think 431 times the speed of light isn't that out there since Yuri obviously completes an adventure going from the SMC to the LMC in less much less than a year. Even with the aid of instant teleportation to shorten the distance Yuri needs to cross, the distance he does travel through isn't something to sneeze at. The Universe and our galaxies are much larger than video games, movies, anime and comic books give it credit for.
In the end that's just what I think. If you disagree with me or know that I got something wrong, feel free to tell me so in the comments below. If you've got your own theories about it, fell free to share them. And lastly, if you're a butt-hurt Dragon Ball fan, you can also comment about how Goku or Beerus or
Thanks for reading!
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