Built some variations. Most were stalling at high speeds. Of the two that were accelerating, one gave backhop somewhere between 900 and 1000mph, and the other came to a similar stand still at about same speeds.
Seems i got really lucky with the exit teleporter and entry portal positions.
Fiddled with the blocks under the place where i come to a stop. Removing them, or truning them into half blocks seems to show that i 'arrive' at my final position on the frozen slime block level, not at the teleporter level, although this could afterimages from previous loops or just my eyes playing tricks on me. Also realized that i don't trigger recovery teleporters when i arrive there, but that might be just how pressure plates work, they seem to require minimum fall distance when triggered from above(?).
Moved exit portal further away from exit telporter to rule out teleporting straight into exit portal. There's now 4 blocks of space between exit teleporter and the wall, but i'm still getting backhop.
Built a variant in space to test applicability in low gravity. It works, and as a bonus it gets rid of the vertical screen shaking during acceleration. Built a rail track based launcher to get initial speed(because it's hard to drop down into accelerator when it's on top of the world) and discovered a
bug(?)
Seems like this is not always the case:
No friction at all while on rails (including while in liquids).
Found another strange interaction between merfolk form and flipper potion. In my mind it should not affect anything in the accelerator, but it does. Hard to pinpoint what changes exactly but acceleration pattern is noticably different. Didn't look into it much, just noted that flipper potion is not a replacement for neptune's shell(no autoswimm).
I think i'll try to build a water based accelerator to see if that helps. Would have to readjust dimensions for water physics though, and that will probably be alot of trial and error or luck. Or maybe i'll try to get some math behind this.
TL;DR
No progress
[doublepost=1463326140,1463311317][/doublepost]Noticed something really interesting.
Previously I thought that portal skipping was caused by going so fast that you 'warped' around portal area, never actually reregistering points in between that were inside portal(I'm having trouble explaining this, but you hopefully get it if you've read this thread). That might still be the case, but there seems to be an additional cause.
Portals seem to have a cooldown timer. (See attachment 1)
In the screenshot I'm hooked to the ceiling where yellow portal is, without automatically detaching and being teleported. Also in the picture is arms dealer npc, effectively overloading the portal to the point where I can walk on it's surface or try to jump into the top one without triggering the portal. Maximum fall height at which this still happens seems to be 8 or 9 blocks(I might be wrong about 8), with more height(and thus - delay) I begin teleporting(is this still teleporting if I'm not using actual teleporters?) too but with noticeable stops when I hit the ground, presumable until cooldown expires.
This is somewhat weird because nothing like this seem to happen when you trap yourself in a short falling loop.
Multiple npcs seem to be able to teleport at once, either ignoring or resetting the cooldown. Built a small tower (attachment 2) to test it and npcs seem to maintain their spacing while looping and also overloading the portals 'better'(but not completely) than when they are all bunched up. Still can't draw conclusions, because being unable to fire last portal and actuate floors at the same time lead to bottom and top npc bunching up.
Portal cooldowns might explain why I'm getting such wide ranges of speeds where acceleration stalls. I'm kind of expecting it to happen at specific speeds (+-2? due to portals being so wide) and their multiples(I vaguely recall something called 'standing wave' but I forgot too much about physics to be sure if this is relevant or applicable). Then again these expectations also might be completely baseless.
Still, if there is a cooldown on portals, would be interesting to know it for sure, and possibly measure it. Some kind of hoik chain with variable duration release? That's probably another thread though.
Just thought I'd share and maybe discover that it's well known, just not on the wiki.
Edit1: I keep forgetting that this doesn't happen in short falling loops with only the player, so most likely this quirk doesn't affect my accelerator at all. Also, I did mean to put it as a separate post, silly forum double post merging software.
