This is a point that seems to come up often when people are complaining about some aspect of supercruise in Elite Dangerous not being scientifically accurate or plausible. Yes it is, and this is why: supercruise is based on the Alcubierre drive.
These are not arbitrary creative choices during supercruise:
- Your ship’s main engines or maneuvering thrusters never light up or fire.
- You can instantly drop to normal space, from many times the speed of light to zero, without vapourizing yourself and your ship.
- You can only move forward, not backwards or on other axes, and cannot fully stop - zero throttle still moves you at 30 km/second.
- Other ships in supercruise can’t be observed visually but instead appear as points of light.
This is depicting an Alcubierre drive. Your ship isn’t actually moving at all relative to your local frame of reference - it’s spacetime that’s moving.