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Post by Apotheon on Apr 6, 2019 0:00:14 GMT
Hey, here's all realistic sci-fi simulators I know (development years):
Available on Steam - Kerbal Space Program (2011-)
- Children of a Dead Earth (2016-)
- Helium Rain (2018-)
Available on Steam (Early Access) - Rogue System (2016-2018, temporarily abandoned)
- Stable Orbit (2017, permanently abandoned)
Off the Market - Shattered Horizon (2009, still available on eBay)
- Race to Mars (2014-2016, abandoned, unabandoned, 2017- with new developer)
Unavailable - Spacefighter Inc (2017-2019)
Unsuccessful Kickstarters - Torchships (2012, 2014, abandoned)
- Slower Than Light (2014, abandoned )
I strongly recommend checking out Helium Rain, which unfortunately hasn't got any attention from major websites! Rogue System is really spectacular, but it's a study sim and that's certainly not everyone's thing.
Shoutouts to Space Engine, Universe Sandbox, Celestia, Orbiter, Reentry, Space Shuttle Mission 2007, Take On Mars, Surviving Mars, Mars Horizon, and the apps Space Simulator, F-sim Space Shuttle, Spaceflight Simulator, and TerraGensis. Also shoutouts to the old classics like Microsoft Space Simulator (1994), Outpost (1994), and small passion projects like Aurora 4X, FARColony, and High Frontier.
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Post by Lurker on Apr 6, 2019 4:36:06 GMT
Thanks! highly useful.
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Post by bigbombr on Apr 7, 2019 11:41:59 GMT
Don't forget SimpleRockets 2. It's pretty similar to KSP, with more part customization but currently less content. Also runs much smoother.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 7, 2019 13:11:58 GMT
We could make a sliding scale of realism, starting somewhere around Frontier: Elite 2/Frontier: First Encounters/Pioneer or maybe I-War, ending at RL.
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Post by Apotheon on Apr 8, 2019 15:05:51 GMT
Right, SimpleRockets 2 looks great! We could make a sliding scale of realism, starting somewhere around Frontier: Elite 2/Frontier: First Encounters/Pioneer or maybe I-War, ending at RL. Yeah.
8: Historically accurate (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, First Man) 7: Realistic (Marooned, Europa Report, Gravity, The Martian) 6: Quantitatively scientifically accurate (CDE & KSP, probably Spacefighter Inc) 5: Qualitatively scientifically accurate (Helium Rain, for instance there are radiators but they aren't necessarily the right sizes, Shattered Horizon) 4: Slightly inaccurate (2001, Contact, Solaris, Moon, Interstellar, Arrival) 3: Moderately inaccurate (Sunshine) 2: Greatly inaccurate (Armageddon) 1: Sci-fantasy (Star Wars)
Obviously I use movie examples since there aren't a lot of games to go around exactly.
I'm not familiar with the differences between Frontier, Freespace, I-War, X and all of the old classics, but I think Elite Dangerous, Mass Effect, and Star Citizen should rank slightly above average.
2001 is unrealistic, but highly technically accurate, while Armageddon conversely is realistic, but highly technically inaccurate. Both at least attempted realism or technical accuracy. Star Wars, on the other hand, never attempted.
A few points that detract from scientific accuracy include superluminal travel, communication, anti-gravity, aliens, AI, airplane or submarine physics in space, absence of propellant or radiators, and super-sleep.
Also, there's ambiguity between realism, scientific accuracy, and technical accuracy. Rogue System, for instance, is highly technical when it comes to electronics and such, but still includes a handful of things that are considered pseudoscience today, including an Energy Catalyser, VASIMR, EmDrive, and laser cooler that violates thermodynamics.
I haven't played Stable Orbit or Race to Mars yet.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 8, 2019 20:52:56 GMT
Superluminal travel is hard to avoid in almost all games and a lot of other sci-fi. Usually the best you can hope for is author(s) acknowledging and trying to address the the unfortunate implications for causality. Aliens are probably pretty realistic in general - I don't believe in miracles, including in us being one. Of course in fiction it all depends on presentation - it's hard to make good aliens (interspecifically omnisexual blue space babes were the reason I ended up NOT playing Mass Effect, BTW, and judging from all the derp in later instalments it was the right choice), and AI is, in essence, just intelligence that's not based on meat substrate, so hardly unrealistic in principle. Of course, some form of interstellar travel is required for aliens to make meaningful appearance. Artificial gravity is pure suck that was only excusable in old TV flicks running on tight budget. Seriously, it's a huge gamebreaker in terms of physical ripple effects, with no actual gains - making do with continuous acceleration (if you have stupidly advanced propulsion and are going places) or centrifugal gravity (otherwise) is not going to break any story or worldbuilding you might have in mind. Anyway, for me Frontier has the special distinction of being pretty much the first space game to attempt broad-aspect realism. It's not exactly the most realistic game (although it comes relatively close due to scarcity of competition) - ships have no radiators, ridiculous delta-v budgets (think noticeable percentage of c) at hilariously low mass ratios, the accelerations are on the high side (fighters can typically pull 20-ish with long term issues not being addressed) and not depend on ship's load, the combat is mostly pewpewing by hand with spinal short range lasers (visible and audible) and, obviously, there is casual FTL and interstellar travel, complete with trading in very mundane crap. OTOH:
- You can travel around more or less a galaxy's worth of solar systems (less, given that it's just a several ly thick slice of galaxy with correspondingly less stars than the real thing, but you are not going to have a lifetime to visit them all anyway) that are modelled in realistic scale, while also making a fairly successful attempt at realistic generation of plausible solar systems (as well as modelling our own and a number of known stars) - think very primitive version of Space Engine.
- Astronomical objects within solar systems rotate and follow orbital paths in real time.
- You can actually perform orbital manoeuvres (most of the time you won't need to with propulsion tech available, but I once needed to eyeball a few Hohmann transfers to dock at a port on a quickly orbiting gas giant's moon after pirates blew up my autopilot - it was easier than eyeballing a brachistochrone intercept) and physical objects (ships, cargo) are influenced by gravity in approximately correct manner (at least until the numerical errors pile-up throws the simulation out of whack)
- You can actually see all that stuff rendered quite realistically, even if it's by the standards of 286/Atari/Amiga graphics, with things like real time day/night cycles, distant objects and rudimentary coloured lighting.
- You can only use FTL for interstellar travel and it drops you off around 10AU from your destination in random direction, and you need to make extensive use of game's time compression feature (working in order of magnitude increments) to get anywhere despite the marvelous drive technology (and have fun flying to Proxima Centauri after your hyperdrive drops you off 10AU from the AB barycenter).
- You actually fly around in a Newtonian manner even though you need to fiddle around with the badly named flight modes to stop the ship's computer from getting in the way - there is no contrived bullshit (apart from why exactly are you pewpewing manually with fixed, short range spinal laser like a caveman, that is) like speed limit or different turning rates depending on velocity (relative to what?), unlike Elite: Dangerous
- All that was realized in the time where Atari/Amiga/286 were pretty much standard gaming rigs and the game fits on a single 3.5" floppy.
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Post by cipherpunks on Apr 9, 2019 17:20:09 GMT
I think Elite Dangerous [...] should rank slightly above average. Well, it has the following from Your list:
Wait, what? How come NASA-paid VASIMR is pseudoscience? Are NASA just fools in Your opinion, or...?
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Post by Apotheon on Apr 9, 2019 20:15:27 GMT
Superluminal travel is hard to avoid in almost all games and a lot of other sci-fi. Usually the best you can hope for is author(s) acknowledging and trying to address the the unfortunate implications for causality. Aliens are probably pretty realistic in general - I don't believe in miracles, including in us being one. Of course in fiction it all depends on presentation - it's hard to make good aliens (interspecifically omnisexual blue space babes were the reason I ended up NOT playing Mass Effect, BTW, and judging from all the derp in later instalments it was the right choice), and AI is, in essence, just intelligence that's not based on meat substrate, so hardly unrealistic in principle. Of course, some form of interstellar travel is required for aliens to make meaningful appearance. Artificial gravity is pure suck that was only excusable in old TV flicks running on tight budget. Seriously, it's a huge gamebreaker in terms of physical ripple effects, with no actual gains - making do with continuous acceleration (if you have stupidly advanced propulsion and are going places) or centrifugal gravity (otherwise) is not going to break any story or worldbuilding you might have in mind. Anyway, for me Frontier has the special distinction of being pretty much the first space game to attempt broad-aspect realism. It's not exactly the most realistic game (although it comes relatively close due to scarcity of competition) - ships have no radiators, ridiculous delta-v budgets (think noticeable percentage of c) at hilariously low mass ratios, the accelerations are on the high side (fighters can typically pull 20-ish with long term issues not being addressed) and not depend on ship's load, the combat is mostly pewpewing by hand with spinal short range lasers (visible and audible) and, obviously, there is casual FTL and interstellar travel, complete with trading in very mundane crap. OTOH:
- You can travel around more or less a galaxy's worth of solar systems (less, given that it's just a several ly thick slice of galaxy with correspondingly less stars than the real thing, but you are not going to have a lifetime to visit them all anyway) that are modelled in realistic scale, while also making a fairly successful attempt at realistic generation of plausible solar systems (as well as modelling our own and a number of known stars) - think very primitive version of Space Engine.
- Astronomical objects within solar systems rotate and follow orbital paths in real time.
- You can actually perform orbital manoeuvres (most of the time you won't need to with propulsion tech available, but I once needed to eyeball a few Hohmann transfers to dock at a port on a quickly orbiting gas giant's moon after pirates blew up my autopilot - it was easier than eyeballing a brachistochrone intercept) and physical objects (ships, cargo) are influenced by gravity in approximately correct manner (at least until the numerical errors pile-up throws the simulation out of whack)
- You can actually see all that stuff rendered quite realistically, even if it's by the standards of 286/Atari/Amiga graphics, with things like real time day/night cycles, distant objects and rudimentary coloured lighting.
- You can only use FTL for interstellar travel and it drops you off around 10AU from your destination in random direction, and you need to make extensive use of game's time compression feature (working in order of magnitude increments) to get anywhere despite the marvelous drive technology (and have fun flying to Proxima Centauri after your hyperdrive drops you off 10AU from the AB barycenter).
- You actually fly around in a Newtonian manner even though you need to fiddle around with the badly named flight modes to stop the ship's computer from getting in the way - there is no contrived bullshit (apart from why exactly are you pewpewing manually with fixed, short range spinal laser like a caveman, that is) like speed limit or different turning rates depending on velocity (relative to what?), unlike Elite: Dangerous
- All that was realized in the time where Atari/Amiga/286 were pretty much standard gaming rigs and the game fits on a single 3.5" floppy.
Frontier was truly special. I believe you can go to a planet, land on it, get out, and drive around on it in a rover. The kind of stuff that makes jaws drop even today when Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, and No Man's Sky does it. I was impressed when I found out Battlecruiser 3000 did it too, before I realised Frontier did it years before.
Also, I had NO idea there were orbital paths or orbital manoeuvres in Frontier!
I think Elite Dangerous [...] should rank slightly above average. Well, it has the following from Your list:
Wait, what? How come NASA-paid VASIMR is pseudoscience? Are NASA just fools in Your opinion, or...? By "slightly above average", I meant maybe a three in my system, which is more than the average sci-fi (1-4). As AtomDragonHeart mentions, avoiding superluminal communication is essentially impossible in multiplayer and superluminal travel is extremely common however there's none in any of the games on my list (and Aurora4X is probably the only one of my shoutouts to have it) and I don't believe it's in Star Citizen or Elite, at least if you accept "teleportation" (stargates or wormholes). In my opinion, teleportation is far less of a problem since there's no actual acceleration to or beyond lightspeed and as far as I'm aware, it's not really forbidden by the laws of physics, depending on how you define teleportation.
Singleplayer games can get around FTL with time acceleration, time skips, or turns. In multiplayer, it's harder to get around it, but not necessarily impossible.
Regarding aliens, I'm OK with them as long as they're not Star Trek or Stargate style aliens. Ominous prescences, such as 2001, Arrival, or the Thargoids are only half a realism point deduction! Same with AI. Only life-like (Cortana) or super-human (Shodan) AI get deductions. HAL from 2001 is basically OK for what we see him do in the movie (just talk, like Siri), but in the lore they mention him being faultless (super-human) and that's unacceptable (even if he turns out not to be quite faultless).
As far as I'm aware, NASA are currently funding three electrical thruster companies. Anti-matter (far future), VASIMR (future), and Hall thruster (today). Hall thrusters are tried and true and demonstrably the best today, while VASIMR hasn't lived up to it's big promises, but survives on its cool name and approval by the Obama administration. All of this is as far as I'm aware and I'm not necessarily right, but regarding VASIMR I haven't heard anything about succesful demonstrations, only press talk, while the Hall thrusters seem to be making real progress. Haven't heard a word from the anti-matter company. Basically, VASIMR seems exaggerated to me. Probably not going to be as good as its proponents say. I think another kind of electrical thruster will dominate.
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Post by EshaNas on Apr 10, 2019 2:35:02 GMT
As far as I'm aware, NASA are currently funding three electrical thruster companies. Anti-matter (far future), VASIMR (future), and Hall thruster (today). Hall thrusters are tried and true and demonstrably the best today, while VASIMR hasn't lived up to it's big promises, but survives on its cool name and approval by the Obama administration. All of this is as far as I'm aware and I'm not necessarily right, but regarding VASIMR I haven't heard anything about succesful demonstrations, only press talk, while the Hall thrusters seem to be making real progress. Haven't heard a word from the anti-matter company. Basically, VASIMR seems exaggerated to me. Probably not going to be as good as its proponents say. I think another kind of electrical thruster will dominate.
VASIMR needs a lot of juice to work. ('To Work' hereby defined as 'actually approaching their lofty claims of manned travel to Mars in a month') Nuclear juice. While JPL and associated orgs are still working on lightweight nuclear reactors, NASA officially doesn't really want to go down that PR disaster. VASIMR itself side-steps it, IIRC, by all but ignoring the issue. A shame, really. Mankind cannot expand in space without nuclear power. End-of.Right, SimpleRockets 2 looks great! We could make a sliding scale of realism, starting somewhere around Frontier: Elite 2/Frontier: First Encounters/Pioneer or maybe I-War, ending at RL. Yeah.
8: Historically accurate (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, First Man) 7: Realistic (Marooned, Europa Report, Gravity, The Martian) 6: Quantitatively scientifically accurate (CDE & KSP, probably Spacefighter Inc) 5: Qualitatively scientifically accurate (Helium Rain, for instance there are radiators but they aren't necessarily the right sizes, Shattered Horizon) 4: Slightly inaccurate (2001, Contact, Solaris, Moon, Interstellar, Arrival) 3: Moderately inaccurate (Sunshine) 2: Greatly inaccurate (Armageddon) 1: Sci-fantasy (Star Wars)
Obviously I use movie examples since there aren't a lot of games to go around exactly.
I'm not familiar with the differences between Frontier, Freespace, I-War, X and all of the old classics, but I think Elite Dangerous, Mass Effect, and Star Citizen should rank slightly above average.
2001 is unrealistic, but highly technically accurate, while Armageddon conversely is realistic, but highly technically inaccurate. Both at least attempted realism or technical accuracy. Star Wars, on the other hand, never attempted.
A few points that detract from scientific accuracy include superluminal travel, communication, anti-gravity, aliens, AI, airplane or submarine physics in space, absence of propellant or radiators, and super-sleep.
Also, there's ambiguity between realism, scientific accuracy, and technical accuracy. Rogue System, for instance, is highly technical when it comes to electronics and such, but still includes a handful of things that are considered pseudoscience today, including an Energy Catalyser, VASIMR, EmDrive, and laser cooler that violates thermodynamics.
I haven't played Stable Orbit or Race to Mars yet.
I strongly disagree with Europa Report. It cuts down the rads on Europa for their own ends; I would shift it to where Armageddon is on that alone. Europa is a rad-baked death world that will probably never see any manned landings or missions. There's also the small, irritating tidbit about them going straight to Europa with no manned missions to Mars beforehand, which is, well, just unthinkable. NASA doesn't go across the street without a billion tests and studies beforehand, mankind jumping from Earth to Europa is just - no. Okay, maybe not Tier 2, but at least Tier 4.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Apr 10, 2019 20:36:14 GMT
Frontier was truly special. I believe you can go to a planet, land on it, get out, and drive around on it in a rover. The kind of stuff that makes jaws drop even today when Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, and No Man's Sky does it. I was impressed when I found out Battlecruiser 3000 did it too, before I realised Frontier did it years before.
You couldn't exit your ship in Frontier, but you could pretty much land anywhere and with big enough ship you could buy some mining machines and set them up on planets to mine stuff for you. It had gravity and applied it to everything that wasn't on rails (as in "space stations and celestial bodies") - seems like orbits would be a natural consequence of that and indeed they were. Of course, with no good numerical integration and the game having to work around the fact that you actually didn't have FPU on most target platforms, the orbits were typically not very stable so you typically crashed or got ejected (or at least thrown into highly eccentric ellipse) after a few revolutions but they worked well enough to do orbital manoeuvres if you were so inclined and could work with having to eyeball everything. As far as I can tell you could even experience Coriolis' force when flying fast along planet's surface. Of course, the propulsion allowed you to pretty much ignore orbital mechanics most of the time (I only did Hohmann's once because it was easier than eyeballing direct intercept in a gas giant's system and the time penalty was not significant there), but the mechanics was there. Three points: - If relativity holds, FTL breaks causality. It does not depends on how FTL works exactly, If you can get from A to B faster than light would, you can make a time machine out of it.
- Actually, even just FTL communication breaks causality all the same, so you might as well have all your fun.
- In most games accelerating past the speed of light is of no gameplay consequence (because it's way too impractical with any sort of reasonable acceleration due to c being so high), and is typically just a consequence of lack of relativistic physics model in game. Proper FTL is pretty much always either jumpdrive (or some sort of non-discontinuous drive like Alcubierre's in some of the fancier productions) or gates/wormholes (same as jumpdrive, but restricted to specific locations), with the former having less worldbuilding and gameplay impact (if properly restricted) due to not creating obvious chokepoints, the latter potentially allowing for some mitigation of physical consequences.
Given distances and timespans involved you'll probably want to have both FTL and time acceleration in most games. How would you do that? Ah, it's ok with me - aliens of rubber forehead variety can all burn in Sgr A*'s accretion disk as far as I am concerned and nothing of value will be lost. If we (or someone else) made an AI that is much smarter than us, it might well appear godlike to us. I really do not see any convincing reasons why making a non-meat intelligence (or even engineering a different meat based one) would be anything but engineering challenge, nor why should humans be the smartest thing possible in the universe. I want my pulsed NTR for a plausible mid-future propulsion if not going full-on fusion. Anyway, flying on oversized firecrackers is obviously not cutting it when it comes to space exploration. Some sort of nuclear (or beamed, but that's for wussies and it's hard to make work in games) power is needed.
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Post by thorneel on Apr 10, 2019 21:56:39 GMT
FTL+Relativity breaks causality, but you can add a causality conservation principle, forbidding any closed timelike loop. Which can have amusing consequences.
In Through Struggle, The Stars, they very carefully accelerate/decelerate all wormholes so there is no time drift, in order to make sure they won't crash.
In the VergeWorlds setting, they turn the bug into a feature: send one end on a relativistic rocket, and thanks to time drift, the other end will open to the new world six months later, even if said world is 40 light years away. Sure, it is also 40 light years in the future, but who cares about that! On the other hand, the wormhole network forbids loops, and the whole thing is a tree with (prior to the Bump) Earth in its center. Which is good! Older worlds control trade, and keep their influence! But as there are four superpowers with their own network, they actually launch "causality attacks" against each-other by voluntarily create a loop after strengthening their own wormholes, so the crash happens somewhere in the attacked branch - and voilĂ ! They just stole a branch to another network, often with decades to pacify them and prepare themselves before a causality counterattack can even arrive. Sure, some locals may be bumped half a century in the future compared to Earth time, but that's why you have occupation forces. Even better, contact with aliens become possible: even if they emerged half a million years apart from each-other, their networks will contact only in decades or centuries of subjective time. Too bad about the Bump in the Night, where the entire network seems to have shattered. By the time local colonies are recontacted, centuries of isolation have often passed - if the homeworlds are ever recontacted, the drift may be a thousand times that... As such, VergeWorlds pretty much don't have spaceships, and have FTL subway stations instead, but I think we can forgive this slight.
The physical reason given for the chronology protection principle is often that, if a closed timelike loop exists, a photon may loop it to its starting point, then looping again... meaning that it would follow the loop an infinity of times, meaning that the energy level on this point of space-time would be infinite, which is not physically possible. So as a loop is forming, quantum fluctuations will become worse and worse until the weakest link crashes (if only, I suspect, because virtual particles following the loop are enough for fluctuations to appear)
On the other hand, you need either negative matter or absurdly immense structures to start playing with FTL, and both are pretty much handwavium.
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Post by Apotheon on Apr 11, 2019 16:52:06 GMT
My idea for space multiplayer without FTL is to allow the player to command more than one character, for instance. Imagine the player starts off on Earth, controls a character in a Star Citizen-like hub or can move around in orbit over realistic timespans, then wants to go experience the moon. Instead of sitting three days in front of the computer just staring at it, the player could recruit another character on the moon and shift control to that character immediately. So, the player could recruit one character on each planet, moon, or station, and have the characters move short distances on auto-pilot, but sending someone to Mars could literally take 6 months of real time, if you really wanted to do that. But the point is, while that's going on, the player could log out or control other characters. You could also have cargo ships and such either be drones that can accelerate to low relativistic speeds or maybe a system where you sell things on on planet and buy then again on the other with no actual transport taking place. Kind of like a space bank. Also, if it's a future setting, the player might simply beam his DNA over to another planet at lightspeed and have a clone made there (14 minutes to Mars?) and if it's even further future, if all players are AIs, they might simply beam over their code or consciousness or whatever. In such a world, perhaps all commodities that get transported from planet to planet are information, which moves at lightspeed, and maybe all worlds are fully self-sufficient in terms of raw materials (or there's an automatic, cheap logistics network that's worth far less than information transfers).
The innovation is that you control more than one character, which is quite unorthodox for multiplayer games since it breaks the "rule of Half Life".
But really, I'd be fine if there was a game where you had to do realistic manuovres, but then could time accelerate your own ship's motion along the trajectory. It would obviously cause some "funny stuff", but I think it's the simplest compromise. Either that or some kind of instant jump technology. But as I've mentioned before, when you accelerate to the speed of light, your mass increases towards infinity, along with your speed and energy, while time stops, and the entire universe flattens into a pancake, while colours explode around you. There are so many problems with it, compared to someone simply being one place place and then suddenly being in another place.
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Post by airc777 on Apr 12, 2019 14:36:17 GMT
So uploaded minds and robot body's and digital clones and such? That's an interesting premise.
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Post by dragon on Apr 12, 2019 23:16:51 GMT
I have recently figured you don't need FTL for anything. A better thing to do would be to increase human life spans. In fact, you can travel between two points in space in an arbitrarily short time, given enough delta-V. The problem is when you try to send someone else. However, since you're on a planet in a latter scenario, you can simply go about your business while waiting a few decades for the sublight traveller to come back. Yes, it's restrictive, but I believe a good 4X could be made on that principle. You could have enormous "heighliners" for sublight travel, crossing interstellar distances in a year or so, as far as passengers and cargo are concerned, and have immortal or near-immortal population (not inconceivable, with sufficient developments in biology), to avoid too much societal disruption by such travels. Indeed, humans having biological immortality would be a good colonization driver, I imagine (one challenge could be managing planetary populations). A game incorporating the lightspeed limit into its strategy and mechanics could be interesting indeed. It would probably be strictly grand strategy-based game, since with lightspeed comms you have to delegate all in-system decisions to someone who's physically there, but such a thing can be lots of fun if done right.
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Post by EshaNas on Apr 13, 2019 3:22:55 GMT
Or, just have a very detailed Solar System with 'medium' range travel times. No in-system warping like we see in Call of Duty, maybe Antimatter jets. The Solar System, up to the Oort Cloud, is huge and a full Solar System has more than enough potential to have a myriad of factions, ideologies, and even new forms of life vying for their slice of the pie.
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