Re: Unrealistic Movement Point System
As I understand (simplified), a "real" mars mission you would burn your engines long enough to change your orbital velocity around the sun from "equal to the Earth" to "equal to Mars". Your orbital distance then increases (slowly) to the same as Mars. If you time it right (what they call a "launch window", you end up in the orbit of Mars at the same location Mars occupies when you get there. This takes you on an eliptical course between Earth and Mars, and takes months (maybe around a year), as I recall. Of course in most science fiction games we have some drive that runs all the time and somehow generates velocity as long as it is on, and it looks like SE4 has that, too. It certainly doesn't seem to work "realistically".
Let's forget about the outer solar system for a moment and just deal with the part from Jupiter in. Jupiter is 778140000 km from the sun. So, to get the sun in the center and Jupiter on the map, our system map has to at least twice that, 1556280000 km. As I recall, in Starfire a speed of "6" represents 0.1c, where c = speed of light = 299792 km/sec. At 0.1c, it would take about 14.4 hours to cross our "big enough for Jupiter" system map. If we increase our map so it is big enough to get Pluto on, now it is 11826000000 km across and it takes our ship about 109.6 hours (about 4.5 days) to cross the map. 0.1c is really, really fast, though. When it shut down its engines after the burn to escape Earth orbit and head out for the moon, Apollo 11 had a velocity of 35,579 ft/sec, which is about 10.8 km/sec or about 0.000036c. At that speed, it would take about 4.5 years to get across our "big enough for Jupiter" map, and about 34.5 years to get accross our "big enough for Pluto" map. Voyager 2 has a velocity (relative to Earth) of about 39.4 km/sec. That would take 1.25 years to cross our "big enough for Jupiter" map, and about 9.5 years to get accross our "big enough for Pluto" map.
Another way of looking at it is that you could probably create a decent space 4X game that all stayed in one solar system.
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