Unrealistic Movement Point System

[Barnacle Bill]

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.

[apache]

Thats a much simplifed, but more or less accurate description of orbital mechanics Barnacle Bill. Anyways, by doing orbital transfers, you save an immense amount of fuel, and thus spacecraft mass. That is the big deal with 20th century (and 21st century) space flight. You actually could fly a direct route to Mars from Earth, but it would mean expending a lot more fuel, though it would mean you get there much quicker.
However, 25th century space flight (according to the game) apparently uses some form of non-intertial propulsion, meaning fuel and spacecraft mass is irrelvant, and you can turn on a dime.

[SirDarwin]

Aren't we getting technical
Also I woudln't call SEIV a near future game, but then again this isn't a realistic game to begin with

It is suppose to be fun, personally I never even thought about how the movement worked in the game until I saw this topic

[Alpha Kodiak]

One aspect of reality that we lose in the game is that solar systems are not static. The planet locations relative to each are constantly changing. During the time involved for even one turn, the planets would move in relation to each other.

While I'm not suggesting that the SEIV game system should be modified to reflect this, (talk about a programming nightmare!) the discussion of the realism of movement points should probably be tempered by the fact that the premise of movement within the system is inherently flawed. The game is fun, as stated before, but we will never get realistic movement with a static system model.

[Barnacle Bill]

Again, it is all a matter of how complex you want it to be. Also a matter of what assumptions you want to make about future tech. That was my point, and why I mentioned everything from Starfire speeds down to "real life" current spacecraft.

In Starfire they do provide the option to track moving bodies within the solar system, etc... Actually it is kind of weird. Computers seemingly offer the ability to make a more complex game playable, but no computer 4X game I've ever seen approaches the complexity of even the current 4th edition of Starfire (which is greatly simplified compared to late 2nd & early 3rd edition rules).

[dmm]

quote:

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Originally posted by Alpha Kodiak:
One aspect of reality that we lose in the game is that solar systems are not static. The planet locations relative to each are constantly changing. During the time involved for even one turn, the planets would move in relation to each other.

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This was the subject of a LONG thread, about 5 months ago. I can't remember if there was ever a consensus, but I do remember that some people had halfway reasonable explanations for the (apparent) lack of orbital movement. (Besides the obvious one that it makes the programming harder.)