The way Freelancer handles space travel is fairly decent. It's very similar to the system in Cowboy Bebop. In Freelancer, they have trade laners which are basically a highway system between planets in the solar system. These gates accelerate the ships to much faster speeds (I don't think its quite FTL speeds). The ships themselves are basically pulled/shot to the next system through a series of gate, kind of like a rail gun. For system to sytem, they have to rely on massive jump gates.

I think the jump gate idea is fine. The trade lane idea bothers me a little since I don't think it really takes into account the fact that all of the planets rotate around the sun at different distances and different speeds. So there would be times that I think planets would become unreachable without making major detours.

The way I'm handling this sort of problem is by starting the player on the surface of ganymede, in the Jupiter system, and thnologically stipulating a speed of about 0.03c to be average, so yu get around very quickly. as time goes on, I'll have ships that travel at ridiculous speed like .7c towards the endgame. I will not have faster than light travel, but in the single player campaign mode, I will have time comression, in addition to the time dilation as described by einstein. I won't have either in the multiplayer game, but in multiplayer, the tech-level, and therefor the speeds that it is possible to achiev quickly, will determine how far apart opposing ships start. at low tech, combat will be accross very short distances(both ships in the same orbit around a planet, on opposite sides of it) and at high tech levels, accross very large distances(one ship starts in low earth orbit, and another ship shows up in jupiter orbit. They close the distance very quickly, because I ignore einsteinian effects in multiplayer.)

if you use time dilation, you can do all sorts of interesting things

I was thinking about single scenario oriented game where a player needs to defeat an alien invasion force in our solar system in the near future. The player would be responsible for constructing and positioning defensive forces. The player would also be responsible for plotting the combat missions and trajectories from earth to wherever taking into account travel time, gravity and so on.

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Original post by Extrarius Quote: Original post by NIm [...]Why do you have a finite speed? Couldn't you just keep accelerating indefinietly? it's certaintly not realistic to have a particular speed.[...] Einstein disagrees with you. Modern physics claims it would take infinite energy to reach light speed, so you can't go any faster than that. The faster you go, the more energy it takes to accelerate according to theories einstein worked out that have been shown at least somewhat accurate (more accurate than newtonian physics for sure).

Actually Einstiens theories disallow the movement of particles that have mass at the speed of light. Moving faster than it is allowed hence tachyon particles. Tachyon particles are particles which move faster than the speed of light, and when they lose energy they actually go faster. Therefore, it takes energy to approach the speed of light from either end and it takes infinite energy to travel at it unless you don't have any mass (like a photon of light). Of course it is impossible (unless some other theory comes around) to accelerate from below the speed of light to above it without ever traveling at that speed. That keeps "slow" particles from ever exceeding the speed of light.

I thought it was because gravity bends space time? Or am using an out of date model of the universe? Hmm, you may be right.

Does light have mass?

Incidentally, tachyons are completely speculative. There is no evidence that they actually exist, in fact most scientists think they probably don't. They were merely proposed as an interesting theoretical "what if?". One derived property of tachyons is that their mass would be an imaginary number.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster Anyway, my thoughts are that games should be fun. Classical physics is often thrown all to hell in the name of fun, why not modern physics? Do what's fun for your target audience.

Well that goes without saying, of course. I just thought I'd try and clear up any argument on the subject.

When modern science hinders something in Science Fiction, simply make up a new science. Like:

"Dr.Smith descovered energy and matter are actually both made of 'smithies' and 'smithites', and the theories saying that you could not travel at lightspeed was based only on 'smithies', however when 'smithites' are taken into account, the Smith Inversion engine is able to easilly accelerate any object past lightspeeds with no time differentials"

See how easy it is to break laws of science when all you have to do is claim you've done it, and not provide proof?

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Original post by Talroth When modern science hinders something in Science Fiction, simply make up a new science. Like: "Dr.Smith descovered energy and matter are actually both made of 'smithies' and 'smithites', and the theories saying that you could not travel at lightspeed was based only on 'smithies', however when 'smithites' are taken into account, the Smith Inversion engine is able to easilly accelerate any object past lightspeeds with no time differentials" See how easy it is to break laws of science when all you have to do is claim you've done it, and not provide proof?

Arthur C. Clarke likes to throw in phrases like "In one of those twists of science..." or "In a coincidence so unlikely no self-respecting author would make it up..." when BSing science. [grin] Sometimes he'll include an appendix with references showing that science might someday actual create it.

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Original post by SquareDanceSteve Tell me more about your lib

A simple multiplatform library that supports 256 bit registry operations. Like division, multiplication, division by 0, and bitshifts.

It was created in Java, and it should work with any reasonable Java VM that supports at least 4.2.