To make it possible to populate time I would suggest making several versions of the galaxy in the game which each represent different points during a timeline.

Each version of the galaxy runs independently and what happens in one version of a galaxy does not affect what happens on the later version in the timeline. However, it might be possible to e.g. destroy a planet at one point in a timeline... and in the later points on the timeline that planet will not exist whether or not the planet has been destroyed at said point.

The part about traveling backward in time would be central in the game and probably have something to do with its title.

I think imagination's your limit here, especially the more into science fantasy you're willing to travel.

There's no real reason why you couldn't put everything around one star if you needed to avoid jump. A high future system could be littered with artificial worlds, many with a scale far more appropriate for meaningful exploration that zillions of empty procedurally generated planets. Asteroids could be elaborate biotech gardens; you could have thick clusters of man-made stations webbed by transit lines and taxis; or you could have giant, ship eating clouds of nanotech gone very bad. (Larry Niven even proposed an oxygen rich smoke ring filled with kilometer long trees where you didn't even need a suit to breathe!)


If you're determined to use realistic, relativistic travel, I'd consider a few things before you go after the calculations. At a respectable 50% light speed, many of the the nearest stars are roughly nearly a decade to a century away, objectively speaking (subjective you'll have to chase down, but it only significantly kicks in up past 80% light IIRC). So in 10 to 100 years, what's going to change? Are the ports going to grow at all? Is civilization going to expand to nearby stars? Could you get to a port only to find that it has collapsed?

If you're going for something insane where it takes only a few days to travel (what, something like 99.999999999999999999% light or whatever, never mind the small universe it takes to sustain that kind of power output) I think you're still not going to be home free no matter what type of game it is, unless you can skip time. You might have a mechanism, for instance, where the player is said to hibernate and then wakes up at the new system. But a system 25 light years away should have experienced at least 25 years of changes.

If you're thinking along the typical combat or space trader route for this, I'd honestly say forget it. Those genres are nonsensical anyway when it comes to realism for far more fundamental reasons (the energy cost to get to the fight is ludicrously high, robots can sustain far higher acceleration than humans through the voyage, and a future with space travel would expect bio/nanotech, making the energy cost of trading far higher than making almost anything other than info/plans, which could be sent via laser)

Relativistic travel might actually work in an adventure game or strategy game quite well, however. Someone told me the old Sun Dog: Frozen Legacy used it in an RPG context, which I wish I could have seen.

It would have to take more than 25 years of earth time to make my idea realistic.

I guess the ships could go slower...

Ghetto edit: "realistic"

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Original post by ville-v Sorry, travelling near speed of light is not possible. If you would encounter a single atom (let alone a rock) on your path, there would be so much energy in the collision that your ship would be no more. If detonation velocity of TNT is 10k m/s, an object with detonation velocity of 0.3kkk m/s will have quite influence. Think of a bullet. When it hits target, it may make a hole with 5mm radius, but it will cause a shockwave in the target material and the hole it leaves target from can have radius of 20cm. If your starship does not have enough mass, the explosion will slow the collision shield down so much that the rest of the ship will collide with it. Something around 1 million km/h is maximum speed in travelling the traditional way in space, so if you want a realistic game you have to limit world into a single starsystem.

I'm not sure where you get this realistic maximum speed from. Considering that a semi-trailer at 100km/h will obliterate you, I find your argument hard to follow.

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Original post by zer0wolf Uhmmm.... okay? The closest star to the Earth, besides the Sun obviously, is Alpha Centauri, which is 4.37 light years away. This means that, even traveling at the speed of light (hence the light years part), it will take 4.37 YEARS. Call me strange, but if I'm playing an intergalatic space faring game, I'm not going to want to sit there for 4.37 years for me to get to the closest planet in the game. [wink]

While you are correct in principle, how many games do you know that actually are REAL time. In a single 1h game of AoE, you can cover hundreds of years. The problem comes when there is nothing else to do while you are waiting for your ship to arrive.

Obviously this depends on the type of game as to how to resolve this. If you are controlling an entire fleet, then you make it difficult for the player to have all his ships going at this speed. If, however, you have only one ship, then the player must be able to do something whilst traveling at this speed, maybe he gets attacked by Defenders of Physics, or argue that nothing can go at the speed of light and attack anything that does.

Iron Seed (old 1994 dos game) does just that, you pilot a single ship that uses sub-light travel speeds (better ships go near but never equal or surpass light speed), while scaling the waiting time so that the player barely waits for anything at all whenever you decide to travel. Additionally, the crew lifespan problem is explained by not having a biological crew at all - their brains are digitally stored into the ship computer.

I don't think it matters if you want a "hard/known science" sci-fi or a "fantasy/unknown" sci-fi universe for your game - one might create more immersion than the other, but there are other better ways to immerse your audience and I don't really think your general audiences will care all that much about the technicalities of your universe, as long as you are able to make them care about your gameplay or story, and are consistent with the rules you built for your universe. I tend to say my spaceships go at the speed of plot, or in this case, play.

Assuming a straight path and unlimited engine power, travel between any 2 points in space will take about 2 months. It takes about 1 month to accelerate to the speed of light (assuming acceleration of 10 g -> t=c/10g), and the same amount to decelerate. When you reach the speed of light, the velocity perceived from the ship is infinite, so you don't spent any time traveling - you just accelerate and decelerate. Because you can't travel at the speed of light, you have to do it slower. So it may take 1 second, or 1 hour or 1 day, depending how much slower than light you are.

Well the real answer depends on if you want to stick to real physics or delve into the theoretical physics. The main difference being that theoretical physics takes a stand that what we know to be true now might be proved to be false at any given point.

Theoretically a gravity drive could be used to create faster then light travel, a gravity drive works by lowering the force of gravity in front of an object while simultaneously increasing it behind the object causing the object to move at the speed of the difference in the gravity fields. The gravity between the two fields would remain the same and since you are being propelled by gravity there is no inertia to put force on the body. This type of drive also solves the problem of coming in contact with particles in space, since the particle will contact the lowed gravity field first its impact on the ship would be negligible.

Theoretically there could also be a dark matter/anti matter/exotic particle engine that could sustain an infinite amount of power and propel the ship as fast and as far as it needed to go.

I am not a huge star trek fan, but the warp dive system in the show/movies relied on a warp shell that was basically photonic particles that created sort of a time dilation field around the ship allowing it to move at great speed while not being effected by the time differential caused by that speed.

Al tho my personal sci-fi way of long distance space travel has always been subspace. Being able to cut through the layers of space and time into an area where the principles of physics don't really apply and distances in our layer of space are cut down to mean skips that can be crossed in a matter of minutes.

If you want to stick to real physics then your basically at a loss because with what we know right now about the way that time works it would be impossible for a human to travel great distance in space at a speed that would actually allow the human crew to survive long enough to reach there destination. Since we do not have working cryogenics or the ability to store our minds in a computer and clone new bodies when we arrive. The fastest forum of space travel that I now about is the ion drive that was used in recent years on crafts such as smart-1 and deep space 1 and most recently on the dawn spacecraft if I am not mistaken.

Well that's my two cents, not worth much but its there.

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Original post by rozz666 Assuming a straight path and unlimited engine power, travel between any 2 points in space will take about 2 months. It takes about 1 month to accelerate to the speed of light (assuming acceleration of 10 g -> t=c/10g), and the same amount to decelerate. When you reach the speed of light, the velocity perceived from the ship is infinite, so you don't spent any time traveling - you just accelerate and decelerate. Because you can't travel at the speed of light, you have to do it slower. So it may take 1 second, or 1 hour or 1 day, depending how much slower than light you are.

I believe you could never really reach the speed of light because you get less spaceship-time divided on planet-time to accelerate the closer to the speed of light you get. If you were to be in the speed of light, time would be completely still in the spaceship and you would not be able to decelerate at all - maybe by external gravity but I don't know.