Sins Forums
I don't remember reading about this anywhere, so thought I'd ask on the forums.
Regarding the planets in Sins, why is it they don't orbit their star, like in real life? And how come they aren't spaced properly, again, like real life?
I think it'd be awesome if the planets actually orbitted the stars
I think this is a case of practical game mechanics trumping reality.
This game handles different zoom levels really well, but realistic scale simply gets absurd. I mean, look at this diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oort_cloud_Sedna_orbit.svg
As for orbit, I think that's another case of simplicity. Because movement between planetary bodies is always governed by phase lanes anyways, this would have no impact on the gameplay but could make the map confusing because everything is always moving.
They did orbit at one point during the beta, but like Davin said it wasnt practical.
I just pretend the map of planets is like the "Alderson points" used by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle from Mote in God's Eye.
Basically these points are distributed around a galaxy "randomly" (meaning there is mathetical relationships involved beyond my ability to explain). Not every star system has one, but each system theoretically has only one. So pretend that your game map is all of the known Alderson points. Some lead to useful places, some to dead systems. As for the star on your game map, just pretend it's a another useless system that doesn't even have gas giants, asteroid fields, space junk or anything...
From the book MiGE, there's a great quote where an amateur noted that the "Empire of Man" was a vast interstellar empire. In reality, man's control of the galaxy was limited to what amounted to a few hundred interspaced tiny bubbles in an ocean. And in between those bubbles, in the void not explored or linked by Alderson points, who knows what lay out there...
If everything was built to scale, it'd probably be a few months before you conquered an entire system, and a few weeks of that just being getting across the Grav Well of a star.
As for orbiting, it'd probably be a huge hassle having interior planets always switching from close to you to close to the enemy and back, while your homeworld moved s l o w e r than anything.
As for spacing; again, tooo big.
I'm suprised you didn't bring up planetary tiers; Volcanic closest, then Desert, then Terran, then Desert again, Then ice.
Xer0 \^/
Awesome book. I don't understand why it's never been made into a movie other than that it's premise--Malthusian biology--like Soylent Green and Silent Running--is very politically incorrect.
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