Gravity

[TedStudley]

well then, not orbits, but at least wrecks should cluster near planets.

[goat not sheep]

I do think everyone is against it.

[Karl]

Against what?

And when did you do a poll of "everyone", by the way?

[goat not sheep]

I hate people who want exact words... Ok. Most people are against the idea of having gravity.

[Karl]

I find people who are unable to express themselves clearly to be counterproductive.

Anyway, whether an idea is good or not isn't about popularity; it's about the quality of the idea. Though, if lots of people think an idea is good, that should be more of an incentive to get it into the game.

And your polling is flawed: most people seem to be for some sort of gravity, there is just disagreement on how best to implement it.

[Yugi]

I find people who are unable to express themselves clearly to be counterproductive.

Yes, that happens quite a bit with GnS.

[Burzmali]

Yugi, don't encourage him. Please keep in mind that people of all ages are welcomed here, and some aren't as articulate as others. I haven't found GnS's posts hard to read, he might shoot from the hip when posting, but I've seen far worse.

[Karl]

Yeah, like Burz.

Though Burz did say a nice thing... don't encourage Goat to get angry by needlessly ripping on his posts. I was trying to respond in a constuctive way to Goat's hatred of precision, and then Yugi's post just seemed like excessive negativity.

[l0mars01]

Now, stargates. Faster than light travel is, as we know, not possible. Thus, not realistic. Stargates are the chosen way around this. This is fine and necessary for the entire premise of the game. As long as stargates don't change how they work every week to suit the needs of the plot (cough, Star Trek) then it's a necessary unrealistic device.

gb2"general relativity". star gates and warp drives don't need to violate physics. space-time curvature, local sub-light speeds, etc.

But gravity: gravity could not be properly simulated in game, because the reason stuff doesn't fall into the sun is that that stuff is orbiting it. Things in transcendence do not orbit the sun, and waiting for a docking space to open up at the fuel station would be a major pain if you have to keep from falling into the sun the whole time.

not so. centripetal force, etc. the station is in orbit around a star or massive object. go into orbit, like the station, hence following it. it's as easy as matching its velocity (on any point along its trajectory). srsly

[OddBob]

But gravity: gravity could not be properly simulated in game, because the reason stuff doesn't fall into the sun is that that stuff is orbiting it. Things in transcendence do not orbit the sun, and waiting for a docking space to open up at the fuel station would be a major pain if you have to keep from falling into the sun the whole time.

not so. centripetal force, etc. the station is in orbit around a star or massive object. go into orbit, like the station, hence following it. it's as easy as matching its velocity (on any point along its trajectory). srsly

The station is not currently in orbit around a star. The entire point of that paragraph is that it would need to be. In other words, gravity must be completely simulated or completely ignored for game mechanics to work right.

Also: Ever played Orbiter? It takes a few hours to learn how to just get in orbit, let alone a specific orbit. Look at the cockpit screenshot on their site, imagine all of that (and you would need it) on the bottom of your screen in Transcendence. Now I might like that, but that's a required leap in complexity.

[Karl]

Oh, come on. Adding gravity isn't going to magically turn the game into Orbiter. (Becuase docking is automatic, for one thing.) And it's not going to turn the space stations into wildly spinning platforms that you have to chase around a planet, either. (Because station orbits tend to be long and time-consuming.)