One thing I would like to see in GC3 is the ability to close your space to other races.Meaning, If they try to enter your space. they get a warning that doing so would provoke a war. And then they choose what they want to do. Ofcourse, Other races could close their space too.
Sorry, but that's the tone your posts are giving off. Most of your arguments would be somewhat valid if we were dealing with a "real life" GC universe, but won't work well in the actual game due to the turn-based issues. Are you factoring in time to lay the mines, cost of tenders, upkeep cost, etc. or are you just assuming mines just appear and are free afterward? In turn based terms, how many mines can be built and placed in one turn? How much manufacturing production is needed to build and maintain them? Are the mines laid on the same hex as the planet, starbase, etc. or on the hexes around the target? If around the target, are you increasing the associated costs 6-fold like you should?
Mines around a single point target might be reasonable if planetary defenses were part of the game (i.e. orbital mines that need to be cleared before invading, in addition to things like planet-based fighters, shields, etc.) It doesn't make sense to add mines in that context without adding other planetary defenses.
Much the same goes for starbases. If the mines are just an additional source of damage to the attacker, they're no different than any other weapon module. If they are preventing the attacker from hitting the base until the mines are cleared, what is the actual game mechanic involved, and how does the user benefit? Are those mechanics likely to be something a human player can easily cheese out of but the AI will struggle with? (example from GC2 - stacks of minimal armed tiny hulls parked on an unarmed mining starbase could hold off a Dreadlord fleet for a considerable time without any hope of ever beating them due to AI limitations)
And as it has been pointed out repeatedly, ships can do that just as well - better, since they can be repositioned when the front shifts. Again, I think the main difference here is that you intend mines to be essentially free, which would make them a viable choice. Add in reasonable costs (including opportunity costs such as having to build the tenders instead of warships) and mines aren't nearly as good a choice as you seem to think.
One of the big benefits of mines in real life is that they are "on" 24/7, while manned defenses can't be. Real life warships can't be at battle stations every minute of the day, and that gives an attacker an advantage if he can surprise them. The "surprise attack" advantage isn't replicated in game, which greatly increases the defensive value of ships relative to mines.
Some civilizations might not, but others would. If anything you've made an argument for mines to be available only to certain ethical alignments. And who says the Drengin and Yor wouldn't hesitate to use them if there was a significant down side to doing so? That's an AI issue. Obviously the Dreadlords wouldn't hesitate, since they don't participate in trade or diplomacy anyway.
And a land mine going off only kills one or two people. A rogue space mine might kill a passenger ship with thousands of people aboard, or result in debris from a killed ship landing on a planet.
1. The "justifications" are in no way frantic. I find them logically or I wouldn't have written them.Sorry, but that's the tone your posts are giving off.
Sorry if it's how you're reading my posts. They weren't (and aren't) meant to be insulting, I just wanted to post valid arguments why mines are not completly useless, at least in my opinion. I find it rather annoying when my arguments are not countered or discussed but just dismissed as "jusitifications". If you have counter arguments, good. Bring them.
Most of your arguments would be somewhat valid if we were dealing with a "real life" GC universe, but won't work well in the actual game due to the turn-based issues. Are you factoring in time to lay the mines, cost of tenders, upkeep cost, etc. or are you just assuming mines just appear and are free afterward? In turn based terms, how many mines can be built and placed in one turn? How much manufacturing production is needed to build and maintain them? Are the mines laid on the same hex as the planet, starbase, etc. or on the hexes around the target? If around the target, are you increasing the associated costs 6-fold like you should?
Well, I try to start with a realistic approach, and then think about how to implement this into the game. Of course would mines need some layer ships, costs for the mines themselfes and (very low) maintenance. On how many mines to build and lay per turn is of course a balancing matter in the game, so it's hard to number it. Taking the "realistic" approach, 1 turn is a week (at least in GC2), so plenty of time to at least lay a couple of hundreds of them - maybe more. The mines would be laid on the same hex you want to protect. Because you can't mine cubic parsecs (so even a field layed in one hex would never fill the field completly. In game mechanics, either you attack the planet or starbase directly, suffering damage from the mines before engaging the defenses (regardless if ships or stationary). Or you take a cautious approach, entering the field in one turn and attacking the next turn without taking damage from the mines. Or you could stay even longer to completly eliminate the field.
Regarding the war crime argument - don't you think the drengin. dread lords or yor would mind about comitting war crimes? In view of the things they already do?Some civilizations might not, but others would. If anything you've made an argument for mines to be available only to certain ethical alignments. And who says the Drengin and Yor wouldn't hesitate to use them if there was a significant down side to doing so? That's an AI issue. Obviously the Dreadlords wouldn't hesitate, since they don't participate in trade or diplomacy anyway.
Same for the yor. As an AI race, they'd use any tech to take an advantage. If it's effective, they would do it. If not, why waste resources? And if mines in the game were not effective, ok, then there's no need to implement them. And humanity has already proven that they are willing to use them...
Space mines are nowhere as nasty as anti-personel mines buried in some field where some kinds will find them and try to play with it. That's why they are a war crime now.
The same goes for every battle field. As discussed in another post, mass driver weapons are bound to hit something, even if it's light years and several thousand years in the future. What about all those ships blown in battles? They'll drift away, maybe hitting a planet or colliding with another ship, causing several thousand innocent victims. Or a missile, targeting a merchant or passenger ship instead of a warship?
I want to point out that war crimes may only apply to humans. How much of human influence is in the galactic council, or what exactly how much control the galactic council have over the other species is up to stardock to decide. R the small races on the galactic council cause if they r not then the laws wouldn't apply to them. I will admit for most of the species there r ethical issues to take into account. In the real world mines r meant for defense purpose. In the game it would at least slow down a cautous species, and do damage to a reckless species. This post is about isolation. The object is to keep people out of your space. This might discourage u from entering if their ship r fast enough to stop u. I want to point out that if u don't want to spend time worrying about mines don't use them. I think all this arguing has turned stardock away from this post. I try to pay attention to who is stardock cause that is who really matters. The only thing that really matters is that does the player have the right to throw u out of his territory. Everything else is how do we implement this.
I think we should take into account if this works for a Tbs game or not, and can the Ai handle this effectively.
They're not insulting or anything, they just have the tone of someone who just can't give something up as a bad idea and move on. Fine, mines are not completely useless in your opinion. In my opinion, the ideas you have put forward are balancing issues you've brought forward solely to balance the game in favor of mines being more effective than they should be, ignoring any practical limitations because "mines are cheap". If we were discussing land mines not far removed from a hand grenade in terms of complexity you might even be correct. Once you start adding sophisticated IFF systems, passive sensor arrays, weapons big/strong enough to hurt a ship thousands of kilometers away, etc. you've abandoned the "mines are cheap" justification and need to start thinking of them as miniature ships that will cost a lot to build and maintain.
Well at least that much is reasonable. Others in the topic were viewing them as an area-denial weapon (which they are on land and at sea). Now we need to consider whether the AI can use them well and respond appropriately when the player uses them. For that matter, ways the player can cheese their way around or through them (dedicated "minesweeper" ships attacking independently before the main fleet to allow a clean shot, etc.)
I meant as a game AI balancing issue. Does the Yor AI value the benefits of mine use over the benefits of trade and diplomacy?
Which is why I specifically mentioned mines being an ethics-related tech, since not *all* humans consider them ethical. Since GC3 will have something other than the basic GNE ethics tech, maybe mines will only be available to civilizations below a certain score on the "Humanitarian" scare or something.
Those are all legitimate issues, but lack the intent that mines have. There's a difference between an unexploded shell landing in a field and deliberately planting scores of mines in that same field. One is an unintended consequence of an attack on an enemy occupying that field at the time the shell was fired and the other a deliberate attack on anyone who goes into that field any time in the future - intended enemy, friendly soldier later in the war, farmer on a tractor after the war, or child 20 years later.
I agree that there should be some way to enforce border control, but it should require active participation by the player. The more I think aboout it, the sillier the use of influence in space is. For sure, if you have one planet in a huge system, all of which is controlled by someone else, that should have some effect. But having Thalans decide to become Yor? It just doesn't seem logical. Think about how long cultural minorities on Earth have endured.
Border enforcement is simply put declare war. I would prefer the idea of creating or possibly funding pirate units (similar to privateers) a way of controlling borders without the diplomatic repercussions of war. The way border control has been done in the most usual sense. Private citizens providing the border control and the government suggesting these individuals are outlaws (probably rightfully so). Simply put it would be nice to privatize a fleet that will work border control, or other questionable activities.
Simple mechanics, decommission a fleet, goes under private or pirate control. Pay at a high rate to prevent these pirate entities from attacking your ships and they will wander your space or neutral space destroying or raiding enemy ships.
I do not want to necessarily add a huge layer of mechanics here, just provide pirate making from civilizations that they might regret in the future.
The way I would like to see it reminds me a lot of Star Trek, with set up neutral zones and the like. I like the idea that the player can designate where his boarder lies, but I think that it should be a claimed territory that can be set by the player, or negotiated for (this could cause some interesting diplomatic situations). I always imagine some ship going up to a planet, to have another ship come up to them and say, "This planet is claimed by the Terran Empire!"
What annoys me the most is when colony ships come into my space, and colonize planets that I was going to colonize. I know that I can go back and capture it, but I also lose any option in the special event that it may have had.
I do not think it should bar them from doing it, but I think that it should send you a warning if a ship enters your space (at least, if a planet could see it). When that warning pops up, it should allow you to choose from a group of options such as threaten them with war, destroy them, let them go, impose a toll, etc. If you destroy them, this would clearly cause diplomatic issues, and could potentially lead to war, which would be kind of cool.
The toll thing would be pretty cool, too. "Unidentified freighter, you have entered Terran space, either pay the toll, turn around, or be destroyed!"
Of course, each choice would be determined by the proximity of military ships in accordance to both sides. So, lets say the Drath have a colony ship trespassing into Terran space, and the Terrans have three armed cruisers within two turns of the colony ship, it would be more likely to give in, where as if there were ALSO 4 Drath Battleships within two turns and thus their fleet outnumbered the Terran fleet, they would be more likely to ignore.
So this system would calculate situation by taking into consideration the nearest response forces, and the power of those response forces. A stronger force on the borders (either ships or space stations), would result in things going more favorably for the Empire that is being intruded upon.
In the Star Trek universe many of the main factions (Federation, Klingon, Romulan) aren't at war but they still consider ships entering their space as hostile and this is definitely something I'd like to see included with a superior diplomacy and foreign relations system. You should have a number of options to limit your space to neighboring races like "open borders", "military restrictions", "trade ships only" and "closed borders" and ships that break that should be considered enemy without having to engage in war.
What you choose to set your space as should also affect what races think of you, for example, having open borders should cause negative standings with someone like the Drengin who's militaristic nature would make them want to take advantage or be positive with more peaceful diplomatic races. Or maybe you could allow specific races access to improve relations.
I also think there should be a difference in your sphere of influence and your territorial sphere because, as people pointed out, there may be foreign planets located inside your influence.
Ok, so we got telekinetic tele wonder where a bunch of religious freaks harness the power of the Dysoruntis Crystal fueled by the souls of the dead to magically create a impassible influence barrier the size of a few thousand parsecs. The supreme priest sees everything within the radius and controls what ship passes through and what gets pushed out.
Congratulations, this topic needs to be put to rest badly before these extreme ideas start to pop up. Please end this conversation and agree on something.
I don't care what happens in the conversation unless these 5 things are included.
1. This closed border agreement only applies to armed militaristic vessels and not regular ships (trade vessels, constructors, space miners can pass)
2. That you can sneak through boarders only if the empire does not see you.
3. Diplomatic option to tell them to leave or they will be destroyed without triggering a war (2 turns to be fair). When time is up feel free to attack the ship with another ship, or hope the enemy will run into the danger zone with mines in it.
4. The ability to use a constructor to plant long ranged mines with hyper drive modules which NO ship can pass (only the owner of the space mines can see them to be fair and autopilot of the owner automatically avoids them) NOTE: I AM Fed up with the conversation on space mines, I will end it forever with this single picture.
5. Stop talking about space mines and more about keeping people out.
What about un-armed militaristic vessels, like troop transports?
I like this idea.
But a requirement to have to enforce this 'border control' would be good. This could be in the form of fleet patrols or listening stations (starbases with extreme sensor equipment).
Cloaking fleets to get past these sorts of things would be cool too.
Adding hyperdrives to mines would appear to defeat the purpose of having cheap, disposable weapons, and would require relatively large mines (at a guess, based on the relative sizes and costs of various hyperdrive components compared to weapon, life support, and sensor components in GCII). Engine components, particularly early engine components, tend to be among the largest components available for ship design, and are also on average the most expensive per unit size (based off of the costs and sizes for components for the Tiny hull class using the Terran tech tree at the start of a Battle of the Gods scenario).
Average costs per size unit (using Tiny hull module size):
Engines - $8.21/size unit
Missiles - $6.31/size unit
Beams - $8.08/size unit
Guns - $6.48/size unit
Armor - $6.05/size unit
Shields - $7.10/size unit
Point Defenses - $6.64/size unit
Sensors - $3.79/size unit (this is including the survey module; if we exclude the survey module, the average cost is $2.06/size unit)
Life Support - $2/size unit (additionally, all life support units are size 2, which is much smaller than any weapon or engine component)
Given these numbers, it is most likely that the Tiny hull costs (and the space used up that we don't see because we're given the remaining available space rather than the total space with a note saying that we've used up so much of it already) can be split something like 58% engines, 27% sensors, and 14% life support using the sensor numbers which include the survey module, or 67% engines, 17% sensors, 16% life support using the sensor numbers excluding the survey module (and yes, I know I've excluded the hull strength from this, but I expect that the cost of manufacturing the actual hull for both the mine and the ship will be similar because as long as both are expected to be capable of superluminal travel they're both probably manufactured with the same general hull strength).
Additionally, normal tiny ships for me basically consist of weapons, maybe engines, and possibly a little life support. Turning that into a mine strips out something that is by far the least expensive and smallest component on the craft - the life support systems. Therefore, a hyperdrive-equipped mine is similarly expensive to a Tiny-hull spaceship on a per-unit basis (e.g. cost of one mine or one Tiny ship). As a result, it is less economical for me to seed fields of hyperdrive-equipped minefields than it is for me to maintain a squadron of fighters in the area I'd have been trying to defend with the aforementioned mines. Additionally, unless you're of the opinion that ships that reach the end of their movement points have for some reason decided to stop in space somewhere rather than have reached the end of their week, a mine which cannot leave its own tile must have at least 1/4 the speed of a ship passing through the tile, if we assume that we have our minefield distributed in such a way as to require any ships passing through the tile to always pass within 1/4 of the tile of a sufficient number of mines to be an actual threat to the fleet, because said ships are only spending (1 parsec)/(fleet speed in parsecs/week) in the tile.
I disagree that the closed border agreement should only apply to military units. I believe that you should be able to select what units go through. If you have a freighter that is connected to another empire, and it goes through my space, you will either pay me a toll, or I will destroy you. Also, don't bother sending your ship trade ships into my space without my permission, you will be labeled as smugglers, and will be destroyed (unless you go through the proper channels, and I approve, though this will usually involve money). Also, why are you sending mining ships and constructors into my borders without my permission?
Like I said, I think you should be able to choose what ships enter your space. If you don't want any ships in your space, you should be allow to ban them. Of course, they can still enter, but at risk of being caught and labeled criminals.
I still want the closed borders agreement to be where u have to click on the ship, and tell it to get out of my space, so this would apply for any ship u choose. The only thing I would want different is if the ship is from a species from one of your allies is that it wouldn't let me do this so there would be no mistake. I would still have u to manually catch me with your ships so I could have a chance to outrun u or fight u. I would like to have an option to capture u instead for ransome and other stuff. I posted this on another reply. This is really where I leave off. On what I am interested in.
Now as far as mines r concerned. The hyperdrive is currently the slowest ship on the game. According to Starwars U can't hyper drive in a gravity well like a star or a planet. What this means is that u can't hyperdrive into a planet. According to game mechanics hyperdrive is folded space, so as far as orbiting or invading a planet u would have to use a different kind of engine. At least as far as I know is that any concept that uses hyperdrives use slower than light speed engines when u r not in hyperspace u use a slower than light engine. Remembering that in the future we will be moving faster than 6 kilometers oer second. I've always set sub light at 1/10 the speed of light. Any ship that goes around a planet will have to use thrusters or some other sub light drive. This probably should be used defensively.I think this would be to cheesy without countermeasures, and if my technology on this is more than yours it would then be reasonable for mine to be more effective. This might spark an arms race.
Because of the size of space I don't know about realism. I would think a sub light drive moving at about 18,600 miles per second is about right especially sonsidering that u can't invade a planet in hyperspace. If I understand the mechanics of the game then a sub light engine would be significantly cheaper than a stargate of a hyperdrive; especially if this was nuclear powered. Personally I don't care about mines. I think u people should figure out who r on what sides of the argument and send each other private messages or make a post, and figure out the best game mechanics for mines. Because from observing the post it looks like the next game is going to have mines, and if I was against mines knowing they were coming I would want to come up with a compromise, so I could minimise the damage. Personally I don't use mines. If I don't want mines then I don't use them.
One agreement we have come up with is that U were going to have to click on units to warn them to stay out of there space, and if they were going to be removed it was going to require a military presence to remove them. As far a going into borders it was allowed otherwise. As far as I know this was what the post about, and everything else were suggestions.
The AI will never fail to do that. It'll do it with 100% accuracy unless the AI is deliberately crippled.
So in the end, that system is really there to let the AI sneak into player territory (as humans are not going to search their entire territory for ships every turn), and make the player constantly look for ships sneaking in to click and say "stop that". There's a reason why so many games went away from that style of border control: it gets tedious.
Michael, two requests for you:
Now, as far as burning in to a planet on sublight drives: maybe we have to, maybe we don't. We can't really say, because we don't have a real idea of how large the tiles are in the neighborhood of stars and planets, since they clearly aren't full parsecs as that would indicate a system diameter of at least 16.3 lightyears, which is about four times the distance to the closest star to our sun. We can guess that the tiles might be about 10 AU each, based on the size of our own solar system, but it's rather difficult to determine an actual number regardless. If that were the case, then each tile would take about 500 seconds to cross at your 0.1 light-second per second travel velocity, which is clearly too little time since the time requirement for moving 1 move action is about 12,000 seconds (about 1/50th of a week, since the maximum number of movement points you can get on a ship is about 50 moves per turn, and each turn represents 1 week in GCII). However, as stated before, we simply don't know how much space each of those tiles represents and so we can't really do anything with them.
As regards the minefields: I don't have particularly significant objections to orbital minefields, though I see that as something that is much more likely to be done as an attempt to shut space travel in and out of the planet down (e.g. as part of a siege or a blockade) rather than as a defensive measure, because without space control or space parity maintaining the minefield would be impractical, and I don't see it as being either a cheaper or a better option than keeping a squadron of warships nearby, as the minefield and the minelayer(s) would have to be within reach of any surface-to-orbit defensive weapons stationed on the planet; minefields outside of orbital space couldn't be used for either a defensive or offensive purpose without significant investment in keeping them in the correct location relative to the planet to be useful. Orbital minefields would additionally only cover the tile containing the planet. Any sort of deep-space minefield is simply too ridiculous for me to willingly accept.
unless you could make it reletively easy for the player to do this
in gc 2 you could scroll out to a tactical wireframe map I assume this will still be possible in gc 3 if I could select a mode in that wireframe ( like putting the minimap options on the tactical map) that would highlight your borders / territory and highlight all ships that are not your own
The default should be closed borders unless at war or some kind of "open borders" agreement is in place.
Great, now it's automated. All I have to do is remember to zoom the map out, then click the button.
So what is that adding to the game again? All I have to do is zoom the map out and sneaking plans are thwarted, which means it's contributing nothing to the game *unless I forget to zoom out*. This is just making turns longer as each turn I need to check "are they sneaking up on me now?"
Any game mechanic that's premised on the player forgetting about it in order for it to do anything is a lousy mechanic.
Ok no more abbreviations. Since we r to primitive for a interstellar space right now our current science can't work without some help. Do where do I get the basis for this.
I do know that 30 Au's is the distance to Neptune. 930 million miles is still a long distance. That is what u suggested. If I can't thwart a player trying to throw me out of his space on multi player playing against real people then I don't want to be able to throw people out of their space. I though the way people could try to throw u out of their space on Civilization 3 was quant or cute. On Civilization 4 it sucked. It was irritating and annoying. Like I said earlier I don't want an invisible imaginary field that can keep me or anyone out of territory without force. I changed my mind on what I agreed to earlier because u want to keep me out of your space regardless of how strong u r. I disagree what this site is trying to do. I know I can make ships that can outrun of fight the Ai. Unless you have a better idea on how to build starbases I don't mind constructor spam. I don't want to be able to close space from anyone without war. This is my new side.
Here's my question since we r not advanced enough technologically pull this kind of travel off then where am I supposed to get my information on this subject if I can't draw from my knowledge of sci fi or science? Are u asking me to just stop quoting where the information is from?
The way people could do it in Civ 3 was tedious and micro intensive for no reason. That's why it was changed. They'd always leave if you asked them to unless a war was started, so it was adding nothing to the game except a bunch of extra clicking.
I have never, ever said that I wanted it to be impossible to violate other factions' space, because I consider that to be stupid. I do think that violating the space of other factions should carry diplomatic penalties and should be viewed as an aggressive action which could be cause enough for war, and that while I could request that you depart from my territory you wouldn't necessarily have to do so.
Common sense and in-game information, if provided, are about all you can work with. Using science fiction from Universe A to explain the goings-on in Universe B is like explaining how magic in the Harry Potter series works by using the descriptions given in the Wheel of Time series. Granted, science fiction works supposedly have a common frame (in theory, all sci-fi works should be building off of real science even if the technologies involved aren't actually possible), but past that common framework you really don't have anything to go on. Additionally, when the sci-fi universe in question is written by many authors and not all parts are necessarily strictly canonical (as is the case with Star Wars and Star Trek), it becomes rather unclear as to whether or not the explanation given in any particular source are true in the universe in question.
It is also possibly the case that the interaction between ships in hyperspace and objects in real space is only dangerous because of the travel rates of ships in Star Wars, in which universe it is possible to cross a galaxy in perhaps a few days. The high end of Galactic Civilizations II speeds suggest that the fastest GCII ships could traverse the Milky Way in in about a decade, which implies that Star Wars hyperdrive speeds are at least 1000 times faster than the end-game GCII drives. About the only real-world things with comparable speed ratios are supersonic aircraft to walking humans, or spacecraft to cars or ships.
If you really want to compare different science fiction universes to one another, then it helps to establish how similar or how different the behavior of the aspects being compared are. Let's compare GCII superluminal drives to the Star Wars hyperdrive and the Star Trek warp drive.
From this, it can be seen that GCII drives are similar to warp drives in terms of maximum speed, interaction with "subspace" and the "fabric of the universe", and probably have similar operating ranges and maximum allowable operation times. There is little in which the GCII drives appear to be more similar to the Star Wars hyperdrive than the Star Trek warp drive, aside from the name of the first GCII drive component. If you want to suggest that two pieces of technology that perform the same role in different science fiction universes work on the same operating principles, you should first establish that the observable operating characteristics of the systems are similar, which is not true for GCII hyperdrives and Star Wars hyperdrives.
I agree with your claim that GCII vessels most likely travel at sublight velocities within a star system, as otherwise travel between worlds within a system takes far too much of the movement allowance of the vessels. What I disputed was the actual speed of travel, as 10% of lightspeed is too fast for in-system travel to take the same fraction of a ship's movement allowance as traveling a parsec in deep space. In the example with our system radius being about 30 AU, the maximum possible distance between any two planets would be about 60 AU. 10% of the speed of light allows for ships to cover about 10 AU in 500 seconds, which would mean that in 3000 seconds we could cross the system. This is a little under an hour of travel time, although we'd need to add in some extra time for acceleration at either end of the trip (unless we're using the superluminal drive to propel us at sublight velocities and the superluminal drive doesn't require a significant acceleration period, at least for such activity). Since 1 week contains 168 hours, this is clearly a little too little time spent to cross the system when a ship can only perform ~50 move actions per week end-game engine technology. Also, when it is suggested that a vessel moves at speed X, it is assumed that most of the distance covered is traveled at speed X, or that the average speed over the course of the trip is X; 10% of c is perhaps acceptable as the maximum speed during a trip, but if said trip is to take any fraction of a week which could represent a movement action of a GCII vessel, then it cannot be a representative speed for undertaking that trip unless GCII move actions are accepted to take periods of time which can differ by orders of magnitude even at the high end of what GCII ships are capable of attaining unless it is also accepted that GCII ships spend significant fractions of the week simply not moving.
In science fiction writing, it is not a good practice to base your fictional science on another person's fictional science. If the writer made errors with their fictional science, then basing your fictional science on their fictional science will likely cause your fictional science to inherit their problems.The 3 major mistakes I can think of at the moment is: A. The science the writer used at the time is outdated (and is now inaccurate or completely replaced).B. The writer made errors.C. The writer made its fictional science based on what would be convenient for their plot.If I recall correctly, some old science fiction novels (possibly over a century old) were based upon the idea that asteroids were like little planets because they didn't know any better (could they imagine that space was a vacuum back then?). Obviously, now a days, writing a science fiction novel based upon that science would at best be considered soft science fiction.Also, I think that Star Wars is more of a fantasy story, not science fiction. A lot of emphasis was placed upon the Force (magic if you will). There's plenty of action and adventure too. There was little emphasis on the science except when it was useful to the plot. Its really a story that happened in space, so it required some science to do the space, nothing more. I would not recommend using it as a fictional science template unless you are also writing fantasy in space.
Let's see now.
Basic information from WikiPedia:
An AU is the average distance from the surface of the sun to the earth (149.6 million KM, 92.956 million miles).
Pluto reaches a distance of about 49 AU from the sun, and if we can call that the radius of our solar system, gives us a
diameter of about 98 AU (about 14660.8 million KM, or about 9109.69 million miles).
Since the light from the sun takes about 8 minutes and 17 seconds (about 497 seconds) to reach our earth, it would take a
ship traveling at 0.1c about 5000 seconds to travel 1 AU. That is quite a bit longer than 10 AU in 500 seconds.
While the outer edge of our solar system is still being debated, it appears that it may be between 200 AU and 50,000 AU
from the sun. it looks like a ship traveling at 0.1c would take between just under 2,000,000 seconds (about 1 1/2 years) to
about 29,700,000 seconds (almost 36 years) to travel across the diameter of our solar system.
Are my calculations off?
Agree... The following made me think of these things
There are even things in the middle of space that are planets without stars next to them.
http://www.space.com/23143-lonely-alien-planet-discovery.html
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