DSP distance units make no sense

[keoriv]

Can we talk about the distance units the GUI gives you in this game? At the speed of 1km/s it takes you 1 minute to go 1.5 AU, meaning 1 AU is 40km. Meanwhile a "light-year" is 60 AU, which is therefore 2400km. Meaning the speed of light in the game is 7.6 centimeters per second.

In reality, 1 light-second is just shy of 300,000 km.

Would it have killed them to pick units that made slightly more sense? Increasing the displayed cruise speed would have solved a lot of problems.

[Bobucles]

in reality, space is so unfathomably vast that it'd take hours just to cross planets in the same star system. Maybe that's fun for an immortal elf, but it doesn't really fit in human life spans.

[dhitch89]

Tbh, I don't really find it a problem or that it makes no sense. Quite the contrary

It's simply one of those "acceptable breaks from reality", in much the same way as some games don't have characters take fall damage, water/a bale of hay is safe to land in from great heights when nothing else is, inventories being virtual black holes of space, etc etc.

^In DSP's case, that means having it's own internally-consistent distance logic for the sake of fun gameplay, rather than going for realism.

[Andy]

They were making compromises because space is so big. It would be impossible to play the game if you started without faster than light travel and the distances weren't exaggerated.

[Shiroe]

The options were probably to either make up some fantasy distance units no one is familiar with or mis-use the existing terms from reality.
I'd rather be flying 1.5 "fake" AU than 1.5 "florps" or something like that...

[Djozar]

Thank goodness it isn't true to life! You're worried about speed, but we've barely even started to produce nuclear fission. We still haven't completely harnessed it's power, only keeping stable for what? I think 30 seconds or something? So we couldn't even begin to be a K2 society that is predicted to be needed to make a Dyson Sphere, let alone source from other planets. We haven't even sent a manned mission to Mars yet. You're concern with reality is "speed". I guess there's a pair of scissors for everyone o run with, and you found yours.

[Dashiell]

Factorio's planets are all 15k km apart, there isn't a single game where units would make sense otherwise you would spend 100 hours watching black screen every time you want to travel between planets.

[CrispyMuffin]

game devs just do it for immersion reasons mostly. like Everspace 2 uses Light Seconds to measure the difference between locations that are usually much closer together, mostly to make the scale believable without being a time waster for the player

like, it feels a bit weird to see a whole different planet and read "30km away". doesnt hit quite right, and i dont see any harm in adding some imaginary numbers to it

[Geirfinna Lieselotte]

Ah, you must be the one player the HoI IV real time mod caters for

[phadin]

Originally posted by Djozar:

Thank goodness it isn't true to life! You're worried about speed, but we've barely even started to produce nuclear fission. We still haven't completely harnessed it's power, only keeping stable for what? I think 30 seconds or something? So we couldn't even begin to be a K2 society that is predicted to be needed to make a Dyson Sphere, let alone source from other planets. We haven't even sent a manned mission to Mars yet. You're concern with reality is "speed". I guess there's a pair of scissors for everyone o run with, and you found yours.

Nuclear fission we have a pretty good grasp of. It's what we use in nuclear plants and nuclear bombs since WW2. Now nuclear *fusion* on the other hand... that we're still trying to figure out properly.

I always remember the difference this way:
Fission = Fissure = splits something apart
Fusion = Fuse = merge something together.

[Erenussocrates]

I also like how the gas giant my home planet is a moon of is basically 1 km away from each other lmao.

[Daedrac]

I only appreciate the concern here in that OP took the time to do the math to prove the concern.