How many square miles is the average planet?

[Nightweaver20xx]

Any ideas? Is there any way to do some rough math and figure it out? The planets all appear to be far smaller than Earth, and moons seem to be maybe 100 miles in diameter.

[japp_02]

These measures have been done in the past, first you need to convert the 'u' units into miles or kilometers based on triangulation methods, etc.
You will find out that the biggest planets are not so big afterall, at most 60 km diameter.

[Nightweaver20xx]

So that means the biggest planets are only about 4,300 square miles? Eww. I mean still, that's multiplied by 18 quintillion for the total possible explorable world area, but I thought that planets were at least a few thousand km across.

OK but here's another good one for you: How long is the biggest freighter in game? At about 500u per second (and I'm figuring units roughly equal meters, since your character is roughly 2u tall), it takes me about 4 seconds to travel from one end to the other of my Venator-style cap ship. So about 2,000 meters or a little over a mile, give or take.

[BL1P]

Originally posted by Nightweaver20xx:

So that means the biggest planets are only about 4,300 square miles? Eww. I mean still, that's multiplied by 18 quintillion for the total possible explorable world area, but I thought that planets were at least a few thousand km across.

OK but here's another good one for you: How long is the biggest freighter in game? At about 500u per second (and I'm figuring units roughly equal meters, since your character is roughly 2u tall), it takes me about 4 seconds to travel from one end to the other of my Venator-style cap ship. So about 2,000 meters or a little over a mile, give or take.

Yet... has less storage space than a hauler :)

[Rexxer]

There is a huge variation in size, as some are moons and some are, well, huge planets. Some dude 2 years ago spent like 3 months WALKING around his start planet and made a YouTube video of it. Basically it's a real waste of time. Just fix your ship.

[japp_02]

I think these astute measurements are in the Steam Guide section somewhere IIRC. So go look there.

[Nswr42]

Executor from Star Wars was 48 km long (based on the analysis of CGI footage)
https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-mysteries-exacting-executor-measurements
Almost the size of the NMS planet :)

but thinking of it makes it, somehow totally irrelevant to me O_o
...strange

[Uraoen]

Ew? See how long it still takes you to walk across a planet.

[Shame]

Having bigger planets close to real measurements would make the game more immersive. But that means that planets would also need to be farther apart and pulse drive would need to scale in speed to that distance, otherwise it might take us half an hour or so to get from one planet to another on pulse drive.

[japp_02]

Here is some good stuff from Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/9lbcpx/the_size_of_planets_in_nms_more_details_in/

[Rexxer]

There are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets in NMS. That means if you just ran around the surface of each for just ONE SECOND, it would take you:

18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets, divided by
31556952 seconds in a year

= 5.84554049×10^11 years, or about 600,000,000,000 or 600 billion years to see all the planets in NMS

If you just limit yourself to systems in Euclid Galaxy, rather than planets in all galaxies, then you need to make some averaged assumptions:

255 galaxies in NMS, so
18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets, divided by 255 = about 72340172838076670 plannets/system (may vary slightly as some galaxies may be bigger than others).

About 3 to 4 planets per system (usu. 1-6 planets per system) So:
72340172838076670 divided by 3.5 planets per system = about 20,668,620,810,879,050 systems in Euclid....down into the quadrillions, *much* more managable numbers, don't you think?

So years to see every system in Euclid, the starter galaxy for everyone:
20668620810879050 systems divided by 31556952 seconds per year
654,962,520 or about 650 million years give or take.

Better start warping if you want to see all of Euclid! Remember, only 1 second per system to meet that finish time.

Even if the game had a million players all cataloging just the beginning universe at that breathtaking rate, it would still take 600 years to ensure all the systems were visited.

[Nightweaver20xx]

Originally posted by japp_02:

Here is some good stuff from Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/9lbcpx/the_size_of_planets_in_nms_more_details_in/

Thanks, that was a fun read! So the planets have about the same area as an average state in the US, and the moons are about as large as an average metropolitan area. Good to know.

[ihleslie]

I watched a video of a GDC 2017 presentation by Innes McKendrik - lead programmer for NMS. He referred to distances in meters. I always figured a 'u' was about a meter. The big planets have a radius of about 130,000 u, or 130 km. The area of a planet that large is (4πr²) = 239,314 km² or 92,400 mi². That's a little larger than Minnesota.

[japp_02]

Actually, a body that would in reality be 60 km of diameter would not be a spheric body, but look like some of the smaller 60 moons of Jupiter or Saturn.

[MS. Green Label]

Sean said years ago these are Planet sized Planets, this doesn't seem to be the case

[Nightweaver20xx]

Right, because gravity can only form something into a sphere if there's enough surface area to overcome the irregularities in the materials used to make the object. Even the Earth isn't actually a perfect sphere, but more of a pear shape. It appears to be a sphere from distant perspectives because of its sheer size. Bodies smaller than our moon or so are simply not made of enough stuff to mold into a spherical shape.