Space travel in general isn't very realistic: the distances are way too short, the max speed depends on width and not mass, and you lose your speed if you stop the engines. I'm considering trying to make a mod to improve some of these things, since I couldn't find one on the portal, but I haven't got around to it yet.
Not just physics, also the sheer volume of spacecraft-sized asteroids... New Horizons would have needed on-board energy shields and been armed to the teeth with railguns to make it to Pluto! Or the speed of said asteroids relative to your ship: they're slower than babies on balance bikes for some reason! There's so much to fix, I wonder if it can be remedied in a way that keeps the game playable (even ignoring whether that would be fun to play). Taking 6 years to get to another planet is not abnormal in real-world distances after all
I've been collecting realistic space games and simulators on the about page of my own n-body gravity simulator: https://lucgommans.nl/p/badgravity/about.html#software_collection
A notable one I want to call out is Children of a Dead Earth, one of the nerdiest games I've ever played. It simulates space battles with real-world technology and physics. As the reviews show, it is quite hardcore and not for everyone, but if you catch it on a sale and are a big Factorio fan, I'd recommend giving it a spin :)
Children of a dead earth is a work of art, if a little hard-going. I never finished all the missions after getting stuck on one of them. There's not really anything else quite like it which is a shame
Exactly how it went for me as well 😅
Cool ship! While it's an advanced, late game design, I wouldn't say it's that unusual in dimensions or number of thrusters which are the main factors determining speed. Meaning that basically every working factorio ship must be capable of ridiculous acceleration. Wonder what protects the engineer from being crushed when he goes for a ride?
Thanks! Yes, I did not actually mean to suggest that this is faster than other people's ships, just that I measured this particular one which I think must be our highest thrusters-to-weight ratio (because it's not meant to be in continuous use but just express deliveries, it has a lot of time to recharge fuel and get sent ammo, so the other facilities are small). Based on this result, I'd assume that most people's starter ship would cause this bone-liquifying acceleration ^^
Wonder what protects the engineer from being crushed when he goes for a ride?
If you read or watched The Expanse, the answer to that would be Alex's juice!
Here in the real world, afaik the only answer that we currently know would work is antigravity tech, as in, some spacetime-bending object ahead of the ship. If you put planet earth in the nose cone of your space ship, you can push the ship about 9.8 m/s² faster than you otherwise could (because the travellers are 'attracted' forwards it (technically: at a standstill relative to spacetime) and thus doesn't experience that acceleration). Now you have the extra problem of accelerating an earth's worth of mass at the desired acceleration, but that's just an engineering/scaling issue right? :D
A Lemmy community for the game Factorio made by Wube Software.
