#spacegame

We're working with @composerinprogress for some new trailer music. Here is a small piece of what we have so far.

A few back-of-the-envelope calculations

What started out as a simple cutscene led me down a rabbit hole of fun facts and figures. Let me explain!

One of the game’s mechanics is travelling between black hole systems in order to find new and progressively harder locations to explore. Naturally, a big theme of this game is the unstoppable passage of time, and the consequences thereof, considering this is how the main character got themselves into this mess to begin with! So of course, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to remind the player that travelling such large distances between black holes does not happen without consequence. And in a universe running out of it, time is among the most precious of resources!

So when I was adding this small fade in/fade out cutscene to long-distance travel interface, I wanted this to be somewhat reflective of reality. So first, I needed to find an appropriate starting point, and then add on years to this. I first got an estimate of the distance of one of the closest black holes to earth as a starting point (1.5k light years). 

Then, I needed to estimate the speed of the ship, in order to calculate travel time. My first thoughts were, well, this game begins during the late 70s/early 80s, what if I just grab the maximum speed of one of the Apollo spacecraft? This put me in the ballpark of ~6667 meters per second or ~0.002% of the speed of light. Then I realised, duh, they could have gone way faster had they not need to slow down and land on the moon!

I then grabbed the Parker solar probe’s top speed and converted that to a % of the speed of light, ~0.064%. Then I took the inverse of it in order to see how long it’d take to travel 1 light year (~1560 years). Finally, I multiplied this value by the close black hole distance I found earlier to get a travel time of ~2.339 million years, give or take some years to account for the initial acceleration and deceleration (which should be comparatively negligible).

Cool, ok so this was my starting point. I realised that it’d be another ~10^50 years before that small black hole evaporated, which is ACTUALLY when your journey starts, but I chose to ignore this and focus on the time the character has been travelling for. If I had started at 10^50 years, you’d never see the numbers tick upward so dramatically! 

The in-game travel time calculation was then quite simple. I generously estimated that with highly advanced rockets/energy generation strapped on to your 70s rocket, it would be able to achieve a speed of 1% the speed of light, quite a significant improvement over the solar probe! 

So what about the average distance between black holes now? Well, all the smaller ones would have evaporated or been consumed by bigger ones by now, so I began by looking at the average distance between galaxies, which was estimated to be ~1 million light years apart on average. This number varies wildly however, as there are galactic clusters and voids in space rather than an even distribution, so that, plus the expansion of the universe going at full bore, I decided that each black hole system will be randomly 1.00-9.99 million light years apart. That’s roughly in the right ballpark I’d say.

Finally, with all the numbers in place, I do the same calculation in-game, 1% of the speed of light means 100 multiplied by the distance to give you the right amount of human years. Done.

“But wait,” I hear you say, “aren’t you going to lose precision/overflow as the game progresses? And how does the character survive for that long? What about the relativistic effects??”, to which I would reply, stay tuned for part 2 of this blog...

;)

Cyborgs in Galactic Rage.