I've also noticed that they are largely out of proportion. Your ship is the size of africa.

Outcast: "You just signed your deaAAAAAAGGGGHHH[![![!"

My $0.02:

As far as planetary orbits go, unless a planet is really close to a sun (like the hot jupiters that planet hunters are finding these days which orbit stars at such close distances that many of them take just 4 days to make one complete orbit), then the orbital motion is probably not immediately noticible. It takes 365 days for the Earth to go around the sun after all.

However, the position of moons probably change a lot faster and it would probably give the game a more realistic look if they seem to move slowly in relation to a planet (for example the moon Maine orbiting Planet Pittsburgh).

As far as trade lanes go... Every planet has at least five LaGrange points (where a planet and its star's gravity cancel out) where an object can be positioned so that its relative motion to the planet is zero. These can be locations for tradelane entrance/exits. Don't know how to handle the positioning of the gates in the middle of a trade lane route though since those would constantly change with the orbits of planets and other objects..

I have noticed that a couple of the planets DO rotate. I think either LA or Curacao is one of them.

As far as orbital speed is concerned, yes, planets closer to the star have to orbit faster, but just because Earth takes 365 days to orbit the sun, it is still travelling fast, about 30 km/s (30,000 meters/second). Way faster than than your ship on cruise speed (300 meters/second).

But this is all relative. Satellites can orbit the earth, and we can launch space shuttles, because each of them are travelling 30km/s through space along with the earth. So I guess we're to believe that the ship speeds in FL are relative speeds to each other.

Trade lanes would make more sense if they functioned like jumpgates. A point by a planet, kept in geosynchronous orbit, and another point at another planet or at the jumpgate. But then the pirates can't disrupt you away, and, more importantly, you can't pirate transport ships. Heh.

Could it be that everything is spinning/rotating relative to a major planet? Imagine being the engineer/physicist told to build that, what a nightmare job. Those Aegira and Deep Space Engineering guys are waaay underpaid.

I think that the jump gates, trade lanes, space stations and all other thing that is static in space is actually moving. Everything inside a system is synchronized to move with the same speed, therefore, we, as the player, will not notice that it is moving, which instead it might have a velocity of, say, 50,000kmh or whatever.
Imagine you're driving your car, you're inside it, you dont feel anything, you can still move your hand front-and-back, you think that your hand moving speed is just a normal speed, maybe 30cm per seconds. But the actual speed your hand is moving, is 30cm/sec + with how fast you're driving your car. In simpler term, this is called momentum. Which i think is inside of the Newton's Law....which one, i dont remember....sorry Mr. Newton!

If you think like this, it will be easier to absorb, isnt it? If not, what other explanation do you have?
lol

/me does not even want to think about how confusing the calculations would be to create tradelanes that always point in stright line to the same place.

~ DaVoid, Expert Star Diver

you can edit a planets file to make it spin um really fast


its... fun!

When i get the planets spinning really fast it makes me dizzy

My Solution:
*Drumroll*
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In Freelancer time doesn't pass because it'd make things to complicated.


"It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold, it is very cold in space."
~Khan, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Planets revolve around our sun at varying speeds. Some have "years" that last a few months, while others take decades to make a full revolution. Also, the planets and stars of Freelancer are scaled down quite a bit, but hey, we aren't using Cray supercomputers to run this game! In other words, you have to take Freelancer with a big grain of salt if you're into astronomy.

I thought that the trade lane concept could be implemented in a system with planetary motion. It would be a lot more complicated, though. Circular lanes in between orbits (like the interstates they use to ring around metropoli) and smaller, moving lanes to connect the orbital belt lanes to planets.

You could also run lanes under the ecliptic plane (which is fairly flat in the solar system), but they would have to slinky in and out as distances grow and shrink. Lanes that tried to avoid a monster like Jupiter (and its moons, which wouldn't make bad colonization targets), would have a hard time avoiding its tremendous gravitational pull.

Either way, trade lanes are a pretty neat concept, but implementing them in a realistic system with true planetary motion and gravity seems a lot more difficult than implementing incredibly fast cruise engines.

EDIT -- Another idea, posted somewhere else, as well. Have two bases far above and below the nearby star. Run your lanes to those points, then the lane can follow the planet through its rotation without running into anything else, or stretching and contracting (as much).

Edited by - Thorkild on 17-05-2003 06:56:39

Actually Jupiter’s moons would make crappy colonization targets, at least in the foreseeable future. Even getting a manned mission close to Jupiter is impossible for us at the moment. The closer a human gets to Jupiter the deader they become. You sure wouldn’t need a microwave oven on the trip.

Ne frustra vixisse videar

Hmm...

Jupiter does have a lot of moons though, some of which orbit at distances on the order of millions of miles. I wonder what is the radiation flux for Callisto (the one big moon that orbits Jupiter at more than 1 million miles distance).

I wonder if a moon's magnetosphere would provide any protection (on those moons that have them that is)..

The radiation pretty much roasted the Galileo satellite. I am not sure if a million miles would do it or not. And I doubt if the magnetosphere on any of the Galilean moons would be enough protection.

Ne frustra vixisse videar

The Galileo probe did indeed get fried... However I think that's because it has to get very close to Jupiter to study Ganymede, Io and Europa (those three orbit really close-in). Makes one wonder if that ice crust and theoretical ocean on Europa would be enough to shield any lifeform that might exist there if the magnetosphere wouldn't provide enough protection.

Did some digging into the Galileo mission and the survey data says Callisto is just outside Jupiter's main radiation belts. Maybe out of all the Galilean moons Callisto is the single one that might not have the microwave setting on "high".