tobe mayr said:
I just recently saw the much recommended motion picture 'Gravity' This made me aware of a particularly nasty hole in my gaming collection: Space based SciFi, optionally hard sci fi.
You know, not the aliens/galactic civilizations kind of games, but something with actual space ships.
I wonder if there is a market for something more serious.
The main issues with hard sci-fi in games, and in a lot of movies to be honest, are time and visual aesthetics. Space is big, and it takes a long time to get anywhere. For example, let's say we finally invent an inertial compensator and can build a spaceship that could continuously accelerate at 50 gravities, or 491 m/s per second. It would still take 30 minutes to reach the Moon, factoring in having to turnover and decelerate halfway through. At that same speed, it would take 13 hours to get to Mars and 22 hours to get to Jupiter. In a game, you would either need to plan your story out accordingly to where the time in transit is accounted for, or have some sort of time-compression.
The other issue, also related to distance actually, is communication. Space is very big and even light-speed transmissions like communications lasers and radio waves take a long time to get anywhere. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to Earth is a bit over 4 lightyears away, and you're still talking about communications lags of between 4 and 20 minutes to get a message to Mars, depending on the alignments of the planets. If you want a game, or movie, to involve anything more than a single spaceship or small group of them, you really need to plan things out accordingly. If you want to do hard sci-fi over interplanetary distances, you either need to have ships delivering messages by hand, a form of FTL communications technology, or the ships involved will be totally isolated from any sort of help from Earth. Let's say we did invent a form of FTL comms though, and let's say we could send a message at 3600 times the speed of light. Let's say you wanted to dial up the Eta Cassiopeiae, one of the nearest G-class stars to Earth at about 19.4 lightyears. If you could send a message at a speed of 3600c, it would still take a hair less than 2 days to get there. These are things you really have to factor in, if you want to tell a hard sci-fi story. That's also why a lot of brands, like Star Trek, takes the easy way out and let their people dial up someone's cell-phone on Earth, instantly, from wherever the hell the Klingon home system is, like they did in 'Into Darkness'.
I'd say probably the biggest issue is simple visual aesthetics though. Because of the vast distances, you don't actually *see* a lot in space. Let's say you want to do a game about military stuff in a hard sci-fi setting. The ships would likely be armed with lasers, and probably railguns and/or missiles capable of accelerating their projectiles to c-fractional speeds. Because of that, you probably would not get ships engaging each other at range of less than, say, a light-second, or a little under 300,000km. Unless you handle it right, it is very difficult to convey that sort of conflict in a visual medium, especially when the go-to image for spaceship battles is an Imperial Star Destroyer rolling up to shoot at something 50ft away from it, or the Enterprise rolling and swooping through space, shooting at a ship with phasers. It would be more akin to submarine fights, or modern naval combat where the primary weapons are long-range missiles launched from over the horizon, than it would be to more 'traditional' ship-to-ship combat.
I do like me some hard and semi-hard sci-fi though. I find it extremely interesting to look at future technologies through the lens of what we actually know about space. Instead of just having World War II in space, with ships shooting broadsides at each other from within visual range. Or even more things like 'Gravity' where you're dealing with much less advanced space technology. The fact is, as far as space goes, humans are barely into bi-planes compared to where we need to be to actually do anything of note. The technology is very young, has very hard limits, and there's not a lot of fallback options if something does go truly wrong.
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