Dissapointed Space Age doesn't do Space correctly

[Dak31]

I usually stay away from space games since they tend to be pretty unimmersive due to space not being implemented correctly. Had pretty high hopes for Space Age (guessing its the same in the mod, but I haven't played that), and I get every game doesn't need to be Kerbal Space Program, but I wish we could at least get Newton's first law. Nothing rips me out of a game more than "rocket engines firing and speed staying constant" or "rocket engines stopping & speed decreasing".

Spaceships =/= boats

[Daid]

As someone who has it's own game developed with a space theme. Let me tell you: Newton's first law makes for really complicated unintuitive gameplay. It works for KSP, because the whole game is about it. For Factorio, it's just a "scene", so having more intuitive mechanics make sense, and people understand "amount of fire = amount speed".

Yes, space-soup (as I've started to call it) isn't realistic. But it makes a lot of gameplay sense.

There is a lot of unrealistic stuff in Factorio, and that is fine. "Never let realism get in the way of good gameplay"
(putting a 1000 cargo wagons in a cargo wagon, inventory in general, making steel without carbon, nothing needing maintenance)


Note that I've tried Newtonian physics in my own space game, and the problem quickly becomes that a major part of the gameplay then becomes about managing that, instead of the other gameplay you envision for your game. Speeds can go off the charts, causing all kinds of other problems.


Changing Factorio to Newtonian physics would cause problems with the asteroid mining as well, slamming into an asteroid at 5km/s wouldn't be fun. Or, the asteroid mining becomes even more unrealistic if you have them match your speed and then you would have a new thing to complain about.

[jirkov]

I'd also definitely leave the ship acceleration/deceleration as it is now, but I'd be very excited if planet rotation was added. For example, Vulcanus takes 2 hours, Nauvis 4 hours, Gleba 7 hours, Fulgora 11 hours, Aquilo 20 hours to go around the sun. Sometimes the planets would be closer to each other, sometimes further away. The distance between the planets could change dynamically according to their position relative to each other. Of course, I imagine it as an off/on switch (it's off in the basic state). It won't change the normal game, but those who are interested can try a little more difficult scheduling of deliveries for suitable flight windows when the planets are close together.

[BlueTemplar]

Sounds nice, if more for a mod (even possibly an official one, a bit like scenarios are ?)
Do we currently have the modding capabilities for this, including adding new platform scheduling conditions for time of day (without complex combinators) ?

----

I like how, while still unrealistic, planets exert a «pull» on stations (that switches mid-way).
I guess it was mostly done so that a platform never gets stranded in-between planets (it's not like a train where you can come to save it !), but IMHO it also adds a nice pseudo-realistic touch to the planet's importance...

[Daid]

I was thinking about this a bit more the other day (cannot turn off a game designers brain).

And, mechanically, Newtonian physics or "space soup" won't make a huge difference for space travel. Right now, to get from A to B, you effectively need X fuel. Which you feed over time into your thrusters.

With orbital mechanics, you need X delta-V to get from A to B, but, in effect, that's mostly that you need X fuel as well. (yes, there is the oberth effect, but ignore that for simplicity, same for many other orbital mechanics like gravity assists)

In both cases, you can spend more fuel to get from A to B faster. The main difference becomes then when you fire the engines, and that asteroid mining doesn't make sense in the Newtonian physics setup.

[BlueTemplar]

Right now, to get from A to B, you effectively need X fuel.

Which is not fixed, but actually increases on the first half of the journey (and decreases on the second half ?) if your fuel production is slow enough !
(An easy way to notice it is to have too many laser turrets on the same electric network as fuel production.)

[KuuLightwing]

I do find platforms a bit of a weak side of the DLC. Building a functional platform is interesting enough, but the whole aspect of space travel feels rather underwhelming. I don't even mean realism, I didn't expect it to be realistic at all, but I think even if we had some animations for departure/arrival on the planet it would already be better. As it is now, even if you reverse the direction absolutely nothing changes in the way your ship moves or the environment around it.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, the planet should probably be in the background somehow when near/at it. (And grow/shrink when you approach/depart it ?)

I guess the issue here is that it has to fit with the animation of the player being carried by the rocket / descent pod ?

And maybe in deep space when reversing course there should be some kind of «flashing horizontal streaks» animation for the background, even if nothing else (like interactable asteroid position) changes ?

[kaijyuu]

Yeah I found space drag to be really silly. It's no more silly than the asteroid density though.

Space in factorio is really, really cluttered.



IMO instead of drag they should've had the risk of overshooting the planet if you don't have enough thrust to brake in time. What happens if you overshoot? Well the obvious would be the space platform lost entirely. Next most "realistic" would be stuck orbiting the star, perhaps allowing escape if you get high enough thrust again. The easiest gameplay wise is you just being sent back to origin planet.

[BlueTemplar]

While this sounds cool, this also sounds like it's very likely to result in the already mentioned :

[...]
Note that I've tried Newtonian physics in my own space game, and the problem quickly becomes that a major part of the gameplay then becomes about managing that, instead of the other gameplay you envision for your game. Speeds can go off the charts, causing all kinds of other problems.
[...]

(Especially as the number of platform you manage grows ?)

[Dixi]

Space ships, flying like they are airplanes in the atmosphere, in many space FPS games are much more unrealistic, compared to Factorio design. Factorio is about building big factories and automation. Yes, space platforms here, looks much more like trains, but they do their job well - allow you to travel distant places, and build much more complicated factory.
Some small problems of Space Age disappoint me, but in whole it's very very nice addition to base game.

I heard about a game, that was promising to do everything, called StarCitizen, that turns to quite a scam in many parts, and I think space ship behavior there is also questionable in many scenarios.

[KuuLightwing]

No need to bring up Star Citizen lol, that's the whole other story.

Also, in what games spaceships are "much more unrealistic" and what metrics are you using? Factorio space platforms strictly speaking don't even go anywhere, there's no 3D or even 2D space they navigate. How is that more realistic than "space airplanes" especially when the problem of space soup is still present in Factorio?

[BlueTemplar]

As an aside, typically, in games they're even more like space... uh... boats, than space airplanes.

(Think for instance about what typically happens with space carriers in games : they don't so much launch planes as gunboats : in the same medium !)

[Irrehaare]

As a somewhat experienced KSP player: I think the fastest way would end up being either full "ahead" or full "reverse" all the time. So pretty much the same we have, but with extra animation of thrusters switching to reverse mode, very unclear speed information for the player and the extra dilemma of what to do with the easy option of platform (possibly with player on it) being stranded on a random orbit - last one would be the only significant gameplay change. Of course there is more, but also there is also a lot of realistic aspects missing in KSP (which focuses on space travel).

Honestly, I think that main character being able to carry hundreds of nuclear reactors pretty much confirms that Factorio cares more about gameplay than the realism.

I also agree that asteroid soup is even more unrealistic, but like I've said: gameplay over realism always.

[BlueTemplar]

[...]
And maybe in deep space when reversing course there should be some kind of «flashing horizontal streaks» animation for the background, even if nothing else (like interactable asteroid position) changes ?

Oh, the position of asteroids probably should not change, but maybe their rotation could !
Like in this bug report : viewtopic.php?p=637206#p637206

[adam_bise]

Saw the title and thought it was going to be about wanting it to take decades to get to other planets.

But it would be a little dissatisfying to hit the thrusters only once and then shut them off. I really like the thruster graphics

As long as I can put 50 locamotives in my pocket I'm happy.

[pulsereaction]

I'm a huge space nerd and big fan of hard sci-fi, and this has bothered me as well. However, the more I think about it, the more I understand the intentionality of the team, and I agree that with realistic space, the game would be way more about dealing with space than logisitics in space.

There are always way too many asteroids; in space there is hardly ever something in the way, unless you're traveling in the rings of Saturn, but even then the space between asteroids is still huge. I believe this was to make sure we could still have the gameplay loop of extracting, processing, and using resources in space, otherwise it would be pretty easy. It would also be hard to make a self-sufficient ship, and all of them would depend on refuels.

Regarding constant speed - realistically you have two stages of a space trip, acceleration and deceleration (maybe three if you count coasting). Basically you speed up until half way then you flip the ship and start accelerating towards wherever you're going. Accelerating would be where the fuel would be consumed, and you could also maybe do the lunar way, accelerate once, coast for 95%+ of the trip, and decelerate.

But then you have to start thinking about how to deal with when to flip, when to decelerate, when to accelerate. If you don't have enough fuel for the acceleration you'd have to coast on constant speed all the way. If you run out of fuel in the deceleration part, you'd overshoot your destination; you'd miss Gleba and go straight for Aquilo for example. Then you'd have to deal with how to rescue a platform without any fuel. Also, keep in mind that to get to Mars under constant 1g acceleration would take 4 days and 17 hours.

If the planets go around the star, we'd need a whole new system to switch targets based on distance - let's go to Gleba now, as it's closer, and in a few minutes we can go to Fulgora, or something like that. Space logistics would get confusing real fast.

All in all, after thinking about the design challenges the team must've faced, I'm glad they picked the trade-offs they did, otherwise Space Age would be an order of magnitude more complex than it already is.

With that said, one thing that annoys me to hell and back is the magnitude of the numbers. 15000 km is WAY TOO SMALL of a distance; the moon is 405 thousand km away, and the closest Mars ever was to Earth was 56 million km. However, even then, if we make each planet 150 million km away (and Aquilo 300 million km), we'd have to bump the speeds from ~300 km/s to 3000000 km/s (which would be... 10 times the speed of light). I don't think processing asteroids should allow us to go relativistic speeds, and the acceleration alone would kill the engineer

To tweak these numbers, there would have to be some LORE changes; Nauvis, Gleba, Vulcanus and Fulgora would have to be moons of another planet (make the distance between them 15 million km), and Aquilo could be a separate planet that you travel to.

But at the end of the day, it's an automation game, not a space game. If Factorio did space right, it would be an incredibly boring game.

[BlueTemplar]

Regarding constant speed - realistically you have two stages of a space trip, acceleration and deceleration (maybe three if you count coasting). Basically you speed up until half way then you flip the ship and start accelerating towards wherever you're going.

I think you mean accelerating away from where you're going in order to decelerate?

Accelerating would be where the fuel would be consumed [...]

And, taking into account the context of your previous phrase, decelerating. (Which you do mention later.)
EDIT : Hey, I wonder if the animation I mentioned earlier when you would decide to reverse course could always happen mid-trajectory too ?
This would also be an important gameplay indication, considering that medium asteroid density seems to be always (?) highest mid-trajectory !
(Yes, this asteroid layout is unrealistic too... OtoH isn't it's a little bit kind of like asteroid belts between each planet ? Ignoring the trajectories nor including Nauvis, or other from Fulgora than to Gleba.))

Also, keep in mind that to get to Mars under constant 1g acceleration would take 4 days and 17 hours.

Like you point it out later :
Earth-Mars distance is (depending on where they are in their orbit) between ~180 and ~1300 light-seconds.
Nauvis-Fulgora is 0.05 light-seconds.
(For reference : Earth-Moon is ~1 light-second.)

[BraveCaperCat]

I think that the speed of space platforms should be effected by the outputted thrust and that thrust only. Because that's how gravity works IRL. This other stuff doesn't matter to me if and only if I don't slow down when I start moving. I shouldn't "turn back" because I turned off my engines (deliberately or accidentally) and I shouldn't have to fire my engines every one in a while because I didn't keep my engines running.

[BlueTemplar]

How would you then deliberately slow down because you don't feel like you can handle the current rate and speed of asteroids ?