LegacyWorlds Beta 6

Many types of objects in Legacy Worlds Beta 6 will have to travel the universe from one point to another. While this set obviously includes ships, many other elements such as probes, resource extractors or migrating populations will need to travel.

It is therefore necessary to write rules regarding the method used to travel from one location to another, and the distance it corresponds to. In order to do that, the different modes available have to be clearly defined, and the geography of the universe must be described more precisely than the vague definition we posted here earlier.

There are two different methods an object may use while traveling through the universe.

• An object can be flying through normal space, in which case it will not be affected too much by gravity wells, but will on the other hand be slowed down by e.g. asteroid belts or Oort clouds. In addition, interstellar travel, while possible in normal space, is extremely slow.
• An object can be traveling in Hyperspace, which allows relatively fast interstellar travel. However, Hyperspace is heavily affected by gravity wells; as a consequence, it is a highly inefficient way of moving inside a stellar system, although it allows bypassing asteroid belts and Oort clouds.

The next thing we need is a notion of “distance”. In this case, we do not really need to define that distance in terms of real-world units (nor do we want to); what we need is a numeric value which can then be used to compute e.g. travel times.

Obviously, the actual distance between two locations is always the same; this distance is specifically fixed for each possible type of location. However, depending on whether an object is moving through normal space or Hyperspace, different multipliers will apply.

For example, adjacent systems are always 1000 distance units away from each other, but a x10 multiplier applies when traveling through normal space.

While the example above is very simple, multipliers are actually much more complicated than that. Many objects can affect the multipliers: nebulae, black holes, location in a stellar system, etc. What’s worse, the two multipliers (Hyperspace and normal space) are not affected in the same way by a given object; the typical example is the Hyperspace multiplier in a stellar system, which gets higher the closer you get to the star, and which is not applied to normal space travel at all.

In order to define both the “base” distances and the multipliers, defining the structure of every possible “geographic” object is necessary. The next posts in these series will therefore describe the structure of solar systems, the structure of “special” objects such as nebulae and supergates, and the rules that will govern interstellar travel. The final post in this series will combine all of these elements.