Sci-Fi Tech Starfall

[JagerIV]

My complaining about Starfield's various issues was morphing into an idea for a totally different Space advanture game, so I figured it would make sense to move such musing to a separate thread, since it increasingly has very little to do with Starfield itself. Preliminary Game map:

First off, the idea for how the transversal system works, so I can hopefully get some feedback and theorizing of how it would realistically work/best way to implement. You've got two major systems, uncreatively names Mass Effect and Mass Inverter.

Mass Effect

Very simply, you adjust the Mass of the object, with momentum conserved. Since Momentum is Mass*Velocity, if you reduce Mass by 10x, speed has to increase 10x.

As an example, something in Earth orbit is moving at 30 km/s compared to the sun. If you reduced the Mass from 1,000 tons to 100 tons, its velocity increases to 300 km/s. This is a very good speed for interplanetary travel, allowing an AU to be crossed in about a week.

A good Fusion Engine should be able to manage an exhaust velocity of 3,000 km/s, about 1% speed of light. If you can then reduce mass by 90%, you boost velocity to 30,000 km/s, or 10%. And if you can decrease mass by 99%, your at the speed of light, though relativity would push that lower. This then can allow for relatively easy interstellar travel at good fractions of lightspeed.

The tech is severely limited by it getting exponentially harder to change mass at the limits, like how lightspeed works.

Basically, within +- 50% of natural mass variation is pretty easy and relatively low energy, but gets exponentially more expensive as you try to change the mass more. And, it cannot decrease the Mass of an object to zero. How much mass can be increased is a little less nailed down.

Technically, lowering Mass costs energy, while increasing mass absorbs energy. But, that might not be a major practical difference: A heater is adding heat, while a refrigerator is removing heat, but from a user/player perspective, both use electricity to cause a change of state.

There are probably many other uses of such tech.

Mass Inverter

This is the FTL system. While the Mass Effect system changes how much things mass, the mass inverter inverts how matter interacts with the universe.

First, the matter is inverted from having a physical presence, to not having one. I'm currently leaning towards "ghost matter" as the name of this state.

Second, rather than being attracted by gravity, its repelled by gravity, which is one of the few forces the ghost matter still responds to. Practically, this means the ghost ship is accelerated away from a Star, and slowed if it approaches one. Escape velocity is a good proxy for the strength of this repellant force. Each 1 km/s of escape velocity corresponds to a roughly 1x light speed travel speed.

Third, it can't exist slower than light: ghost matter which decelerates bellow lightspeed reverts back to regular matter. This means the ship much be converted to ghost matter and accelerated to at least lightspeed. I'm currently thinking of a minimal gravity field of 1 m/s^2

Examples.

Earth has a surface gravity or 9.81 m/s^2. Anything Earth and larger is unambiguously large enough to support matter inversion. Escape velocity is about 10 km/s, so a craft that inverted aground earth would be repelled at approximately 36.5 days per light year. It would need to be braked by a body with at least equivalent escape velocity.

Pluto has a surface gravity of 0.6 m/s^2. It does not have strong enough gravity to support matter inversion. Its escape velocity is 1.2 km/s. Thus, it could only break a vessel traveling just over the speed of light, and such a vessel would have to leave Pluto via STL.

A red Dwarf, the most common type of star, are dim and relatively compact. A 100k radius red dwarf would have an escape velocity of roughly 400 km/s, enough to travel FTL at less than a day per lightyear.

Suns like our own can have higher escape velocities, our sun would have a 600 km/s escape velocity on the surface. But, since stars like our are larger and hotter, getting an equivalent acceleration to a red dwarf may be more challenging.

Finally, White dwarfs are dead suns with masses roughly in line with our sun, but roughly the size of the earth. This can easily allow a 4,000x lightspeed, or about 1 LY per 2 hours.

So, what do people think of these FTL systems?

 

[JagerIV]

I was thinking about the potential of Mass Effect tech, playing around with some of the functionality my description implied.

I based the energy cost on the difference between momentum and energy, on the logic you might need to balance that. I got the following effects: I decided to put the Base energy state at 1 GJ/kg, equivalent to a speed of 44 km/s.

Mass change	Energy State	Energy (GJ)	Energy Difference From Base (per kg)
100x	-99%	10 MJ	-990 MJ
10x	-80%	100 MJ	-900 MJ
2x	-50%	500 MJ	-500 MJ
1x	100%	1 GJ	0 MJ
0.75x	133%	1.3 GJ	+300 MJ
0.5x	200%	2 GJ	+1 GJ
0.25x	400%	4 GJ	+3 GJ
0.1x	1,000%	10 GJ	+9 GJ
0.01x	10,000%	100 GJ	+99 GJ

So, taking this, some potentially interesting effects.

A) Gravity Generator: if making something more massive puts out energy, going from 1 kg to 2 kg would release 500 MJ. This would be pretty good energy source. Methane comparatively has 55 MJ of energy per kg. As a Methane+oxygen total, energy is down to roughly 10 MJ per kg. So, you've got something that either can reach roughly the equivalent of a hydrogen fuel cell, at 140 MJ/kg hydrogen for a small mass change.

B) Gravity Battery: However, the above would be assuming using normal matter. If you took mass already reduced, you could have an even more expansive energy. For example, say a suit had a 1 kg of regular mass. You reduce its mass to 10%, 100g, would absorb 9 GJ of energy. If you could reduce it back town to 1 kg, 900 g change which is pretty small in the scheme of a whole change of an armored soldier, but you can release 9 GJ, which is a lot of energy in the scheme of a personal suit.

C) Gravity Bomb: if the energy could be made to release a lot of energy quickly, this is a lot of energy in pretty small packages. TNT has a density of roughly 4.4 MJ per Kg, so this is a lot of energy density per kg. A Mark 84 bomb would be 2.5 GJ of explosives. The same bomb made out of mass reduced material of 400 kg, reduced to just 75% mass would be 120 GJ. How efficient this would be I guess would depend on the gain. For example, if releasing the 120 GJ of energy requires a 1.2 GJ beam, that's probably not effective for a bomb, or its a much weaker bomb: maybe you have 10 kg of explosive for 40 MJ which can power a matter increaser beam That then powers a release of 4 GJ release, you have a 2x as powerful bomb, but not that much.

D) Disintegrator beam: if doubling the mass of an object would release 500 MJ, that's a very strong bomb. Depending on how the energy can be released, that would probably vaporize people.

This might be too much energy for a fun outcome.

 

[JagerIV]

However, a different assumption of what the base energy state is will give a different result. Lets instead set energy equal to weight. So, 10 J is roughly equivalent to 1 G.

Mass change	Energy State	Energy (J)	Energy Difference From Base (per kg)
100x	1000%	1,000 J	990 J
10x	1,000%	100 J	90 J
2x	200%	20 J	10 J
1x	100%	10 J	0
0.5x	50%	5 J	2.5 J
0.0x	0%	0 J	5 J
-0.5x	-50%	-5 J	7.5 J
-1x	-100%	-10 J	9 J
-10x	-1,000%	-100 J	10 J

Immediately apparent outcomes.

1) Much lower energy levels, which makes powering such use much easier, and makes game powers easier. If you wanted a power that made someone 100% heavier to slow them, a 100 kilogram soldier takes 1,000 Joules, about half the energy of a 5.56 mm bullet. It would thus make sense why you would even bother with a slow power vs disintegrating them, which is what's implied by the velocity level of energy. 1,000 Joules spread over a persons entire body is not all that much energy to absorb. Especially being absorbed in less physical ways.

2) The energy endothermic vs exothermic is reversed when energy is calculated in relation to a gravity field: making things heavier costs energy, while making things lighter releases energy. This can justify several fantasy tropes:

• why is the superweapon a giant flying platform? Because floating a million tons isn't costing a huge quantity of energy, but generating a huge quantity of energy. Specifically by the above math, 10 GW at this ratio. Which is a lot, but not that much, but then again 1 million tons of matter isn't all that much either.
• why would a big "spell" cause rocks or other things to float aground the caster? Because making things float actually generates energy to power the spell!
• This further justifies placing things on Earth like planets, or heavier, because being in a strong gravity field can produce power, vs just building your secrete doom base in the middle of the blackest space.
• An advanced facility can have lots of floating orbs or such, because it generates power!

3) In measure to the gravity field is much more suggestive of a flow, rather than a stock with the Mass Effect. So, laying someone flat by making them 10x heavier would be a steady flow of 10 KJ per second, and once the beam ends, the effect would end. Or, when the artificial gravity generator turns off, the gravity will turn off. Also gives a general order of magnitude for artificial gravity, which could also be useful. Something generating 10 m/s of gravity for, say 50 tons of mass on a small ship would be 50,000 kg * 10 J = 500 KW. So, powering gravity for a small ship would be a small, 1 ton ish generator. The Abram's tank for example has a 1 ton engine taking up approximately 1 cubic meters producing a 1,100 KW engine.

4) Making things lighter would be easier than making things heavier, which is benifitical to game play. Reducing a person's weight to 0 theoretically produces energy, so if you have some efficiency gain function, a small initial energy can add up to a large effect. A anti grav grenade that makes everyone float can have a wide area and make people float up a bit for low energy, but someone weighing nothing doesn't directly hurt someone. So, gameplay wise an anti grav grenade effectively is a wide range flash bang, with less impact than a flash bang because its less disabling. And, if you have a grav suit, canceling the effect is pretty quick too.

Meanwhile, if you can rapidly increase someone's weight, that can cause damage: if nothing else, 4-8 G of force seems like its in the realm where it can cause a blackout from loss of blood pressure. But, since that's more in the realm of 5 KW to target a specific individual, you need more focused attacks, either down to individual targets or small range, or the drain is much heavier requiring a much larger machine.

So, I think both of these might be useful tech to the science fiction setting.

 

[JagerIV]

To completely switch modes, some thoughts on Player statistics.

Basically, stats are good, pure perks are bad. A character with high Intelligence I can think of as, well, an intelligent character. It lets me define my character as a distinct being with a general quality. Having a bunch of intelligence perks I don't think give the same amount: each one is separate, and there's too many to hold in the head as a general character feel, compared to a single stat. Thus, stats should be few enough to hold in mind, but varied enough so a character can have distinct feels. I'm currently thinking 9: three physical, intellectual, and spiritual stats. Which then would have other additional derived stats

Physical: Pretty self explanatory and standard

Strength: effects things that depend on, well, raw strength.
Dexterity:
Endurance:

Derived Stats

HP: I'm thinking this might derive from all 3 physical stats, probably equally. Say 10 HP per point in a physical stat.

Carrying Capacity: Probably mixture of Strength and Endurance. Say 10 kg per point in either.


Intellectual: Your ability to understand and manipulate things.

technological:
Social:
Natural:

Spiritual:

Bravery: The ability to do things you don't want to do, to resist fear and coercion.
Restraint: The ability to resist temptation, to no do things your character would want.
Leadership: The ability to inspire and lead others.

This is a lot more social skills than I think is normal, plus will rolls, which I think are fairly rare outside something like call of cathulu.

I think it could however make speech a bit more interesting, and strong social opponent more threatening. Talking to an NPC with a high Leadership would be a legitimate risk that your character could lose the verbal battle. A bribe takes a check to actually resist, especially really large one.

 

[JagerIV]

Thinking about the likely nature of the future, having pure dialog situations of skype calling does make sense. So, a fairly involved verbal combat system makes sense.

Three possible depletable stats for verbal combat:

Endurance Bar: based on the physical stats, your ability to simply continue. Some types of conversation "attacks" would be endurant limited. A conversation method of just bashing people's will down, so they give up just because they don't want to continue the conversation. Filibuster or sea lioning tactics.

Intellectual Bar: your reserve of intellectual energy. If someone has a technological issue, you can apply intellectual energy to think up the technical solution to the issue to present a solution to their concern. Or if someone suggests something or a riddle, you can apply intellectual energy to find holes or nitpicks. Or just dazzle a conversation opponent with a display of your intellect, either in knowledge or quick thinking.

Spirit: Resisting attacks on your morale. Turning down a bribe, resisting an attempt at seduction. High spirit is a multiplier to the effect of other effects. You could provide a very intelligent answer, but if the enemy has destroyed your self confidence, delivering it with zero self confidence would

 

[JagerIV]

Is anyone actually familiar with any games with mechanically intensive "verbal combat". I couldn't really think of any, which suggests some possibilities:

1) This is actually common, I just haven't played the kind of game with these mechanics. Maybe dating sims or some sort of genre of pollical/legal games I haven't played? I know Ace Attorney exists, but its my understanding the gameplay there is closer to a matching game than what I'm describing.

2) This isn't done, and I'm the first to come up with a brilliant idea, or

3) This isn't done, because its actually a terrible idea and all attempts to do so crash and burn horribly.

My quick googling has suggested a system called "Burning Wheel", which I've never heard of before, which makes me suspicious of how practical such a system is in a general game.

 

[Typhonis]

Let's steal a page from Pathfinder. Skills have 5 levels Untrained, Trained, Expert, Master, and Legendary. These offer a bonus to your skill based on the level. At untrained you can still try the skill you just have an attribute bonus is all. For example, being sneaky while untrained gets you a 0 bonus. While trained nets you +2.


Stats are generated the same way. You start with a 10 in each stat and it is modified by 3 things. First your culture, then your background. Lastly your chosen entry job.

Add in 20 traits of which you can take three and well. You could have millions of possible characters.

 

[willdelve4beer]

To completely switch modes, some thoughts on Player statistics.

Basically, stats are good, pure perks are bad. A character with high Intelligence I can think of as, well, an intelligent character. It lets me define my character as a distinct being with a general quality. Having a bunch of intelligence perks I don't think give the same amount: each one is separate, and there's too many to hold in the head as a general character feel, compared to a single stat. Thus, stats should be few enough to hold in mind, but varied enough so a character can have distinct feels. I'm currently thinking 9: three physical, intellectual, and spiritual stats. Which then would have other additional derived stats

Physical: Pretty self explanatory and standard

Strength: effects things that depend on, well, raw strength.
Dexterity:
Endurance:

Derived Stats

HP: I'm thinking this might derive from all 3 physical stats, probably equally. Say 10 HP per point in a physical stat.

Carrying Capacity: Probably mixture of Strength and Endurance. Say 10 kg per point in either.


Intellectual: Your ability to understand and manipulate things.

technological:
Social:
Natural:

Spiritual:

Bravery: The ability to do things you don't want to do, to resist fear and coercion.
Restraint: The ability to resist temptation, to no do things your character would want.
Leadership: The ability to inspire and lead others.

This is a lot more social skills than I think is normal, plus will rolls, which I think are fairly rare outside something like call of cathulu.

I think it could however make speech a bit more interesting, and strong social opponent more threatening. Talking to an NPC with a high Leadership would be a legitimate risk that your character could lose the verbal battle. A bribe takes a check to actually resist, especially really large one.

Dexterity & Endurance (by whatever factor) can be used to generate character movement speeds, whilst Strength & Dexterity can give you jumping height/stagger resistance.

 

[Typhonis]

Quick question. Is this to be a computer game or a tabletop one? Because you may want to think about how to simplify the system first. Case in point, some pen and paper systems, Palladium and Iron Crow for example, can have 10 to 12 stats before getting into calculated ones.

Then you have simple systems. Tri stat and Barbarians of Lemuria. Both go with far simpler system so gameplay and character creation is faster.

Believe me...Palladium system can take a bloody HOUR to create a new character. Rolling stats, choosing skills and everything else. Same with Iron Crowns system. There your stats give you development points that you use to advance your skills and the skills have a dimminishing returns mechainc.

 

[willdelve4beer]

Quick question. Is this to be a computer game or a tabletop one? Because you may want to think about how to simplify the system first. Case in point, some pen and paper systems, Palladium and Iron Crow for example, can have 10 to 12 stats before getting into calculated ones.

Then you have simple systems. Tri stat and Barbarians of Lemuria. Both go with far simpler system so gameplay and character creation is faster.

Believe me...Palladium system can take a bloody HOUR to create a new character. Rolling stats, choosing skills and everything else. Same with Iron Crowns system. There your stats give you development points that you use to advance your skills and the skills have a dimminishing returns mechainc.

For a video game, it depends in part on how much effort you want to put into graphics / sound vs mechanics. Computers excel at number crunching, after all. The other part, of course, boils down to giving players enough 'levers' to customize their approach to game enough that they can enjoy the game, without giving them so many that they get lost or frustrated over missing an unrecognized booby trap.

One tricky issue that game designers seem to face a lot is the challenge of 'must have/god tier' vs 'wasted/dump' stats/perks/traits. the more varied the number of game-play approaches and scenarios you want to support, the more options you offer, the more chances there are to create some combination of traits/abilities/gear that will 'break' the game in ways that you never anticipated.

 

[JagerIV]

Quick question. Is this to be a computer game or a tabletop one? Because you may want to think about how to simplify the system first. Case in point, some pen and paper systems, Palladium and Iron Crow for example, can have 10 to 12 stats before getting into calculated ones.

Then you have simple systems. Tri stat and Barbarians of Lemuria. Both go with far simpler system so gameplay and character creation is faster.

Believe me...Palladium system can take a bloody HOUR to create a new character. Rolling stats, choosing skills and everything else. Same with Iron Crowns system. There your stats give you development points that you use to advance your skills and the skills have a dimminishing returns mechainc.

Video game. This is born out of my anoyance at Starfield, and thus pulling together ideas for a better game, since some of my theorizing on a better game seemed like it was getting a bit off topic. Though there seems to be quite a bit of theorizing still ongoing over there.

For a video game, it depends in part on how much effort you want to put into graphics / sound vs mechanics. Computers excel at number crunching, after all. The other part, of course, boils down to giving players enough 'levers' to customize their approach to game enough that they can enjoy the game, without giving them so many that they get lost or frustrated over missing an unrecognized booby trap.

One tricky issue that game designers seem to face a lot is the challenge of 'must have/god tier' vs 'wasted/dump' stats/perks/traits. the more varied the number of game-play approaches and scenarios you want to support, the more options you offer, the more chances there are to create some combination of traits/abilities/gear that will 'break' the game in ways that you never anticipated.

Yeah, I want there to be enough Stats to give a character a distinct identity. Something Starfield lacks. I basically started with the Traveller Stats, which is a decent system, but the game defiantly needs a bit more in the way of "levels" than that game has: your character doesn't necessarily get better in that game post character creation, which is realistic and can work in a game with disposable characters, but doesn't necessarily translate well to video games, and honestly getting more powerful is just fun, and a good balancing methods for a casual game: you can design a scenario to be beatable by a level 10 character, for example, but if someone is really struggling, they can just over level to 15 and brute force a main story quest. If you have a level cap of, say, 30, you let the main quest if you have one be beat comfortably by an average player with 25 levels, and is easy with 30 levels, and then put stuff challenging for a 25-30 level character in optional side content.

Leveling up I've looked at the last computer game I played, Fallout New Vegas.

 

[Typhonis]

You could go the Far cry route. You have perks you gain by completing tasks. Master lockpick? Simple pick 50 locks. Sniper qualification. 100 head shots and so on. The more you use an ability the more it ranks up.

 

[willdelve4beer]

I do like the achievement based perk/skill leveling, if not necessarily how it was implemented in Starfield. But, J4's basic point that underlying stats/traits add a level of differentiation and customization that feels lacking in BGS's version of the game resonates. Stats/traits/ability scores strike me as the foundation - they set the overall shape of the character you are working from, and the skills/perks/power are how build off of/express that underlying concept.

For video games, being, by definition so visual, I think they need to take a page from the old fable games and have the abilities and perks of your character be reflected in their appearance somehow.

Obviously we've (we like to think) come an appreciable ways from Fable in sophistication of graphics and game design, so I wouldn't expect a one-one reflection, but I would not expect a max-strength character to appear small and sickly in a pseudo-realistic game like Starfield/Starfall. Nor would I expect a low health/stamina character to be 'cut'.

Depending on how much resources one wanted to devote to this, scars, dismemberment, cyberization, and visual displays from afflictions (sickness, bleed, broken bits, radiation, poisoning, hypothermia, hyperthermia) can be worked into the game. Wouldn't be visible through a space suit with an opaque visor (except for extreme cases, like being set on fire (How that works in 0% oxygen atmospheres, or the void, I have yet to work out), or having a broken/amputated limb), but would add a touch of realism to visuals in breathable areas. Actually, thinking that through 'out loud' as it were, it is probably not worth the effort to visually represent afflictions, beyond what is already in the game, given how much time the PC spends in spacesuits.

 

[Typhonis]

Heck go a simpler route. If you are wearing a spacesuit or uniform all of the time. Have them be qualification or certification badges.

The perks represent your qualifications. Got geology, zoology, botany, or medical at level 4? You get called Doc by some of the NPCs. Piloting and Navigation 4? Captain. If you have enough you can choose which to show. With unorthodox perks beings stickers applied to your helmet.

I remember one encounter where I was helping LIST colonists and I'm sure most of them thought I was a high end bounty hunter or mercenary from how they spoke.

 

[JagerIV]

Yeah, I defiantly like Perks. I just think there should be at most 10, and probably less. I lean to perks should be significant, which means you need to have few enough that while playing a character you can always more or less remember exactly what perks you have. My vague sense is people can generally remember maybe 10 distinct things, past that you just have a vague "manys". There's probably more exact science on what I'm talking about, but I think 10 is approximately correct, and I'm hopefully clear in what I'm talking.

So, the goal is to give a lot of options, but in the interest of replayability and memorable, you shouldn't be putting a lot into any one.

So, you have say 9 character Stats, Which are either fixed or change pretty slowly. And realistically you generally have 1-2 great stats, 1-2 bad stats, and everything else middling. So, while there's 9 stats, what you will normally remember about the character is "this is a strong, dub character" or "Fast and societal, low constitution". All your player strategizing and roll play practically revolve around "I'm strong at x, weak at y" probably 90% of time. A strength character might use melee weapons 90% of the time for example. Thus, the players strong stat in that case directs some 30-60% of the game on how you fight combat.

Then you have skills of what you can do, which may be a point system like fallout, say 1-100 point lockpick, or a level system, say level 1-10 lockpick, say classic each level lets you unlock a new level of lock, maybe with each 3 on average having some additional advantage, say level 3, 6, 9, and 10. Say level six your so skilled you can break simple locks without even thinking about it: level 1-3 locks are auto lockpicked with tried. That kind of thing.

But, say you have a level cap of 30, with the idea a particular character should be played for roughly 40 hours, advancing a level per hour and then maybe having 10 hours of max level play. Say 30 skills with 10 levels. Thus, while you theoretically have 300 skill levels, you can only really fill 10% of them in one game. Maybe at game start you default getting 10 levels in character creation for your starting skills, some bonus system gives you an additional 10, so your average game has 50 skill points you can invest, means you can only buy 16% of the skills in one run through. Thus, while there's 30 skills, your character is only really good a 1 of them, maybe 2. Probably a good 10-20 skills you have zero levels in.

Perks you get maybe above get one every 3 levels, so in a 30 level cap you select 10 perks. Maybe 7 of them will end up not being all that major, say a 5% bonus to XP, increase a character innate AC by one. 3 Should be game defining. A high Dex character might be able to take "olympus Bolt", which gives the character Usain bolts running speed of just under 100 m in 10 seconds. There may be a 100 Perks, but once again you pick 10 for only 10% on any one playthrough.

So, despite say the character creation/leveling system having 9 characteristics, 30 skills, and 100 perks, to draw some semi-random numbers, the character people will actually remember is their high dex glass cannon character with dex melee weapons perk who can run really fast and knife people while dodging all the shots. Which would be a character built around basically just:

High Dex stat
Melee Weapon Skill
Medical Skill
Perk: Surgical Precision: you apply your medical skills to wounding rather than healing: certain melee weapons get Dex modifiers in addition to Strength. Requires Dex x and Medical Skill y
Perk: Olympus Bolt:

So, out of over a 100 choices, the essence of the character boils down to 5 actual critical things. But, a player can clearly remember that character build, keeping it distinct in his mind, and since one character is only ever really dealing with about 10% of the stats in any one run intensely, you can probably get at least 10 different play styles here that would feel genuinely unique.

10 playthroughs at 40 hours a peace, maybe round up to 500 hours of total content, seems plenty, and 10 playthroughs is probably pushing the amount of variety you can cram in the actual game missions, rather than just theoretical builds.

 

[Typhonis]

Nine stats. Ok lets go with three overarching attributes. Mind, Body and Soul. Soul is how you connect to others, mind is the rational part of your person and Body is the physical.
They have 3 catagories. Strength, Dexterity and Endurance.

Strength, how strong you are.
Dexterity, how flexible you are.
Endurance how long you can last.

 

[JagerIV]

Nine stats. Ok lets go with three overarching attributes. Mind, Body and Soul. Soul is how you connect to others, mind is the rational part of your person and Body is the physical.
They have 3 catagories. Strength, Dexterity and Endurance.

Strength, how strong you are.
Dexterity, how flexible you are.
Endurance how long you can last.

That's basically what I was thinking: Body/mind/Soul, with three characteristics each. Physical I agree with the three there, with the following derived stats. Maybe humans have 1-30, 1-10 below average, 10-20 average, 20-30 superior.

Strength: directly impacts Health, Carry Capacity, Damage Melee, Recoil Modifier

HEALTH: Being strong seems the most directly tied with overall body mass of the physical stats, and thus raw bulk. Strength training I believe also makes your muscles thicker and tougher, bone to. So, it makes sense for this to tie to direct health. I'm thinking the formula being something like:

Strength*10=HP

So an average human has 10*10=100 HP, a toughened soldier would have 15*10=150, and an extreme outlier human has 300 HP.

Carry Capacity: carry capacity, though more like it determines encumbrance.

Strength*1= kg Carry Capacity

So, an average untrained person can perform actions unencumbered with 10 kg of weight. You can still sprint for example, maybe acrobatics like pulling up a wall. Encumbered is up to 3x that, where you can still do stuff but at a penalty. You can still run, but either slower or at more endurance cost. Walking speed might be slower. Up to 3x might be heavily encumbered, and bigger down, while over 3x is over-encumbered and you can't do some things like run.

So, basically the light-medium-heavy build trade offs, plus overall weight limit.

As point of comparison, a soldier with a Strength 15 would have 15 kg, 30 kg, and 45 kg, as light, medium, and heavy loads. With an averagish weight of 80 kg this would be 18%, 38%, and 56% of body weight, which seems reasonable for combat load. And that above that you might be pretty useless combat wise.

Melee damage and recoil minimization seem fairly straight forward, though how exactly its calculated would depend on specifics.

 

[JagerIV]

Dexterity: Directly impacts Dodge, Accuracy,

Dodge effects the to hit modifier of the character. This may either be a chance to hit, or abstracted to an AC modifier.

Accuracy effects the likeliness to hit, and hit precisely. Might be an actual to hit, might be abstracted to a damage modifier.

Endurance: Directly impacts Endurance points, Resistance, Speed?

Endurance Points: Currently leaning to Points*10. So, basic human has 100 endurance points. Max human would be 300 points

Resistance: persons innate toughness, resistance to effects like heat, cold, etcetera.
Speed I could see either being a dex or endurance.

Leaning to 1 point = 0.1 m/s walking, so walking speed between 1-3 m/s, running speed 3x walking, for 3-9 m/s.

 

[JagerIV]

To switch to map math, I found an interesting thing. Modern computers can use the 64 bit coordinate system. Using classical integer map coordinates for three dimensions, how big of a map does that allow? By this I mean where coordinates are stored (X,Y,Z) where each coordinate is 64 bit. Or, a total of 8 bytes per dimension, or 24 bytes per coordinate. Integer means there's no fractions, just whole units. If the unit for example is mm, someone moves 3 mm or 4 mm, but not 3.5. This can be useful for large maps, because you avoid float point errors which can be problems if the game world isn't literally built around the character.

So, how many units does a 64 bit hold? Well, 2^64=18E^18. How much is that? Well, if the scale is 1 mm, then that's 18 trillion km. 1 light year is about 10 trillion km. The map at the top is roughly 60 ly wide, so real scale/game scale to fit would only be about 30-1, which is not much at all. It would likely be necessary to shrink distances more for gameplay purposes.

So, with 64 bit coordinates, it should be perfectly possible to model a 50-1 60 LY radius map that's "only" 1.2 light years wide. which is still crazily large.

If you had your object list of 32 bit, you could list 4 billion objects, so for a full 4 byte object list with 24 byte coordinates, you could store the information of the location of 4 billion distinct objects for a mere 103 gigabytes. This is a huge amount of info, but not an impossible amount Maybe a 1 terabyte game? An extremely crazy 64 object list with 18E18 objects would probably be a quantum computer.

More realistically, you probably have a 16 bit object list on top of the 64 bit coordinates. That would be up to 65,000 distinct objects with 26 bytes per object, so filling up that object list would only be 2 Megabytes of info. Which is very manageable. I think each one would be a level/star/fleet. So, a planet would be 1 object on the space map, a star another one, a fleet would be another one.

Each Space object could then have its own 32 bit coordinate system based on itself. 32 bit coordinates take 50% as much memory as 64 bit, but at the same mm scale, you can still have 4,000 km wide maps. At a 50-1 scale Each would only be 240 km wide, easily within scale. One could have merely 20-1 scale for planets, which I was leaning to, and the Earth would only be 600 km wide, which is roughly what I was thinking about anyways. Jupiter would be just a little to big at the 20-1 scale, at 6,900 km wide. Suns would also be much bigger.

you could probably program around this though: maybe gas giants and suns use the 64 bit coordinates, which has light year scaling, Earth scale bodies use the 32 bit scaling, which allows a good sized planet and a bunch of space aground the object. 16 bit is unfortunately a little bit small for play modeling (assuming a 1mm movement scaling is neccesary) so, even small asteroids and such probably should use the 32 bit scaling.

16 bit though might be useful in level design. If done at the 1 cm scale, a 16 bit coordinate system can cover 655 m. If 10 cm works, you can do a 6 km area. If you had 16 bit coordinates for all 5 degrees of freedom plus an object list of 16 bit, a 16 bit
object list is 12 bits per object listed in the map, so a map with max objects would be less than 1 Megabyte of data.

All this to say a large scale 1 LY map might actually be technologically doable with 64 bit coordinates. So everything can be stored as one map. Technically. Effectly its 3 maps layered over each other. Buts its much better than I initially thought might be possible.

 

[JagerIV]

So, if you can model at true scale roughly 2 LY, and 40-60 LY scale at 20-1 or 30-1 scale, whichever makes more sense, doing so does require populating it with objects worth exploring, including in the depths of space. Otherwise one might as well have loading screens.

30-1 scale allows one to much more do "hand crafting" of worlds. It would be too much to place every tree on a planet for example, but setting the area of "forest" and letting procedural fill in forest is much more handleable.

30-1 scale for earth would be a planet with a diameter of 424 km. At orbital speeds of 8 km/s it would take 166 seconds to go to any particular point on the Earth, a little under 3 minutes. Since at most you can move to the opposite side of the world, the longest trip from one location to another would be roughly two minutes. Enough time to have a sense of distance, and a time to apricate the world in a flight sim sort of way, but not so long to be a major drag.

Especially treating the players time with respect and realism so phones work so you don't have to travel just to deliver a message. A hop to a different location on the planet should probably be at least a 15-20 minute mission, if not a questline/grinding zone. In which case a 1-2 minute travel to build atmosphere of the region and give the player a sense of the area makes sense.

A regular plane speed of roughly Mach 1 is 1 km per 3 seconds, so that speed would be 66 minutes to circle the globe, so realistically something like 20-40 minutes on max travel. Mere continental travel, say West coast to East coast, would still be on the scale of 200 km, which would be a plane trip of 10 minutes, an orbital trip of 25 seconds, car trip (100 kph/60mph) of 2 hours, walking of 40 hours. Assuming proportional rotation speed was maintained, you would have a complete day/night cycle in 48 minutes, so a cross continent walk would be 50 in game days.

This seems a good scale to preserve a sense of scale and things being big, but small enough you can get pretty far and do a bunch in real time.