>Well to be honest real scifi space settings would be horribly limiting. You'd have to take so much into consideration.

I'm not talking about diamond-hard sci-fi, mind you. Such games as Nexus: the Jupiter Incident and Homeworld managed to catch the feel just right, and the hardest sci-fi things in those were that in Nexus ships had retrograde and maneuvering thrusters, and in Homeworld fighters had to refuel in the first game. And both games portrayed space breathtakingly. Especially in Nexus, you always "feel" the space, but never have to suffer through it. The game's exposition does the job: "...after nine month of flight we arrived at Sunflower" or "...with current propulsion technologies and orbital positioning, voyage from Jupiter to Pluto will take us 20 years, but with hyperspace tech, we can make it in 2 weeks"
and so on. It really makes you understand how bloody huge are the distances, if even to travel withing a solar system with space-warping alien magitech you need weeks! Now compare it to Sunrider, where Icari can warp from one star to another and back before the bathroom break. Homeworld though made it through pure visuals and soundtrack alone. It embraced big empty spaces, and thre a bunch of collosal nonsense in the background occasionally, just to make you feel that much extra tiny and unimportant. Nexus also did that, just as succesfully, it's just that instead of nonsense, it had actual planets.


Some games take those limitations and roll with them, building entire gamepllay mechanics around them. KSP and Children of a Dead Earth do so with orbital mechanics and weight limitations in space travel, COADE adds combat and designing armour and weapons into the mix as well.






> Also Mass Effect Andromeda tried to do something similar in preproduction and determined that a vast empty space was honestly not fun. It's >what No Man's Sky turned out to be on release.

The failure of NMS was that it polluted all that space with a butt-load of same-ish crap. It was repetative and the space travel itself was just meh. The space was vast, sure, but just like in Sunrider, at no time would you feel like you are in actual space, exactly because of that. Fuck, Freelancer made a better job than NMS in that regard.

To portray the space correctly, one does not need to force the player to slog through large open spaces hours on end, in fact, a lot can be done with as much as just adding a calendar and modifying the date. It's something they did in Space Rangers games. The flight from one system to another takes minutes, but in in-game time, it could take weeks. Usual delivery quest gives you about 90 days of in-game time to complete on average. And when you hyper-jump from one pace to another, you can not see the date at all, so there is always the element of surprise when you emerge from hyperspace - "ooh, it took THAT long. I better kick the engine into overdrive". Battles also lasted days. You could sometimes fail an assasination contract simply because it took you a week or two just to bring the target's health into the reds and you've missed the deadline because of that.

The spaceship design is also important in this regard, one could use that as well. Ships in Sunrider look more "-ship" than "space-" if you know what i mean. Decks laid out in parallel to the vector of thrust, no propellant tanks even SUGGESTED anywhere, fucking superstructures, etc. NO RADIATORS too. In space, one of the biggest problem is waste heat disposal, since in vacuum, an object can only cool itself down through radiating the heat away in the form of light (visible or invisible), which is inefficient as hell. If one takes that one consideration into account, one can design some cool looking spaceships accentuating with those designs that "Spce is NOT an ocean".

If LiS did as much as added messages like "You want to jump to Ongess. It Will take you 2 months and 23 days to arrive" during mission selection, that alone would do wonders. Of course, that would require to write the story with regards to such travel times, but that will only benefit it, methinks.

>They made plenty of references to the time everything actually took if you paid attention.

I stopped giving any fucks after that episode with "OMG THAT BULLET WAS MOVING AT 150% SPEED OF LIGHT AND ASAGA DEFLECTED IT WITH A SWORD!!!!". All numbers in the game are pure asspullium with no consistency or relevancy. I should have mentioned that in the OP.

>The final battle of Liberation Day was basically 2 days long. It took Fontana 14 hours just to get the PACT fleet operational after Alice intervened with her little virus.

If i remember correectly, it was two hours. Anime engineering, blyat.

Anyhow, my point stands - they've made a terrible job portraying space. Good game otherwise, will wait for a sequel.

> Asaga might have anticipated that the shot was coming. Yeah of course laser light is extreme fast but hey, what is a laser weapon? I'm studying >laser technology and even I wasn't mad of it.

It wasn't a laser, it was a bullet. Which Asaga deflected with her sword, so it hit a Ryuvian crusier instead of Chigara. By all reasonable accounts, launching a bullet from a rifle at even one quarter of the speed of light should have vaporised both bullet and Sola in an instant. Besides, it's basic physics that no object in normal space can travel faster than light, right?

>So where do we want to draw the line?

At sodomising basic physics? I have no problem with warp drives and anti-laser shields and other handwavium like that, but accepting "150% OF SPEED OF LIGHT!!!111oneoneone" means just throwing any resemblance of sense into the airlock.

Warp drive vanishes nothing. Warp drive, hyperspace, stutter-teleportation, stargates, etc. - all of those are handwavium devices that CIRCUMNAVIGATE the limitations of real space, not break them. When such technologies are introduced into the setting, they are always assumed to be working on some extended variant of normal physics, using them to cheat or avoid otherwise insurmountable obstacles, like the lightspeed. Warp drives do so by twisting and bending the space-time in such a way, that the ship is technically standing still, but at the same time is moving; Hyperspace ones avoid normal physics by jumping into a literal paralel dimension with different metric, etc. IN every instance, however, the physics are expanded in some vaguely specified way, not broken( at least not at the levels of school physics curiculum). The problem with BULLET being launched at the speed of light (from a rifle, mind you) or even faster, is that no such technology is even possible to squeeze into the situation. It is a solid chunk of metal or whatever, traveling at transluminal speed because enough energy was applied to it with a rifle. It require outright breaking a buttload of physical rules, as well as common sense. And if we accept that, then the whole story and the entire universe loses any kind of meaning, because at the point when so much rules are broken, there is no reason for things to develop in any logical way, everything becomes an asspull.

Now, regarding earlier points:




Sharr of Ryuvia is just a genetically modified human, basically. And there is only that much that a chunk of meat can do, no matter the genetic engineering, unless we assume existence of literal magic in the setting. 




See above.

    Bloody hell, imagine for a moment that you are trying to float a solid uranium dildo in a lake of liquid hydrogen, ok? Obviously, on it's own accord, the bloody thing will sink instantly, because it's density is about 20+ times as big. Now, if it din't do so, and floated instead, that would be analogous to launching a bullet at the speed of light in terms of blatanly breaking physics and common sense. THAT WOULD BE MAGIC. However, if you attached floatation devices to it, sufficient to make it float, then it would be analogous to inventing some handwavium FTL drive in a sci-fi setting with expanded physics.




Goddammit, Neppi, you don't get it, you keep missing the point like it's a frikking PACT Support Ryder and you are drunken Kryska standing five hexes away, ARGGGBRAFLGROASKHDKHLKAJDHLJKW *eats keyboard in rage*.

... and yes, i did enjoy the game. Characters are lovable (exept that Mary Sue Chigara), although the battles are often excrutiatingly boring and prone to save-scumming.

This is where I lost it xDDD . Obviously this is the point where I lost the discussion, isn't it? But who says that the shooter of this bullet had NOT a device alowing it to shoot those bullets at this speed, or having his own little warp out of the weapon?

I got your point mate. There are physical rules which cannot be broken, like material is always slower than speed, heavy things sink in liquid without help. Devices have the power to work around these rules, I get it Just sayin' that you almost always can find an explanation if you really want.

Did you know that shooting a laser cannon, like the Legion one, would heat all material in the Legion up to melting temperature no matter what material (or it would need to be 1000 times bigger than the beam)? And instead of a big light fire cannon you would see just a fraction of a light puls (because continious wave lasers can never reach that power). Its even likely it would be light in UV (UV has more energy) so you wouldn't even see this
Normally as a physics student I should have thrown this game right into my trash bin, because it is never explained how the hell the Legion and the Vanguard Cannon can produce this shit load of energy without having cooling problems.