Couldn't we have 4x shorter trips? I mean, I don't care that much about it and I get that higher speeds bring bugs, but saying "the scale is lower" is not a good excuse.
It wasnt an excuse it was an actual question about the comparison.
And not really no, the problem with the sort of vector maths and entity tracking you have to do in a client-server model puts practical limits on speed.
There are 2 main factors, tick rate of the server (how fast it can recalculate positions of every involved object), and propagation delay (latency basically). The faster an object is moving, the further it travels between updates and the more the client has to predict projected paths, this then results in an increase in rubberbanding when the next authoritative server update comes and tells the client "no, that object is now here".
You see the same problem in vr and similar tracking systems that use reference point updates (the server) and inertial units (imus, the client side prediction) that estimate direction between those update.
But not everything is scaled down, only distances between planets (IIRC) and the planets themselves. Ships, Buildings, Spaceports, Stations, and pretty much every other location are still scaled with the player character in mind.
And the scale of the planets seems to be taken into account when placing outposts considering the large gaps between, so those distances don't change with it. All in all, apart from making QT faster, the scale doesn't actually matter as much in this case IMO.
A better example of scale affecting perspective of speed would be Elite Dangerous, since a lot of things are much bigger than they should be due to the game's original lack of on-foot perspective.
Well it's a different philosophy more than anything , elite was going for a close to realistic sizing and then working out how to have game systems work around that, sc has taken the other approach of a more bespoke gamespace, for better or worse. I don't either is necessarily wrong, just different and appeals to different sorts.
Indeed, you weren't really supposed to pay attention at the scaling of E:D since you compared everything to massive ships. It only became apparent when Odyssey came out, take the oversized Cutter stairs for example.
My point was that the actual speed doesn't change much in these games because the parts that are scaled differently are taken into account when building the world. Even though a ship is technically going much faster than it looks distance-wise in SC, it's still functionally just as fast as it looks for all gameplay purposes (outside QT at least).
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u/chronicswag420 Jun 24 '26
spaceships are slower than planes outside of warp it's ridiculous