I have noticed that we are a week and half in and the orbits of various planets/stations haven’t moved much relative to each other. I’m not sure if the simulation slowed down, but at this pace I expect that many planets will be opposite the CX with really bad flight times for two weeks or more. Due to current STL flight mechanics, this will mean either 1 day (or more) flights for in system travel to the CX, or using a lot of fuel to cut down travel times. This is going to be a major problem for some planets, where getting to and from the CX will cost a lot of fuel.
Besides the obvious ongoing frustration this will cause for players on these planets, I think it will be even more of a problem for new players. There is no way for a player to know when they are picking a starter planet that it is an inopportune cycle of their orbit. It is more or less mandatory that new players make at least one flight to and from the CX due to limited starting consumables, and if this flight takes a day or more it could cause new players serious grief.
While I dont have a problem with these sorts of situations (long travel time due to orbital positions), I agree its just another thing thats inopportune for new players who cant see the universe setup before they start. I think at the very least for the short term each planet info buffer needs to show orbital period and current angle (based on the degree measurements around the outside of each system map). That way you can kind of determine when things will line up again, and I bet certain enterprising individuals will build calculators out of that in no time so you can see when next things line up nicely.
The problem right now is that for some planets we are likely looking at weeks of suboptimal flight times between planet and CX. And I’m not talking about scenarios where they aren’t in perfect alignment, I’m talking about 2-3 weeks where the planet is at 80-100% of the worst case scenario trip to the CX. People can’t delay flights that long, especially new players. I think it would be better if the orbital periods were in more reasonable time frames so that the “bad” flight windows aren’t such an extended duration.
I think there are 2 big problems here: 1 where the planets and the CX are moving very slowly and take many weeks or possibly months to complete a rotation. The other BIG problem is then that some orbits are more or less synchronized/similar, so that the gap between them changes very slowly.
For example, when the universe started Umbra and Benten station were more or less perfectly aligned. It is approaching close to 2 weeks now, and the gap has widened to what I would guesstimate as 30 degrees. When Benten and Umbra end up opposite each other in orbit, they will have a (close to) worst case alignment for the better part of a month where flying to the CX is going to be very slow and expensive. There is no planning around that, it’s just going to be a cost of doing business. If the orbital periods were faster, such that best and worst case flight alignments happened over a period of days, then it would be more reasonable to do your shipping in that limited window.
Obviously this is a case by case situation, as some planets may have shorter windows of alignments/misalignments with their associated CX or other neighboring planets. I think the Benten/Umbra situation may be one of the worst cases. It also doesn’t help that Benten seems to be the most spread out of the CX systems, combined with the highest micrometeriod density (double that of any other CX) turning it into a nasty resource sink for shipping costs.
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Yeah you are right there. In a universe where the STL between planets only takes hours (compared to our system/a more realistic scifi universe like the Expanse), the planets should orbit much quicker really. That does definitely solve the problem, and I cant see what the downside would be.