Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

How I Wonder WHERE you are

Real View vs Adjusted View

As we know stars are a long way away from us, even the light from our own sun takes 8 minutes to reach us, so we see stars where they were when the light left them years earlier not where they are currently. This leads to a problem with how we show the view of the universe, if we show stars where they were when the light left them (the Real View) then we’ll get complaints that when we accellerate towards a star to travel their that we’re not aiming at it, of course if we actually aimed at it we would end up jumping into deep space since the star will have moved. If we use an Adjusted View then viewing the galaxy from Earth will cause all the stars to appear in the wrong place, familiar constellations will not be recognisable (based on the fact that the stars that make them up are different distances away so they will be offset by different amounts dependant on distance.

Below I’ll detail the pros and cons of using the two views

Real View

Pros:

  • The universe will look correct no matter where it’s viewed from
  • Realistic in terms of space travel as we understand it

Cons:

  • Not travelling towards a star to jump may be construed as a bug
  • More difficult to setup since we need to calculate distances and backtrack the motion of the stars.

Adjusted View

Pros:

  • Easy to code since we will already know the location of every star
  • Travelling towards a star will look correct in laymans terms

Cons:

  • Constellations will not look correct when viewed from Earth due to the difference in distances causing distortion.
  • Incorrect in terms of actual space travel and real world physics.

Which View to Use?

Obviously we should use the adjusted view since it’s the easiest to program and understand, so who will notice the distortions to constellations from Earth, well that’s true, however except where we’re dealing with FTL travel ATF is trying to be as realistic as possible in it’s space model, so we have really have no choice, we have to go with the real view, there’s no escaping it.