You know, when we started to develop this game, there was not the planets and orbits. There was friction in space, maximum speed limit and the only key feature was a limited fuel and ability to capture parts of enemy ships. We wanted to call the game “Salvage Command”.
How well that we have changed the concept.
Once we thought: Hey! Vaccum friction? It’s a silly! Why all action space games ignore the realism?
Beautiful Kerbal Space Program already tell to the world about real space. Actually, KSP and Simple Rockets inspired us to bring realism in our space games.
So there we start to develop Celestial Command.
The main idea is unite classic action space game with realistic orbital mechanics. So scale of star system should be changed for more action.
Celestial Command will have a multiplayer, so we cannot use time scale and fast traveling between a planets. Instead of this, we decided to make star system smaller, so travel between planets will takes something around 10-20 minutes. And while your ship in travel you can switch to another ship and do something else.
Let’s talk in numbers
Most likely we will change it, but for now we have next:
Sizes:
Average ship size 10 m
Planet diameters 100-400 m
Star radius 2 km
Average orbital period of the ship on the planet orbit is 2-7 minutes.
Average orbital period of the planet on the star orbit is 6-20 minutes.
If you’re familiar with astronomy, those numbers may seem funny, but our goal is not reliable reconstruction, we want to create pretty simple action space game with a bit of realism.
Where is the moon?
You are probably noticed that planet don’t have a natural satellites.
The problem is that planets even now is small relative to a ship. And if we’ll add satellites, they should be just a tiny So we decide do not add natural satellites to the game.
And we cannot enlarge the planets, because of then we need to enlarge distance between planets and then interplanetary traveling will become boring.