User blog comment:CrimsonAssassin/New BFE Map Game Anybody?/@comment-35390562-20130529160708

So what I'm seeing is that a lot of people want a backstory TL, which Pita, Monster Pumpkin, and I will be working on. Anyone else who wants to join this TL is free to do so. Regarding the game itself, a lot of people, from the looks of it, really want to tone it down on the size of the map. What I want to bring to attention is a few things on space itself. The following paragraphs might be kind of long. Okay, really long.

1. Space is empty and habitable planets are rare. Stars with planets are kind of rare and intelligent life is even rarer. Even if we set up camp on uninhabitable bodies, extensive subterranean or bubbled colonies take a long time to create. For them to make a difference in the race's empire takes even longer. Important planets will be seperated by millions of km while important systems will be seperated by tens of lightyears. Galactic Empires would hold a few habitable planets, a bunch of uninhabitable planets, and that's pretty much their territory. A planet that matters, in theory, would take a long time to take over. My first instinct was to say that a large empire only actually has a few dozen planets. I then took into account how incredibly empty space is.

2. The galaxy is not a flat disk. The systems usually are a few lightyears away from an average 'altitude' of systems. Take Planet Dave and Planet Steve for example. These planets, if you're looking at a bird's eye view of the solar system, look like they're right next to each other. In reality, Planet Dave is three lightyears above the 'average altitude of systems' and Planet Steve is maybe one lightyear below the average. Pizza Planet, we're leaving out of this discussion.

3. Realistically, you can't blockade a system. A planet, maybe, but not a system. Say you had a blockade in the Oort Cloud. If you had one ship for every oort body, you've still got a really ineffective blockade. So you know what this means? Territorial claims, realistically, don't mean shit. Yeah, Race A can say that he holds the entire Perseus Arm. Race B might recognize it and Race D might recognize it since they've known these guys for forever. Race C, however, might not know about the claims due to their being a new empire and Race E might be a dickhead and just go through Race A's space. Given the probability of him actually going near any inhabited systems or ships, there is nothing Race A can do about it.

4. The Galaxy Map we know represents a bird's eye view and, while it is great for showing us what a galaxy looks like, it's a horrible way to represent territories. The solar system we live in isn't a dot with a little arrow that says 'you are here'. It's a complex ball of celestial bodies and gas that, despite what science fiction will have you believe, is mostly empty. A good representation of territories is a 3D star map on a plane. You know what kind of plane I mean.

Given the above statements, I think we can come to the conclusion that not only is our way of using a galaxy map for territories kind of silly, stellar territories presiding over large swaths of space (meaning large swaths of 98% nothing) are not feasible unless your race has an incredible birth rate and is incredibly horny all the time.