spara wrote: ↑Mon Aug 07, 2017 5:34 pm I feel that the lanes are fine, but they have to be rationalized some how.
That's not difficult at all. No matter what your geometry - Euclidian, non-Euclidian, Einsteinian-gravitational - there will be some routes from A to B which are shorter than other routes from A to B. Crews cost money to feed, and cargoes have deadlines, so no matter what your choose for the Ooniverse physics, there will be quicker routes, which will attract more traffic than others.
What that geometry is, and how to calculate the optimal route, is where the interest comes in. And it's not a trivial problem. Try hunting your science reading for a discussion of real world quantum computing which doesn't mention the "Travelling Salesman Problem".
As far as I can tell, the physics model the the Ooniverse uses basically means that straight lines are the shortest routes between A and B. Which is fine enough - that tells you where your space lane will be (and also where to avoid if you don't like being mass-locked every 5 seconds, or getting into a fight every 20 seconds).
But I do have one beef. Mass locks. They work well for spacecraft - there's an OXP which varies the range at which you mass lock depending on the mass of the spacecraft affecting you. Works great. But it ignores the planet until you get to a certain altitude above it. (I've not investigated closely - it's somewhere between 2 and 3 planetary radii from the centre.) Which is unrealistic. If you assume all the planets have the same density (unrealisitic) then the mass-lock range would be something more like the cube of the planetary radius (with a scale factor). Which would mean that a gas giant might have a mass lock radius that gets in the way of the straight line route from witchpoint to system station. So your actual shortest-flight-time route is now to fly to a tangent to the planet's mass lock radius, then skirt the planet while staying minimally outside the mass lock range until you can resume your flight towards the system station. Worse (or better, depending on your point of view) is that a station in free space (ConStore at the witchpoint) or in orbit around a very small planet/ moon might have access from any direction, but most stations in orbit around planets of a decent size would need to be approached (optimally) by torus-driving to a point radially out from the station, then accepting the planet's mass lock and coasting in towards the station. There are high-angle turns lurking in there (we call them dog-legs when steering oil wells), which have potential for cutting the corner on injectors, where you an get a jump on/ from attackers.
Did I mention that a mass-related mass lock would considerably affect the (optimal) approach path to a station around a large planet. Meh, who cares about them? Well, larger planets have more space for more population, so more Gross Planetary Product in the economy, and so often higher prices. Hmmm!
One minor complication, from a planetary science MOOC course I took under @plutokiller a few months ago (yes, the guy largely responsible for Pluto not being considered a planet any more) is that the density of planets varies considerably with composition and size. So strictly, you shouldn't just assume that the mass is related to the cube of the radius. But it's a relatively minor effect - in the Solar System, the density range is from 687 kg/m^3 for Saturn to 5514 for Earth (an 8-fold difference). Mass OTOH ranges through nearly a factor of 6000 for the planets (all 8 of them) and radius by a factor of 30. Raising the radius to the power of 2.6 would give a Solar System-like distribution of masses, and mass * range would give you your parameter for when the mass lock effect kicks in.
I think that gives a number of interesting changes to gameplay at the expense of actually being somewhat related to reality. I've no idea how to develop OXPs, but this might give people some ideas.