Movable Planets?

Your planet and station moving code has given me a very interesting idea. I had never considered that the stations could move around the way you are moving them.

Stations have some magical properties that normal sims do not. A system can have 100 stations in it and not have a change of frame rate. But 100 ships, even out of sight, will crush the processor.

The reason I created Fleet Operations was to let there exist hundreds of ships, but not burden the graphics system. Fleet Operations exist as waypoints not placed into the game.

However, it now occurs to me that moving stations could be used as operations. Or better said, operations could be represented as just another type of station. It would use either an invisible Sim or a specific ship.

The major advantage of this idea is that the operation would then be present and easy to locate. If you wanted to know if a police patrol heard a distress call, it would be easy to look for all police stations within 500,000km. Which is harder to do if the Fleet Operation have no physical location. Not impossible to do, just difficult, and slow and full of special cases.

Also possible are operations that exist in deep space, or other non-station location. Right now, operations can only exist near stations. This is the chessboard concept.

But if they exist as a sim, a station themselves, then they could locate themselves at any possible place.

There are huge disadvantages to consider. We would need to leave a bunch of "operations" free in the system. These kind of "no-type" stations would get assigned to an operation. The operation would move them around.

This would mean the number of "stations" in any one system would roughly double.

It would be like having the chess board concept, but with the chess board itself changing and flexing to match the world. Basically, anywhere the player would want to go, would become a place.

It deserves further consideration. It might be the key to making the game much more seamless than it currently is.

The idea of having orbiting objects update on system entry is exactly how it was done in Frontier: Elite 2 & its sequel..! It was cool then and I'm damn sure it'll be cool now

The way it was handled in both games, however, left something to be desired: the H-Drive would dump you at a random point in the outer system, so it didn't really matter whether the planets were accurately simulated because it was effectively random how far you'd have to go to get to any given planet at any given time.

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