About the 400 billion star systems

[Iain M Norman]

You're off by 2 orders of magnitude: 100 billion & 400 billion.

Interesting no one knows how many there are exactly. Either for real, or in the game.

Frontier have never counted them they said, they only know an estimate, as crazy as that sounds for a computer program.

Can't exactly get the Stellar Forge to give you an array of all the systems and simply get it's length

 

[CaptainKremmen]

Yes you're right, you will be free to go anywhere in any direction, but to do and see exactly the same few things each time.

Reminds me of this forum sometimes!

 

[Jenner]

Reminds me of this forum sometimes!

I seriously loled.

 

[Monarch Black]

Yes you're right, you will be free to go anywhere in any direction, but to do and see exactly the same few things each time.

Each one of us will barely go through 1 % of those 400 billions star systems before quit playing Elite Dangerous and move to something else.

That is still very optimistic. If one of us saw 0.00001% that is still 40,000 systems, or 5 1/2 times the total systems in Eve Online counting regular and wormhole space.

400 billion systems is a hard thing to imagine (DB and the videos say 400 billion, not 4 or 100). Really it is so large it borders on ridiculous. If ED sold 500,000 units, that would be a personal domain of 800,000 systems per person. If you played 12 hours a day, every day, and spent 10 minutes in each system, it would take you over 30 years to visit your personal domain, and that is for each of those half million people. If everyone in the world played ED, they could each have 57 systems to themselves.

If we were to calculate the galaxy as a cylinder 500 systems deep (that may actually be too deep, not sure if there are 500 systems in a vertical slice) then it would have a diameter of 31900 systems. If it took averaging a minute to jump from one system to another, that would take 532 hours to fly from one side to the other, or 44 days of flying 12 solid hours a day. If the depth of the galaxy were more like 400 deep, then make that 50 days to fly across.

To quote HHG2tG: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."

 

[Zvanya]

Saying that ED will have a play area of 400 billion systems is a bit of sophistry. Anyone with even a dim understanding of what 400b means knows that 99%+ of those systems will never be visited. In practice if there were "only" 1 million systems instead of 400b there would be little if any effect on game play - IMO.

I'm not complaining or criticizing mind you. Just sayin

 

[MarcusReed]

NO just no

 

[Ian Phillips]

Don't be naïves, even exploring will be redundant up to a point. When you will have seen every different types of spaceports, outposts, hotspots, etc., there will be, you will quickly lose interest to wander any further.
The 99 % left will just be the same, but with a random combination of already seen stuff.

So.....rather like the real galaxy then?

Absolutely no point in exploring - should have told all those people who went to unknown parts of our world. It's just more of the same stuff - so why did they bother?

 

[CaptainKremmen]

"Mr. Darwin, really. More drawings of trees, animals, insects, birds and coastlines. We have all that and more in Bognor! You say you seek variety of species? Why, I myself have a cat, two dogs and a stoat! Your frivolous obsession with travel is a waste of time and money, I say. What does the rest of the world have to offer that England does not?"

 

[Zvanya]

Yes you're right, you will be free to go anywhere in any direction, but to do and see exactly the same few things each time.

Assumption. How do you know it will be "the same few things each time?"

Each one of us will barely go through 1 % of those 400 billions star systems before quit playing Elite Dangerous and move to something else.

Speak for yourself please. And BTW no one will see anywhere close to 1% of 400b

Don't be naïves, even exploring will be redundant up to a point. When you will have seen every different types of spaceports, outposts, hotspots, etc., there will be, you will quickly lose interest to wander any further.

You are assuming that exploration will have no purpose than to look at stuff. You are also assuming that everyone has a short attention span. Projection?

And i'm sure of one thing, from a quality standpoint, procedural generation of content cannot match content hand-made my developers.

another assumption

 

[Enigma333]

That is still very optimistic. If one of us saw 0.00001% that is still 40,000 systems, or 5 1/2 times the total systems in Eve Online counting regular and wormhole space.

400 billion systems is a hard thing to imagine (DB and the videos say 400 billion, not 4 or 100). Really it is so large it borders on ridiculous. If ED sold 500,000 units, that would be a personal domain of 800,000 systems per person. If you played 12 hours a day, every day, and spent 10 minutes in each system, it would take you over 30 years to visit your personal domain, and that is for each of those half million people. If everyone in the world played ED, they could each have 57 systems to themselves.

If we were to calculate the galaxy as a cylinder 500 systems deep (that may actually be too deep, not sure if there are 500 systems in a vertical slice) then it would have a diameter of 31900 systems. If it took averaging a minute to jump from one system to another, that would take 532 hours to fly from one side to the other, or 44 days of flying 12 solid hours a day. If the depth of the galaxy were more like 400 deep, then make that 50 days to fly across.

To quote HHG2tG: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."

Just to add to this. It takes approximately 32 years just to count to a billion. To count to 400 billion therefore would take 12800 years by this measure so even if you visited each system for say 5 seconds, it would take far beyond the span of recorded human civilization to do so. The FD team do not need to provide any content for over 99% of the systems as no-one will ever get there. Thus there's no point worrying about content that can never ever be visited in the span of a human lifetime.

Just like real space, it's nice to know that there is something out there, even though, wormholes notwithstanding, mankind can never visit.

 

[hawkenfox]

Nah OP you are joking, we want to escape the limit and here you want to trap us all in a limited world ... go play eveonline it has 5000 system.

 

[hawkenfox]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ... there is so many other game that does that so what's the point in having limited freedom and fighting for 1 slice of a fix number of pie ? :S

 

[Fromhell]

It´s very important to have a number to print on the backside of the box and on advertising posters.

If it means anything relevant for gameplay is totally secondary

If it were a real sandbox you could claim a non populated system, build defences, place an NPC army of ships, fly down to your own planet and build a house there, or a factory, mine the ressources and craft from there.

Since this crazy number of systems is not put to use in any way it is rather meaningless if the game has 100, 1000 or a billion systems.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It makes practically no difference if there are 400 thousand, 400 million or 400 billion stars available, the point is that the play area is essentially borderless and you can go anywhere in any direction.

400 thousand actually would run into a border fairly soon - you'd not even get as far from the edge of inhabited space as the edge is from Sol before you reached the edge of the galaxy. (I'm using 70,000 stars as the count for inhabited space, and assuming that inhabited space has a "normal" average density at least for the Orion-Cygnus arm)

400 million you'd need to go about 17 times as far as the radius of inhabited space to get to the edge (though, actually, you'd hit the top and bottom of the galactic disc quicker than that if you headed up or down, and run into the extremely sparse space at the edge of the Orion-Cygnus arm going in most other directions, so it might be okay).

That probably would be enough in practice, though I don't know exactly how self-sufficient Frontier intends an exploration fleet to be capable of being: if it is theoretically possible to travel that distance, someone will, and then you really do need all 400 billion.