Every dot on the vast cosmic starscape of the Milky Way is a star system and within are an amazing mix of planets, moons, asteroid belts, rings, comets or cosmological marvels waiting to be discovered. The Milky Way galaxy features 400 billion star systems; each one can be explored and they are all moving correctly; spinning, orbiting each other. And you will be able to select stars to jump to directly from the night sky.
To achieve this, frontier started out with the precise locations all the known stars, exo-planets, celestial bodies and phenomena. Beyond that, procedural techniques are used in conjunction with real, ‘hard’ physics to model the other hundreds of billions of star systems.
Never before has the beauty and scope of our galaxy been so accurately mapped and so completely realized in a virtual world. Every single one of the stars in the real night sky is present in the virtual one.
In elite we have some 150,000 star systems visible from Earth in real life; in the game this will be backed up with billions more that will be scientifically accurate in terms of how they formed. They will be generated procedurally to fit the observational data as best as possible, as most of these systems are not individually visible from Earth, even with Hubble.
Each of these will include stellar systems with different types of planets, gas giants, rocky moons, asteroid fields and so on. One great side effect of this is the night sky is “correct” when viewed from Earth and changes gradually as you travel to nearby systems. The constellations gradually become unrecognisable as you move further from Earth