' Wrote:I prefer to compare Space to the 1800s Oceans than to modern day life.
How many pirates did you see robbing merchants in a dinghy?
The following is my personal opinion, not that of the admin team:
DING! Someone is a winner, here, because you get the scale. The actual analogy of:
Quote:Let's say that systems are cities. New York is New York, New Berlin is Berlin, Stuttgart is Stuttgart
is flawed.
City of New York has about 10,000,000 people, with a police force of about 40,000 officers (including things like Port Authority, Transit Authority, etc., not just regular NYPD. That's all those people in an area of about 370 square miles. Assume that since it's built up and down, to include cubic space, and you still only get 370 cubic miles.
Now, let's translate that into solar systems reality. The distance between Earth and Jupiter is just under 400 million miles. (Our orbit is 93 million miles out, Jupiter is 483 million miles out - forgive the rounding, but it's easier for calculations.) Area of a circle is pi times the radius, squared. So we simply consider the 'washer' in space that is the area volume - and again, assume that we only stay right on the plane, we have 2,450,442,228 square miles, or roughly 8 million times the surface area of New York City. And of course, since space isn't flat - there's a LOT of space out there.
Cops are going to sit near the planets, do customs patrols right there, and enforce planetary law. It really IS going to be up to the Navies to patrol that vast distance - and they're not going to do a good job of it, simply because space is so darned big - which is what happened during the age of pirates. Police cutters would work close in to shore, catching smugglers (or not) as they came in close. But out on the open seas, it's was the navies against the pirates - and lots of times, the pirates won their battles.
Move this up in scale now to our fictional Freelancer universe. There are, for rules purposes, 26 official house systems. You're going to do what, with more than 50 billion square miles of space between those small chunks of rock called planets? (Again, that's assuming you stay on the plane. You start figuring cubic, and then it gets really ridiculous. That's when the old mariners prayer comes to mind - Lord, your ocean is so vast and huge, and my boat is so small....)
(Again, to reiterate for the hardcore science guys out there - I'm only considering the area between Earth and Jupiter - if we consider the total volume of just OUR solar system, the numbers get astronomical in size - pun intended.)
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
