Returning To the Edge: The Stars In Their Courses

The Cosmology of Planet's Edge

Pick almost any clear, moonless night of my youth, and you’d find me lying in the backyard of my childhood home and gazing at the stars overhead. I’d go through a ritual of first finding the North Star, then carefully tracing the outline of the Big Dipper and Orion and all of the other major constellations. My favorite was Cassiopeia, five delicate stars arranged in a W and named after the mother of Andromeda. I adored the exotic sounds of the ancient names, dreamed romantically of Altair and Rigel and Vega, and wondered why Betelgeuse had such a silly sounding name. Once I had my bearings, I’d get down to the business of trying to discover where Mars and Jupiter had wandered off to, and establish if the moving lights in the sky were airplanes, satellites, or aliens that had come to finally take me back to my home planet.

My love for stargazing was nurtured by my Uncle Bob, the third youngest of my mother’s four brothers. Along with being the person who gave me a love of science fiction and of chess, he also gave me my first experience with a telescope. During my bi-weekly visits to the family farm south of Haskell, Oklahoma, he would quiz me on my knowledge of the stars and planets and other celestial phenomena as we took long walks, reveling together in a view that was less contaminated by light pollution than I had back in Tulsa. It was his influence more than almost anyone else that kept me always looking up.

Years later, when I was tasked with creating the content for the original Planet’s Edge, I remember pouring through my childhood star atlas and trying to work out which star systems we should use in the game. We’d determined that we’d have an explorable “bubble” of about a hundred and fifty light years from Earth, so I had to find out which stars were within that radius. To my chagrin, I discovered that virtually all of my favorites fell outside that arbitrary limit, so I had the choice to either abandon even the smallest crumbs of scientific accuracy and “relocate” them, or stick with what existed. I opted for authenticity and dashed off a list of appropriate systems, then handed it over to Eric Hyman to implement since he would be the one responsible for making all the space navigation and exploration possible. As it was, my plate was full with figuring out what worlds we would be visiting and how the game story would thread those experiences together.

THE STAR MAP - The original printed star map that was included in the Planet’s Edge game box, rendered by Focus on Design, the company that produced many of the marketing materials for New World Computing in the early 1990s.

The point of our game wasn’t about accurately modelling our stellar neighborhood, but instead placing stars where they best served the design of the game. (This was a philosophy fostered by New World Computing where we were all encouraged to balance for what felt right over rigid mathematical accuracy.) For the most part, Eric did a good job of getting the relative stellar distances from Earth right, but then committed the egregious sin of transposing the Izar and Zaurak sectors of the map. The stars within these regions were flipped from their proper places in the heavens so that they were located almost diametrically opposite from where they existed in the real cosmos. I should have caught the mistake myself, but I wasn’t paying close attention to what Eric was doing with the map, and I didn’t even realize it had happened until last year when I began trying to compile a more accurate database to use for Fractured Frontier.

NAVIGATIONAL CORRECTION - While creating screen mockups for the Ulysees bridge, I created a corrected version of the sector map that more accurately represents the real-world distances of the stars, and puts the transposed sectors where they should actually be.

While the stellar transpositions had been an accident, we were utterly cavalier about ignoring specific astronomical facts or making changes to streamline the game experience. The star map was collapsed to a 2D plane, meaning that most of the relative travel distances between star systems were completely wrong. We altogether ignored the sizes and types of each star, and how that impacted the “goldilocks” zones of habitability around each. In every system, the planets moved in completely circular orbits when they should have been moving elliptically. Despite the fact that many of the star systems featured in Planet’s Edge are composed of multiple stars, nary a binary, trinary or any other -ary made an appearance in game (I still can’t forgive Eric for not solving the infamously intractable three body problem for the sake of our little space game).

I would like to say that in the reboot that I’ll “fix” all of these astronomical oversights, but in reality I’m stuck with the same issues we had back in 1991. I’ll have to balance accuracy against what makes the game fun to play. If I can add something in, and it enriches the experience, then I’ll absolutely give it a shot. If there’s an element that makes the game truer to life but it bogs the player down, however, then I’ll either simplify it or ignore it altogether. At the very least, I know I can do at least a little better than we did the first time around.

Of course, many things have changed in the interim between Point of No Return and Fractured Frontier. Not only has better technology come along that allows us to create games with more complexity, but the Hubble and John Webb telescopes are allowing us to peer into other star systems and detect alien planets. You can expect the newly surveyed systems of Gliese, Kepler, TRAPPIST, and Wolf to appear in game alongside old favorites like Algieba, Kornephoros, and Cor-Caroli. We’ll venture into planetary nebulae and navigate asteroid fields. It’s all waiting out there along the Fractured Frontier.

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