Meet Ferry the Spaceship.
When you need a quick one-off delivery, Ferry is your chauffeur. We hired him because there is no traffic or possibility of collisions in space. This makes him excellently suited for the job: fast, reliable, and no driver’s license required.
When this boat floors it, the first 100 km/s out of a planetary orbit are reached in less than a second. My trusty qalculater tells me that
> 100km/s /1s to gees
(100 kilometers/second) / (1 second) ≈ 10197.2 gees
Being used to tens or perhaps hundreds of gs at most, I thought my calculation had gone wrong, but no: with one earth g at ~9.8m/s², these 100km/s² aren’t a mere ten of those, there is an extra kilo of them.
Ten thousand earth gravities. Fancy that pulling on your buttocks! Ferry’s leap into interplanetary space is, however, no unparalleled feat. Desiring to put this number into context, my deep dive research (i.e., opening Wikipedia) landed me at this comparison table. Coming in at 10’400 g, a Mantis Shrimp’s claw during predatory strike accelerates as fast as Ferry’s six rocket engines.
The next entry of the table is also of Factorial relevance: the electronics in military artillery shells is rated up to 15’500 g. I am glad I haven’t pushed a little harder! Poor Ferry, his electronics broken, völlig losgelöst
I hope this fun fact made your day just a little better :)
Space travel in general isn’t very realistic: the distances are way too short, the max speed depends on width and not mass, and you lose your speed if you stop the engines. I’m considering trying to make a mod to improve some of these things, since I couldn’t find one on the portal, but I haven’t got around to it yet.
Not just physics, also the sheer volume of spacecraft-sized asteroids… New Horizons would have needed on-board energy shields and been armed to the teeth with railguns to make it to Pluto! Or the speed of said asteroids relative to your ship: they’re slower than babies on balance bikes for some reason! There’s so much to fix, I wonder if it can be remedied in a way that keeps the game playable (even ignoring whether that would be fun to play). Taking 6 years to get to another planet is not abnormal in real-world distances after all
I’ve been collecting realistic space games and simulators on the about page of my own n-body gravity simulator: https://lucgommans.nl/p/badgravity/about.html#software_collection
A notable one I want to call out is Children of a Dead Earth, one of the nerdiest games I’ve ever played. It simulates space battles with real-world technology and physics. As the reviews show, it is quite hardcore and not for everyone, but if you catch it on a sale and are a big Factorio fan, I’d recommend giving it a spin :)
Children of a dead earth is a work of art, if a little hard-going. I never finished all the missions after getting stuck on one of them. There’s not really anything else quite like it which is a shame