Frontier Planets?

[Buleste]

Thanks to this site i've started going through some old games and i've had a thought. Frontier was one of the first games to use the real Milky way for it's star systems but had to make up the number of planets and with new planets being discovered each week I was wondering how close they actually got it. O.k. i know that only really huge planets can be detected at the moment but still. Art imitating life or vice versa?

[Harrison]

That's an interesting thought. Frontier had a great virtual model of our galaxy that although fictional in it's makeup was always fascinating to explore using the 3D map system.

I don't know much about how they designed and created the in game galaxy map. A lot of the actual stars have their real names and locations, but obviously the actual systems within them must have been made up. Or were they? I seem to remember at the time reading about how only the important systems were hard coded and some sort of procedural coding randomly generating the rest of the star systems. So in a way the chaos theory creating the random but structured nature of real life is imitated in the game.

The way we detect planets around other stars is still very primitive though, looking for radio frequency distortion and wobble in the motion of a star, indicating the presence of a large body rotating around it, so we can't even be sure there is really a planet there and not just a space anomaly.

[Buleste]

I've been rereading the manual and at that time (God 1993 was sooooo long ago wasn't it, Not) no planets were discovered but they were using the latest theories in planet formation and the stars were created acurately (Binary and trinary systems where appropriate) the only exceptions was some of the startup stars from Elite were there (Leesti, Lave, Reedquat). I just thought it would be interesting to see. By the way who went to Wolf 359 to see if there was any Borg?

[Harrison]

Another Star Trek fan! That would have been so cool for them to have included some cube like ships floating around in the Wolf 359 system.

[Buleste]

Or maybe the occasional Thargoid just to keep the fear that the name Wolf 359 brings.

[Harrison]

There has always been a rumour that there is a Thargoid ship within Frontier somewhere, but I tried to follow the guides on how to find it at the time and never did.

[Buleste]

I think it was just wishfull thinking and a way of making all the obsessive gamers play for weeks/years trying to find the damn thing. Including me.

[v85rawdeal]

I never needed the Thargoid rumor to play Frontier for years...

...lack of girlfriends was ezxcuse enough for me!

Mind you... maybe there was some corrolation there!

[Buleste]

True. There is a mathamatical formulae about the corrolation between game playing and girfriend time. Besides Amiga means girlfriend although there are somethings that even an Amiga cannot satisfy..... Like thirst. You can't get an Amiga to get the beers in but a girfriend...... O.k. i'll think of something else.

[Harrison]

The mathematical formula is: "Gameplay fund" becomes "Girlfriend fund".