For Science (and Fun)

Realistic space sci-fi has some difficult challenges when it comes to mainstream gaming appeal.  Certainly a lot of the math involved could be abstracted, but unless spaceships have delta-v budgets and heat radiators then what's the point?  Saying your spaceship runs on pixie dust and crocodile tears would be just as accurate as some technobabble like "nanomachines powered by zero-point quantum energy."  That all said, I'm not posting this blog entry simply to dunk on Star Trek or Star Wars.  There are a lot of people (myself included) who enjoy fantastical stories and that's totally okay.  Instead, what I want to do is highlight some aspects of hard science fiction that could hold wider appeal if they were executed in clever ways

Automation is a major component of real-life space exploration.  Quite a bit of spaceflight involves math and calculations that are the kind of thing that computers excel at.  What they're not so good at is trouble-shooting.  Generally speaking, keeping humans alive and well in space is tricky.  It requires a menagerie of special equipment which could be replaced with other resources that are more mission specific.  The thing is though tasks that take a Mars rover hours to complete could be done by a human in a matter of minutes.  Additionally, there are much more stringent limits as to what a machine can accomplish.  So, the basic takeaway here is a few astronauts supported by computers go a long way compared to a setup that relies completely on automation.  For folks who love space battles, this means a bunch of warships would only need a few (or maybe even just one) manned spaceship for command and support purposes.  Vessels such as tankers and cargo vessels wouldn't need any crew, but a tender or salvage/repair spacecraft would almost certainly benefit from having trained professionals onboard.  Some examples of games that capture this reality to varying degrees are as follows:

• Carrier Commander
• Advanced Wars: Days of Ruin
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker
• House of the Dying Sun
• Mission Critical

Asymmetric warfare is another aspect of space that often gets overlooked.  Taking vehicle stat sheets and bashing them into each other is a time-honored tradition of war games, but not necessarily an accurate depiction.  Just because we don't get massive capital ships exchanging point-blank pyrotechnic broadsides, doesn't mean it has to be boring to look at though.  Actual visuals could be swapped out for tactical displays.  Lasers might be invisible to the naked eye, but there's no reason not to show them on a sensor readout.  The same is true for size scales and distances.  Time, too, can be skipped over so as to not bore the player with long uneventful journeys.  Best of all these kinds of games can be educational in an indirect way.  Scientific realities might be overwhelming in their totality, but in smaller (more digestible) chunks it is possible to advance a player's understanding simply by interacting with such games.