Fleet Transit Time
This page explores how long it takes a fleet to travel between stellar objects, across systems, and along multi-system routes.
It does not describe final game behavior. It captures the current direction and unresolved design choices.
Goal
The goal is a transit time model that:
- makes every leg of a journey feel meaningful, not instantaneous
- rewards players who understand the galaxy's layout
- creates real strategic trade-offs between faster and slower routes
- is simple enough that players can reason about it without a spreadsheet
Current Direction
The strongest current direction is a segment-based model. Every system a fleet passes through contributes time to the total journey duration.
A journey has three distinct segment types:
Departure — the time required to move from the fleet's starting stellar object (e.g. the inner star, a mid-system station) to the edge of the origin system.
Transit — the time required to cross through each intermediate system from one edge to the other. A fleet in transit does not visit or interact with any stellar objects inside that system — the star, planets, moons, and stations are irrelevant to the crossing. The system is treated as a single passage with a single duration.
Arrival — the time required to move from the entry point of the destination system to the target stellar object within it.
Total journey time is the sum of all three:
departure time + (transit time × intermediate systems) + arrival time
For a fleet travelling from System A to System E via B, C, and D:
[A: departure] [B: transit] [C: transit] [D: transit] [E: arrival]
↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
time A time B time C time D time E
(inner → edge) (edge → dest)
Total = A + B + C + D + E
System Size
One natural source of variation in transit time is system size. A larger system takes longer to cross than a compact one.
This makes the layout of known transit systems strategically relevant. A route through large systems is slower, even if it is shorter in terms of hop count.
Open questions
- Is size purely a fixed physical property, or can infrastructure (e.g. relay networks, jump lanes) reduce effective crossing time?
- Should size affect departure and arrival time, or only transit time?
- Should system size be visible to players before they commit to a route?
Other Factors That Could Affect Transit Time
Beyond raw size, several other properties could modulate how long a crossing takes.
| Factor | Potential effect |
|---|---|
| System type (e.g. nebula, void, dense field) | Slows or speeds crossing |
| Existing infrastructure in a system | Reduces transit time for those with access |
| Fleet composition | Slower fleets carry the speed of their slowest ship |
| Fleet condition | Damaged fleets may cross more slowly |
Not all of these need to be active at launch. The model can start simple and layer in modifiers over time.
Open questions
- Which of these factors are worth introducing at the start, versus being added later?
- Should fleet composition (slowest ship) affect speed, or is the fleet treated as a single unit for transit purposes?
Departure and Arrival Asymmetry
Departure and arrival time depend on where the fleet starts and ends within a system — specifically, how far that stellar object is from the system edge.
A fleet based at a gas giant in the outer orbit belt has less distance to travel to reach the system edge than one based at the inner star. Conversely, a fleet arriving at a distant moon must travel further from the entry point than one arriving at an outer station.
This creates a subtle geographic advantage for holdings at the system periphery in routes where rapid transit matters.
Open questions
- Should the game surface the departure / arrival breakdown to players, or only show total journey time?
- Should players be able to pre-position fleets at system edges to reduce departure time?
Multi-Region Routes
There is no shortcut between regions. A fleet cannot jump from one region to another directly — it must physically travel through every system in the current region until it reaches the gateway system that connects to the next region.
A journey from Region A to Region C via Region B looks like this:
Region A Region B Region C
────────────────────────────── ────────────────────────────── ──────────────
[origin] → [sys] → [sys] → [gateway A→B] → [gateway B→A] → [sys] → [sys] → [gateway B→C] → [gateway C→B] → [sys] → [destination]
Every system in every region on the route contributes transit time. There are no skips, no fast lanes between regions, no instant transitions at the boundary.
This is intentional. It is what makes the galaxy feel large. A region is not a label on a map — it is a body of space that takes real time to cross. The further the destination, the more of the galaxy a fleet must physically traverse to reach it.
Why this matters strategically
Because every hop counts, the gateway system a fleet uses to enter a region is also the point at which that region's full internal distance begins. A well-positioned empire with holdings near the inbound gateway of a region it governs has a genuine geographic advantage — its fleets exit faster than a rival that must cross from the far side.
Scaling Beyond the Galaxy
The same principle that applies to regions applies at every scale.
If a second galaxy is ever introduced, a fleet travelling to it from the first galaxy would need to:
- Traverse all systems in the origin region to reach the region's gateway.
- Move through all intermediate regions, crossing each in full.
- Continue until reaching the edge region of the origin galaxy.
- Pass through the inter-galaxy connection into the new galaxy.
- Traverse the arrival region of the new galaxy from its entry point.
- Continue inward through regions and systems until reaching the destination.
No layer is skipped. The journey compounds at every scale — system, region, galaxy. This is what makes distance meaningful in a universe that could, in principle, grow very large.
The Inter-Region Movement feature describes the gateway structure that governs which routes between regions are possible.