(maven)
It's a scale issue. Space is fcking large even for one system, measured in AUs, which are about 144000000km (assuming the Earth is 8 light-minutes away, I can never remeber if it's 8 or 4). Showing realistic details (<5 m) AND scales that massive would require enormously flexible units, prehaps double precision floating point. For a graphic visualization of how slow that would be, download POV-ray from (url="http://"http://www.povray.org")www.povray.org(/url) and try to render something at 640480. Then we talk "seconds per frame" instead of "frames per second".
I think the oort cloud (farthest area of the system with something solid in it) is a few hundred AUs from the sun. That's about the systems RADIUS. Think about trying to do that. You'd blow a motherboard.
(/maven)
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William Darkk, head of the Darkklight Entrepenurial Federation
"Strategic warfare" is code for "killing civilians", and it's my calling. Yeah, it's barbaric. War's supposed to be.
(This message has been edited by Fleet Admiral Darkk (edited 01-11-2001).)