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[sonerohi]

Fun Fact 16: In the discussion of Renaissance gentlemen, our History teacher said that being a good swordsmen was a requirement. Myself and another kid both professed ourselves as one, so our teacher let us bring fencing gear to school and compete infront of the class.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Fun Fact 17: Reniassance Gentlemen washed their genitals, on average, more frequently than some people today.

^{(I am guessing about this Fun Fact I am so sorry to let you all down like this)}

[Itnetlolor]

Fun Fact 18: Plump Helmets melt in your mouth, not in your hand.

[Strife26]

Fun Fact: Someday, somewhere, the zefie modification is more popular than vanilla DF.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Fun Fact 20: Mars has an incredibly interesting landscape. There's a Google Maps for Mars and you can zoom around. There are very few Starbucks.

[qwertyuiopas]

Fun fact 21: I will be lucky if somebody notices that 21 has been used, and DF 1.0 being released today is more likely than anybody reading this fully.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Fun Fact 22: You can use facts to prove anything. 90% of people know that. Facts schmacts!

[Angellus]

Fun fact 3: Sofia is still totally obsessed with Taokaka.

Fun fact 23: I only like Taokaka when there is a face visable.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Taokaka

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Fun Fact 24: Any fiction or game involving space on a scale of even a tenth of the galaxy is meaningless because it's so huge. There are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Which means if in your guidebook you detailed each star system with just one page of text, and you can fit 269 pages in an inch of book thickness with one solar system on each side of a page, the book would be almost 3,000 miles tall. Earth's diameter is almost 8,000 miles.

If you were to read that book at one page per minute, continuously without sleep 24 hours a day 7 days a week, you would finish over 190,000 years later.

And this is one page of text per solar system. Go ahead and try defining our solar system, including Earth and all its biology and civilization and history, in just one page.

I say this scale is meaningless because our stories involving galaxies always focus on just a few people and planets, and even then only on extremely limited parts of those planets.

You could easily tell the story of Star Wars without anyone in the cast visiting more than a half-dozen solar systems. You have just a few scattered planets visited, a moon or two, a couple bars, etc. In a stretch you could set it in just one solar system.

In terms of a game, just try designing, even in a crude overview using randomized tables like in Traveller, just one quadrant of a galaxy. It's pointless.

And unless you hit all those places, you might as well not even talk about the galaxy at all. It's just a buzzword that makes the fans titter.

[Armok]

(There is actually one meaningful way to have a galaxy: have each star be just a dot with a few bytes of data, and generate it procedurally if and only if the player visits it. Think Noctis.)

[Rashilul]

Fun fact 25: Rashilul has mild OCD and messed up brain halves leading to bad coordination.

[Itnetlolor]

Fun Fact 26: Somewhere, somehow, there's a duck watching you.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

(There is actually one meaningful way to have a galaxy: have each star be just a dot with a few bytes of data, and generate it procedurally if and only if the player visits it. Think Noctis.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Digitally, it's more feasible. But if a star isn't generated until you visit it, then there is no connectivity between systems, and you can't really say your game / fiction is really about a whole galaxy. It's just about a series of disconnected star systems. And until you've done the generation then you don't even have that: you just have a funky little bitmap. That's like me showing you a picture of the Milky Way and saying that's a fleshed-out fictional setting.

But even then, with exactly two bytes per star system, your galaxy takes up over 186 gb of storage space. If you average four planets / features per system, one moon/feature per planet, and give each of those two bytes of description, you've inflated it to 1.67 tb of data. But you need little spacer bytes that say "move on to describing the next body" so between each needs to be a byte at zero.

Our solar system would look like this:

Single Medium Yellow Star
Tiny Rock Planet, No Moon
Small Gas Planet, No Moon
Small Rock Planet (Atmosphere), One Small Rock Moon
Loose Asteroid Belt
Small Rock Planet, Two Tiny Rock Moon
Huge Gas Planet, 62 Tiny Rock Moon
Large Gas Planet (Rings), 33 Tiny Rock Moon (1 Atmosphere)
Large Gas Planet, 27 Tiny Rock Moon
Large Gas Planet, 13 Tiny Rock Moon

If every system had that level of detail, you're looking at about 27.8 tb of data.

And I'd say to have a meaningful interaction with Earth you'd need to know more about it than that it is a small rocky planet with an atmosphere. If you accounted for space to tell what the main atmospheric composition was, the presence of liquid water, biology, civilization, not even getting into any names or specifics, you're still looking at a galaxy of well over 300 tb of data.

But even that doesn't actually give you a setting. You need to name civilizations, determine what civs they know about and how they feel about them, what their tech levels are, how peaceful they are, what atmospheres they breathe, etc. At that point you might as well call it 5-10 pb of data for your galaxy.

Don't even try for ship floorplans, names of countries or famous individuals, social movements, general maps of planets, and so forth.

Space is just too big to try talking about a galaxy.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Fun Fact 27: Itnetlolor is that duck.

[Aldaris]

Fun fact 28: This is getting silly, stop it.