I am not familiar, so I don't know, but do they assume something like 31,536,000x speed of light to make the galaxy even remotely navigable, e.g., the ability to navigate from Earth to Alpha Centauri within 4.34 seconds?
Then I like to say the nearest next start is roughly 4 light years away. So even at 17km per second, or about 10.5 miles per second, it will still take approx 72,000 years for it to reach the nearest star.
That star is 4 light years away and our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. The next galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away!!! So at the incredible speeds of one of our fastest man made objects it would take something like 45 billion years to just get to the next galaxy!
Seeing how the known universe is estimated at over 46 billion light years in size and looking back on the other numbers I wrote it quickly becomes apparent that to travel across the galaxies one would need to be able to reach unbelievably unimaginable speeds. Even the speed of light as you mention would not be even close to fast enough to get anywhere significant.
On a side tangent I was always a trekie back in the day. I know their warp drive was faster then light but now I almost want to go back and look at the math of how fast they must have been going to be going the distances they were going.
While there's a rough polynomial (v =~ c * w^3, I think) for post-TOS Star Trek warp factors, the only consistent rule: a starship travels at a velocity that helps tell a good story.
It's fun to try mapping Star Trek stories, anyway; it helps you ponder how much time they must have spent in transit. They have to find things to occupy their time.
But I absolutely loved the show growing up so not here to knock them. I am sure in hindsight they may have come up with a better definition of how warp speed works and how they can travel great distances. I won't think about it too much.
This just shows a juvenile and naive level of thinking. You can't spend 72,000 years with our current brains in full conscience without going insane.
I'm not sure if the CMB itself will decay fast enough with the expansion of the universe to avoid 1g eventually getting you hull eroded by positron-electron pair production from photons blueshifted above 1022 keV, but that's in the set of things you need to think about.
I have never seen anyone writing about us having solid reference points to travel that far in case we can reach those speeds.
If you miss you end up in some empty space you won’t be able to mine anything for fuel to have more shots.
Estimating time-to-arrival when your destination is also moving at ludicrous speeds is incredibly difficult.
If you go close enough to the speed of light, what you actually see is that space appears to shrink (in the direction of travel) and the trip seems to take less time than light would, because you've apparently covered less distance. Of course what those on the planets would see is that time has been moving oh so slowly on your otherwise speedy ship. There are equations you incorporate into a simulation that would account for this. If the game mechanics were such that you could could see what day/month/year it is in local time, vs your ships time, it would quickly become apparent that bashing through the void is no way to get anywhere.
Time dilation is just shortcut to say you are no longer sharing the same frame of reference. If everyone has their own frame of reference there is no difference between single player game and multi player one
The crazy part is that this 3D game was programmed in 68k assembly, ran smoothly on Amiga and Atari ST home computers, and fit on a single 1.44MB floppy. The massive universe with realistic solar systems was almost entirely procedural.