You Cannot See the Present

You Cannot See the Present

Every space game you've played has given you a god's-eye view. Select a ship across the solar system. See it in real time. Issue an order. Watch it execute. Pan the camera to the other side of Jupiter. See that fleet too. All of it, simultaneously, as if you were everywhere at once.

You are not everywhere at once. Nobody is. Nothing is. Information moves at 299,792 kilometers per second, and that number is not negotiable. It is the hardest speed limit in physics — not a suggestion, not an engineering constraint, not something a sufficiently advanced civilization overcomes. It is the structure of spacetime itself.

And it changes everything about what space actually is.

The Delay Is the Game

Here are some numbers. They are simple, and they ruin the entire genre.

Earth to Moon: 1.28 seconds. Earth to Mars at closest approach: 4.2 minutes. Earth to Jupiter: 35 minutes. Earth to Neptune: 4 hours.

Those are one-way. You send a message to a ship at Mars. The message arrives 4.2 minutes later. If the ship replies immediately, you hear back 8.4 minutes after you spoke. That is the minimum round-trip communication time. It doesn't depend on your radio equipment. It doesn't depend on your technology. It depends on the geometry of the solar system, which you cannot change.

Now consider what this means for a fleet engagement.

Your sensors detect a hostile contact at Mars distance — 75 million kilometers, 4.2 light-minutes away. Your Sensors Officer reports the contact's position, bearing, velocity. Good data. Solid detection.

Except it isn't current. That data is 4.2 minutes old. The contact was at that position, moving at that velocity, 4.2 minutes ago. Where is it now? If it maintained course and speed, you can extrapolate. Velocity times delay: a ship doing 30 km/s perpendicular to your line of sight has moved 7,560 kilometers since the light left it. Your sensor data is already wrong by the width of a small planet.

And that assumes the contact didn't maneuver. If it burned during those 4.2 minutes — which it may well have done, since it detected your sensor emissions 4.2 minutes before you detected its response — then your extrapolation is fiction. You're pointing at empty space.

This isn't a quirk. This is the fundamental tactical reality of space. The light-cone — the region of spacetime from which information can reach you — defines the boundary of everything you can know. Outside your light-cone, events have happened that you cannot see, orders have been given that you cannot hear, ships have maneuvered in ways you cannot predict. You are making decisions with incomplete information, and the incompleteness gets worse with distance. Linearly. Unavoidably.

Every space game that shows you a real-time galaxy map is lying to you about the most important thing.

What It Forces You to Do

The reason light-speed propagation matters for game design isn't aesthetic. It isn't about realism for realism's sake. It's that the constraint produces an entirely different kind of strategic thinking — one that no instant-information game can create.

When you cannot see the present, you must plan for uncertainty. Not as an abstract principle. As the operating condition of every decision you make.

Take fleet coordination. You have three ships in formation, 10,000 kilometers apart, approaching an engagement at Mars distance. Ship-to-ship communication delay within your formation: 0.03 seconds. Effectively real-time. You can coordinate with your own squadron. But the target is 4.2 light-minutes away. You see what it did 4.2 minutes ago. It sees what you did 4.2 minutes ago. The minimum detect-maneuver-counterdetect cycle is 12 to 15 minutes.

In those 12 minutes, you cannot issue corrective orders based on what the enemy does. By the time you see their response to your first move, three more decision cycles have elapsed. You are not commanding in real time. You are programming doctrine in advance and hoping it covers the contingencies.

This is not a limitation of your equipment or your crew. This is physics. And it produces a specific, historically grounded form of command.

Nelson at Trafalgar could not signal his fleet during the battle. Once the engagement began, his captains fought on the doctrine he'd established beforehand. Nimitz at Midway issued objectives and let his carrier commanders decide execution. Eisenhower launched D-Day and then waited, because the forces were committed and no amount of radio traffic could change what was already in motion.

These commanders didn't micromanage because they couldn't. Not because they lacked radios (Nimitz and Eisenhower had radios) but because the tempo of events exceeded the information loop. By the time you hear the report, assess, decide, and transmit, the situation has changed. The order arrives into a context that no longer matches the one you issued it for.

Light-delay makes this universal. At Mars distance, every order you give arrives into a 4.2-minute-old context. At Jupiter, 35 minutes. At Neptune, your orders arrive four hours after you gave them. The situation has evolved beyond recognition. If your standing doctrine doesn't cover it, your ship is on its own.

So the actual skill is not issuing orders. It's writing doctrine that holds. It's thinking through contingencies before they happen, defining decision boundaries clearly enough that your crew can adapt autonomously, and accepting that once the engagement begins, your contribution is already over. You did your work hours ago, when you programmed the responses. Now you watch and learn for next time.

No instant-information game will ever produce this. It can't. If you can see everything and respond immediately, the optimal strategy is always to micromanage. The reason real commanders delegate isn't philosophy — it's physics. The speed of light makes delegation mandatory. Remove that constraint, and you remove the entire strategic landscape that makes command interesting.

The Uncomfortable Part

There is a reason other space games don't enforce this. It is uncomfortable.

You will give an order and not know whether it was right for minutes. Sometimes hours. You will watch your ship approach an engagement and realize that the intelligence you based your doctrine on was collected 20 minutes ago, and the adversary has had 20 minutes to change the situation. You will experience the specific anxiety of commitment — of having launched a course of action that you cannot recall, adjust, or cancel because the light hasn't gotten there yet.

Your crew will report a contact at bearing 045, 800,000 kilometers out, light delay 2.7 seconds. A close contact — practically real-time. You have options. You can react. But that contact at Mars distance? The one your Sensors Officer flagged twelve minutes ago? You have no idea what it's doing now. You made a decision based on twelve-minute-old data. You're living with it.

This is what space actually feels like. Not the serene overview of a strategy game. Not the cockpit heroics of a flight sim. The specific, grinding uncertainty of operating in a universe where information is always late, always incomplete, and always decaying in value from the moment it's collected.

We enforce this because it is the single mechanic that makes space simulation honest. You can fudge Newtonian physics and still have an interesting game. You can simplify orbital mechanics and still create strategic depth. But if you give the player instantaneous information across astronomical distances, you have not built a space game. You have built a board game with a space skin. The defining feature of space — the thing that makes it different from every other operational environment humans have ever faced — is that it is too big for light. Remove that, and you've removed space itself.

The server calculates which events fall within your past light-cone, checks whether your sensors can detect them at that apparent magnitude and distance, accounts for planetary occlusion — Earth blocks your view of Mars for a few hours every day, just as it would in reality — and returns what you can actually see. Not what exists. What you can see. The difference is the game.

We are not aware of another simulation that does this. We built the propagation engine because without it, everything else is set dressing. The physics, the orbital mechanics, the crew AI, the cryptographic economy — all of it means less if you can see the whole board. The whole point is that you can't.

Light does not lie. But it arrives late. What you do with that delay is the entire strategic question.