I'm trying to ascertain what the largest engine size necessary to navigate a given galaxy is. To determine this, I need to understand how the coordinate system maps to the galaxy size.

In the current game, the galaxy is 250,000 light-years across. Does the coordinate system map directly to light-years? (e.g. if the distance between two sectors is 323 units, does that mean the distance is 323 light-years?)

lol, that's an interesting problem, and I don't know the answer, but I can tell you that 270 makes almost everything one turn, and 280 does make everything one turn.

I would also wonder if the expanding galaxy changes the size of the universe. Or do the sectors near the center get closer together to fit within that number.

The Galaxy layout is similar to a true spiral galaxy. You can see this when you view the 3D galaxy map. Every dot on that map is a sector in the game. Each dot represents the X/Y/Z coordinate if the sector in the galaxy. The distance between each sector is based upon the distance between the X/Y/Z coordinates of each sector in LIGHT YEARS.

The expanding universe doesn't mean the universe expands in distance. The expanding universe is the Federation finding NEW sectors through exploration by Federation Scout Ships. When the Federation finds a new sector it is added to the Galaxy Wide Map of found sectors used by all players. The Federation doesn't do anything other than report the existence of the new sector.

Ah, thank you. That tells me exactly what I need to know. I now know how to calculate the proper size engines to guarantee I can get anywhere in the galaxy within an arbitrary number of turns. (Actually, I had already figured it out from looking at the code, but this just confirms it for me.

That being said, is there a point at which no more sectors can fit in the galaxy? Since the galaxy never actually gets bigger, and more sectors are always being found, there has to be some finite amount of sectors. And if so is it so outlandish that it could never be seen. I'm just wondering, not really sure why this is so interesting to me.

It would be in the billions or is it trillions...

Put it this way it could be more sectors than any single database server could handle.

Given that the galaxy is 250,000 light years across, and that the coordinates seem to always be integers, I'd guess the answer to the first part of the question is yes.

For the second part, you'd have to work out the volume of the galaxy. Since it is a spiral, with a central sphere that is about 1/3 the size of the total galaxy and the remainder spread out in a disk that is about 1/10 the height of the sphere, as a first pass, I'd say that it is roughly ((4/3)*pi)*(250000/6)^3 + ((4/3)*pi*(125000*125000*(125000/10))) ~= 1121131648061342 sectors (more or less).

Yeah, it's an insanely big number, and even if my first pass approximation is off by a factor of 1000, you're still talking about a LOT of sectors (more than you could ever see; you'd crash the server first).

Yea, I guess so. Still interesting how far the game could theoretically expand too given the time and non-existent technology, and database structures.