>>713426704
>can only reach planets, not stars
>>713420513 here
it was an intentional design decision
sean and his team are very transparent about how they were trying to make a game first and a simulator second
in an interview, he said they had play tests leading up to their closed beta where they actually had the planets have orbits around stars, but they found that it lead to high levels of disorientation for many players when planets would move after they left a planet and were trying to heading to the next one, so they made the decision to have the sun rotate around the planets instead
it had the added benefit of making vistas on planets permanent (eg setting up a colony on a planet with another planet/moon in the sky would always have the same sky and therefore always be screenshot ready) and it would end up meshing better with their 1960s/1970s retrofuturism and airbrush space art inspired art direction they'd inevitably converge on anyway (which is why a lot of the items and POIs have sphere motifs, btw)
there's a lot of artistic talent that went into the game that not a lot of people appreciate because the animals sometimes look funny