Are the space stations really in orbit? When looking at the ground from the station, it does not seem to be moving. Do the stations rotate around the planets, like ISS ?
No everything is static currently, mainly because of network limitations.
No planet orbits, or orbits of any other kind.
However, you can establish an orbit with your ship.
It is noteworthy that it was discussed that orbits maybe will be simulated during round changes, so that the solar system changes depending on day time. The updates to the planet positions will then happen in-between the rounds.
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Thank you for your answer
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Yup. We have discussed various ideas to keep each Battlescape fresh and generating new (fixed) positions along their orbits for each round seemed like a pretty good solution. Besides, you wouldn’t really notice things like planet rotation etc anyway, even if it was implemented! Too much time whizzing around 
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Well you would notice stations shifting position if they aren’t in geostationary orbit.
But that makes balancing play area rather difficult as stuff keeps changing and add to that all the network complexity and you end up with a lot of work for very little gain.
If they do orbits, they should be calculated as analytically as possible first, which would mean simplifying them, unless they have really good processing power to update all of those coordinates. Orbital errors also accumulate really fast.
Maybe you could do a system where you have an approximation to the n body problem where you calculate something’s trajectory based only on the dominant gravitational field. Or, if you had a binary star system you’d just do an elliptical orbit around the center of mass of the binary star system. That would be computationally cheap, since you’d literally just update the 3d coordinates as a function of time.
The only thing that this leaves out is things like lagrange points and transfer orbits.
Enstead of rotating planets, that may be difficult to modelise, and with no orbiting effects… It should be possible to make the sun circling around planetar system. Planets dont move, yes, but the sun light could move, simulating the day. Then shadows could change acording to the time, and the stations on the ground would be some time with day light, and some time with dark night. This may not be difficult to implement, is it ?
That would be a fair way to pretend there was a day and night cycle for only one planet, but it won’t be a good idea for a whole solar system, where the sun needs to be in the middle or there’s no point!
A realistic day/night cycle is a bit redundant anyway, since it would take too long to actually notice any change.
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And realistic fluffy white (and other colored) layered volumetric clouds.
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You wrote:《《That would be a fair way to pretend there was a day and night cycle for only one planet, but it won’t be a good idea for a whole solar system, where the sun needs to be in the middle or there’s no point!》》
Yes, but on our game : there is only one main geant planet. The other ones are satellits of the geant. So why not for the sun to cycle around the geant ebstead of geant to cycle around the sun ?
This won’t be the case in the final Version.
See latest update:
I think the devs hinted that they may try to have the position of planets and moons of the System change between matches. This would provide some difference, where some parts of a planet may be shrouded in darkness from one match to another.
I don’t really see why day/night cycles are that important given the play time, I can see some merit in it when we talk about multi day real time rounds. Are you also proposing accelerated time, as to experience the day/night cycle unrealistically often?
Why not ? But not too much accelerated (like minecraft)…
no more sunrise in this game ?
You can achieve an awesome sunrise already by simply flying round a planet from the dark side to the sunlit side 
No need for rotation!
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Yeah tt’s very easy to implement technically, although it’d be a cheap trick. Players would definitely notice something is off.
You may be right. But dont forget that mankind needed thousand years to verify that the earth spins around the sun and not the opposite. This “cheap trick” does’nt prevent to change the position of the planets from time to time.
The idea won’t make any sense at all once the planets are distributed around their standard orbits. You’re talking about a sun that would have to orbit around outside of Saturn’s orbit, among other problems (every single planet has the exact same day/night cycle?).
The “cheap trick” does not work in any imaginable way.
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You are right. My proposition is suitable only with a single geant planet and its satellits.
Do you confirm that the final system will count several planets orbiting one sun ? Distance between planets will be much more important than it is now…
The system will comprise of stationary planets, but they will be in positions dictated by a logical orbit.
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