Why is it that space games always have so little content between the stations and planets?

Why is it that space games always have so little content between the stations and planets?
It's always driving through nothingness. How can it be fixed?

Compare it to a game like subnautica where there's something to collect almost every 2 feet.

How can you make a space game feel more interesting when you're trucking between areas?

Space really is just a load of empty nothingness though, what were you thinking? The only thing I can think of is asteroid fields, random encounters with space pirates, abandoned space stations, floating debris around earth's solar system maybe.

By making it not space. space is space because it contains nothing that would let you describe it as something else like "air" or "sea"
real life space is EMPTY.

By having you control a crew member and having to maintain the ship so everything doesn't go to fuck. Space ships are really delicate things.

I know that, silly guys.

There could still be more interesting things to do. Like let me open up an alien dating site on my terminal and schedule a date with a three-titted green girl. Or have a chess league within the game where you play fake online chess against aliens. Fuck I dunno.

Yes that would be excellent.

so you want a yakuza space game?

i guess you could use teleportation to skip the space between stations and stellar bodies

Maybe you end up in a warp storm user :^)

Maybe you could play video games while in transit.

because that's what space is, an incomprehensibly vast vacuum of near nothingness
the only shit out there is except a few rocks is solar wind and radiation

enjoy your space AIDS

Or, y'know, fast travel. You're trying to reinvent the wheel – rather than trying to make up some stupid shit to kill time with, just skip the whole part that makes you want to kill time. Have some jump drive, or a star gate, or whatever, so that the player doesn't need to to stare on nothing for several minutes while he flies between the stars.

Or just make all spaceships insanely fast. They're too slow.

Well you don't want to be too fast when in a solar system, just when in between them, meaning two modes of travel. Elite: Dangerous does this.

Fighting off space daemons would be nice, but when the gellar field fucks up most of the crew will die and then it would be hard to explain how the ship continues to be operational.

The answer to the question has two parts:
A: Space actually is very very very empty, that's why we simply call it "space".
B: The few objects that are in space come in two sizes. Microscopic dust and fuckhuge. Pic related. It's 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (the Asteroid Philae landed on and the only one we have ever gotten close to at all) compared to Los Angeles.
Of-course there may be smaller or even human/spaceship sized objects, but we simply haven't discovered them. Even then they will split up into dust quite quickly, because small objects have a larger surface area. You will only find small-ish objects in the planetary rings, where there are a lot of larger objects for them to break off of.
So scientifically speaking it doesn't make sense to have space cluttered, anywhere else but the planetary rings and maybe around earth (space debris). Just like, make game.

so, microscopic dust?

galaxy/universe is a huge space of nothingness, only 1% or even less has things like planets and stuff

So it is more interesting for games or even movies to just jump from one alien planet to another and do stuff rather than engage in retarded and boring shit on some space station near planet aka BABYLON 5

Could you imagine seinfeld taking place when a ship was going traveling from planet to planet?

...

jerry can i borrow your oxygen scrubbers

Red Dwarf

user one day the technology will be so good that you can render 10000 starships swarming around Earth like Corruscant in Star Wars.

That day is not today.

Star Ocean 2?

It could easily be done today, but the graphics would suffer.

Space games have a lot of nothing because that is what makes space space. If you don't like that then maybe you just don't like space games.
Don't try to "fix" a genre you don't like, just play something else.

There should be a space sailing game where you get to fight giant space krakens and space whales and trade space dust for cosmic dubloons so you can buy laser cutlasses and the like.

Nobody else? Really?

That ship's a big ol' space wang.

What is the deal with vacuum packed flash frozen astronaut food?

Tell me about your relationship with your mother.

Erectile dysfunction also has nothing to do once you get where you're going.

I think doing something like a research vessel that scans down for anomalies and alien relics would add a little something. Felt Rebel Galaxy did a fairly decent job of at least making space feel more populated while going A to B.

sage

You should watch Lexx sometime, it's pretty much intentional, going by the tone of the show.

Why do you need my oxygen scrubbers for?

...

Make space smaller, but keep the ratios the same.
Instead of taking place in a universe, make it take place in a multiverse.
Your ships can't stop getting bigger. Eventually you can have a death star. But of course some of the more dedicated players will be "that guy" and build a multiverse sized ship in the shape of a (rather effective) penis to intimidate newcomers and trigger some of the more provocative community members. The dev's will wring them out with their multi-multi-multiverse sized scale model replicas of the starship Enterprise, but it's the reactions that actually matter. Then some asshole who used that omnipotence bug will create an existence sized spaceship of a really nasty giant cube. It won't even be cool like the Borg, it will literally just be an OCD hell of a cube. The inside will all be shaped triangularly (obtuse and acute triangles only) to showcase this desire. He'll force every OCD being in existence to promptly kill themselves from sheer hate.

Space has a shit ton of floating debris, especially around Earth. Maybe have to avoid it?

Hahhaaha lexx rhymes with sex

going to watch now, thanks user

This

So we're avoiding attack from a galactic cruiser when all of a sudden, we're doooodginggg moooree aaasterooooiiddsss

Come the fuck on.

What is the best space sim?
Is it still X3?

Any others????

OHHHH WAYYY OHH

sensors have detected an unidentified space pleb

I kind of agree, but I also strongly disagree.
Travel between two points in space should always be mostly empty blackness. Travel should also take quite a while, even with imaginary FTL drives and whatnot.

Setting the ship to jump, then getting up and going to do some other things within your ship during the 5-10 minute FTL travel time is the sweet spot, I think.

Maybe you're a space pirate on the run, and the only time you have to make repairs to your ship is while you're in that crazy FTL dimension where nobody can find you - where you can't stop and your travel time is precisely timed.
Or I guess you could browse a fake space internet and watch xenotube.

I don't really care that it's fun as long as it's brutal. Autism is its own reward.