As a hard sci-fi fan I would love that! Even just as a visual change, with ships "in orbit" sticking to the rotating planet

Thirded, but not sure it would be possible under this game's engine?

The mod's author replied to me on their Discord about the idea, here's what they said:

Originally posted by Annatar:

This idea came to many almost immediately after the release of the game. It's hard to do this with mods. But most importantly, it is not necessary at all. Otherwise, the developers would have done it themselves. There are two reasons. First, it's just an additional inconvenience to the gameplay. Secondly, this is an additional load on the calculations for the game. Bad move for optimization.

Originally posted by Kalmorph:

The mod's author replied to me on their Discord about the idea, here's what they said:

Originally posted by Annatar:

This idea came to many almost immediately after the release of the game. It's hard to do this with mods. But most importantly, it is not necessary at all. Otherwise, the developers would have done it themselves. There are two reasons. First, it's just an additional inconvenience to the gameplay. Secondly, this is an additional load on the calculations for the game. Bad move for optimization.

Concept: Planets only move in a system when a player is actively looking at it, and are stationary otherwise.

Additional concept for if the human gets privy to this: Planets move only in systems that the player looked at within the last 60 seconds (or another similar, arbitrary time-frame). When looking at a new system that hasn't been looked at for longer than that time-frame, the positions of planets & moons are randomized. If there are ships in orbit of a planet to bombard it or whatever, they are teleported with the planet.

Ok. I created a mod which did this. The secret was to keep it really light or it very quickly overwhelms the computer.

1. The mod only update the position of planets and other system assets when either the system screen is opened. I have not figured out how to update the position of planets while the system screen is open without a full refresh. Its possible... but heavy as planets and stations do not use the same processes as ships so my script method was less efficient.

2. All planet orbits were pre-calculated and stored in a table. The update algorithm then just uses the orbit number and the date to get the planets position. This caused issues with the binary, trinary, and quadnary systems in the game. Moons where awful.

3. For ship journey's I originally used the estimate of the length of the trip to calculate the planets position.This made for a slightly better calculation for the destination but resulted in the ships failing to enter orbit of the planet as it was off slightly due to the planet location recalcs. In the end I used another calc which reset the planets position when the ship entered the system but there were still issues.

In the end I abandoned the mod for my better star systems mod which made the system scale more accurate and made the second and greater stars either 'very close companions', 'distant companions' or 'very distant companions' where the close companion would be in the same system and the distant companions would spawn as stars virtually on top of the primary star on the galaxy map. Also included tight globular clusters with up to 10 stars practically on top of each other.
I originally did this to try and work around the binary issue with the planetary orbits mod... but eventually just preferred it for game play.

So it is just like Annatar described; too complicated and heavy on performance for almost no impactful gameplays.

Yes... cute and fun... but not particularly meaningful.

What about new machine worlds?