Originally posted by Stryke 9
Mik: You sure? I'm fairly sure I got partway to another system on my LDS once, just by hitting it and leaving for an hour.
Oh yeah. Late in the game you get a positively SICK LDS drive. It took me probably 20 minutes to fly from Santa Romero to where the Effrit was supposed to be. I pulled up my starmap, drilled down, found the Effrit and selected that as my destination. Then, instead of engaging autopilot, I turned my ship on the heading and jammed my LDS to max. It doesn't take very long to get there at all. There was nothing there at all. There was the star entity, but not system of any sort. Any destination your HUD shows as 'OUTSYS' has to be loaded.
Another way to test is to play about with the sensor settings. No matter what you do, you cannot get a larger range out of your sensors than the local universe. Even if your sensors have a range of a thousand klicks, you won't see traffic beyond your local space. As you move, things will spawn just inside the horizon, even though your sensors can technically see beyond it.
Besides the empirical testing, Stephen Robertson of PS confirmed that indeed, this is the way IWar2 handles space. Upon entering a system, the game runs a serious of scripts that start tracking major entities in the system (the system and traffic scripts) and another set of scripts that start creating and managing entities in your local 400km universe.
Certain things are tracked staticly when they are outside of your universe, but only if they are marked 'critical'. Mission items are marked critical and are therefor not recycled. Scripts would break horribly if they were.