The way people could do it in Civ 3 was tedious and micro intensive for no reason. That's why it was changed. They'd always leave if you asked them to unless a war was started, so it was adding nothing to the game except a bunch of extra clicking.

I have never, ever said that I wanted it to be impossible to violate other factions' space, because I consider that to be stupid. I do think that violating the space of other factions should carry diplomatic penalties and should be viewed as an aggressive action which could be cause enough for war, and that while I could request that you depart from my territory you wouldn't necessarily have to do so.

Common sense and in-game information, if provided, are about all you can work with. Using science fiction from Universe A to explain the goings-on in Universe B is like explaining how magic in the Harry Potter series works by using the descriptions given in the Wheel of Time series. Granted, science fiction works supposedly have a common frame (in theory, all sci-fi works should be building off of real science even if the technologies involved aren't actually possible), but past that common framework you really don't have anything to go on. Additionally, when the sci-fi universe in question is written by many authors and not all parts are necessarily strictly canonical (as is the case with Star Wars and Star Trek), it becomes rather unclear as to whether or not the explanation given in any particular source are true in the universe in question.

It is also possibly the case that the interaction between ships in hyperspace and objects in real space is only dangerous because of the travel rates of ships in Star Wars, in which universe it is possible to cross a galaxy in perhaps a few days. The high end of Galactic Civilizations II speeds suggest that the fastest GCII ships could traverse the Milky Way in in about a decade, which implies that Star Wars hyperdrive speeds are at least 1000 times faster than the end-game GCII drives. About the only real-world things with comparable speed ratios are supersonic aircraft to walking humans, or spacecraft to cars or ships.

If you really want to compare different science fiction universes to one another, then it helps to establish how similar or how different the behavior of the aspects being compared are. Let's compare GCII superluminal drives to the Star Wars hyperdrive and the Star Trek warp drive.

1. GCII drives are clearly affected by proximity to large masses; otherwise it would take virtually no movement time to traverse between worlds inside of a system. Star Wars hyperdrives appear to be similarly affected, but to what extent is not clear (nevertheless, Star Wars hyperdrives can engage within minutes of take-off, based on the escape from Tatooine and the evacuation of Hoth). I'm not certain about Star Trek.
2. All three universes appear to allow the drive systems to be engaged and disengaged relatively close to the aforementioned large masses, although how close is difficult to judge, particularly with GCII since we only have the game map to base such judgements on, and we already know that the game map tiles are distorted from the nominal 1-parsec edge dimension in the neighborhood of stars and planets. Star Wars hyperdrives appear to be usable within minutes of takeoff from a planet's surface, though by that point in time the ships in question have already at least attained orbital altitudes, and are possibly further out; Star Trek appears to allow warp drives to engage while in orbit of a planet. There is little evidence in either Star Wars films or Star Trek episodes that there is a significant amount of time spent approaching a planet after returning to subluminal velocities. The time (and therefore distance) requirement in GCII is unclear, though apparently similar to the time requirement for departure.
3. GCII superluminal velocities peak at about 10,000 lightyears per year (50 parsecs per week times 52 weeks per year times 3.26 light-years per parsec); Star Trek superluminal velocities appear to peak at about 3000 lightyears per year (from the Memory Alpha site, excluding the outlier of ~800,000 times the speed of light), at least for the Federation and most other non-Borg factions; Star Wars superluminal velocities appear to be at least three orders of magnitude greater, assuming that the Star Wars galaxy is approximately the same size as the Milky Way (~days to traverse the galaxy as opposed to ~7 decades to traverse the galaxy (Star Trek Voyager) or ~50 parsecs per week (GCII)).
4. Star Trek warp drives are known to be influenced by "subspace phenomena" which render the drives slower or inoperable; GCII drives behave the same way. Star Wars drives, to the best of my knowledge, are not similarly affected.
5. High-speed warp travel in Star Trek can damage the fabric of the universe (or, at least, it could in some episodes); high-speed GCII drives can damage the fabric of the universe (based on a United Planets speed limit law). Star Wars hyperdrives are not known to have this property, again to the best of my knowledge.
6. Star Trek warp drives and GCII hyperdrives both appear to allow for changes of travel direction between departure point and original destination without returning to sublight speeds for course correction (I am not certain that this is the case for GCII). It is not clear to me as to whether or not this is possible in Star Wars (the books go both ways on this, and the movies don't provide anything definitive).
7. All three universes appear to allow small craft to carry superluminal drives; however, Star Trek drives appear to only fit on the larger classes of shuttle or larger vessels. Star Wars hyperdrives can apparently fit on vessels not much larger than the standard TIE fighters, and can do so with little or no loss of speed, though whether or not the range remains similar is more difficult to determine (certainly the maximum time you could theoretically spend in hyperspace is more limited on the starfighters than on the larger vessels, but that's about all that can be said either way about the difference in operating range; there might be something about it on one or another of the Star Wars official or fan sites, but I'm not going to do any digging for it).
8. Operating ranges in GCII appear to be limited to within a few tens of "sectors", with each sector being a square 15 sectors on edge, although it is unclear if this is a drive constraint or a supply constraint. Star Wars operating ranges appear to cover large portions of the galaxy even on small craft, although this is difficult to judge based on the movies, and I'm somewhat unwilling to rely on books to cover this aspect of hyperdrive operation. Range of Star Trek drives is more difficult to judge.
9. It would appear that the Star Trek warp drives cannot sustain more than a few weeks of continuous operation at cruising speed, or more than a few hours of continuous operation at maximum speed (however, the estimate on the cruising speed constraint is a guess, not something necessarily supported by the shows; the 'few hours at maximum speed' figure comes from the Memory Alpha site, which is a bit more specific that what I gave here). Maximum sustained operating times (at either cruising or maximum speed) of both Star Wars and GCII drive systems are unknown to me, though standard Star Wars hyperdrives are unlikely to be designed for more than a few days of continuous operation simply due to the travel speed.

From this, it can be seen that GCII drives are similar to warp drives in terms of maximum speed, interaction with "subspace" and the "fabric of the universe", and probably have similar operating ranges and maximum allowable operation times. There is little in which the GCII drives appear to be more similar to the Star Wars hyperdrive than the Star Trek warp drive, aside from the name of the first GCII drive component. If you want to suggest that two pieces of technology that perform the same role in different science fiction universes work on the same operating principles, you should first establish that the observable operating characteristics of the systems are similar, which is not true for GCII hyperdrives and Star Wars hyperdrives.

I agree with your claim that GCII vessels most likely travel at sublight velocities within a star system, as otherwise travel between worlds within a system takes far too much of the movement allowance of the vessels. What I disputed was the actual speed of travel, as 10% of lightspeed is too fast for in-system travel to take the same fraction of a ship's movement allowance as traveling a parsec in deep space. In the example with our system radius being about 30 AU, the maximum possible distance between any two planets would be about 60 AU. 10% of the speed of light allows for ships to cover about 10 AU in 500 seconds, which would mean that in 3000 seconds we could cross the system. This is a little under an hour of travel time, although we'd need to add in some extra time for acceleration at either end of the trip (unless we're using the superluminal drive to propel us at sublight velocities and the superluminal drive doesn't require a significant acceleration period, at least for such activity). Since 1 week contains 168 hours, this is clearly a little too little time spent to cross the system when a ship can only perform ~50 move actions per week end-game engine technology. Also, when it is suggested that a vessel moves at speed X, it is assumed that most of the distance covered is traveled at speed X, or that the average speed over the course of the trip is X; 10% of c is perhaps acceptable as the maximum speed during a trip, but if said trip is to take any fraction of a week which could represent a movement action of a GCII vessel, then it cannot be a representative speed for undertaking that trip unless GCII move actions are accepted to take periods of time which can differ by orders of magnitude even at the high end of what GCII ships are capable of attaining unless it is also accepted that GCII ships spend significant fractions of the week simply not moving.

In science fiction writing, it is not a good practice to base your fictional science on another person's fictional science. If the writer made errors with their fictional science, then basing your fictional science on their fictional science will likely cause your fictional science to inherit their problems.

The 3 major mistakes I can think of at the moment is:
A. The science the writer used at the time is outdated (and is now inaccurate or completely replaced).
B. The writer made errors.
C. The writer made its fictional science based on what would be convenient for their plot.

If I recall correctly, some old science fiction novels (possibly over a century old) were based upon the idea that asteroids were like little planets because they didn't know any better (could they imagine that space was a vacuum back then?). Obviously, now a days, writing a science fiction novel based upon that science would at best be considered soft science fiction.

Also, I think that Star Wars is more of a fantasy story, not science fiction. A lot of emphasis was placed upon the Force (magic if you will). There's plenty of action and adventure too. There was little emphasis on the science except when it was useful to the plot. Its really a story that happened in space, so it required some science to do the space, nothing more. I would not recommend using it as a fictional science template unless you are also writing fantasy in space.

Let's see now.

Basic information from WikiPedia:

An AU is the average distance from the surface of the sun to the earth (149.6 million KM, 92.956 million miles).

Pluto reaches a distance of about 49 AU from the sun, and if we can call that the radius of our solar system, gives us a

diameter of about 98 AU (about 14660.8 million KM, or  about 9109.69 million miles).

Since the light from the sun takes about 8 minutes and 17 seconds (about 497 seconds) to reach our earth, it would take a

ship traveling at 0.1c about 5000 seconds to travel 1 AU. That is quite a bit longer than 10 AU in 500 seconds.

While the outer edge of our solar system is still being debated, it appears that it may be between 200 AU and 50,000 AU

from the sun. it looks like a ship traveling at 0.1c would take between just under 2,000,000 seconds (about 1 1/2 years) to

about 29,700,000 seconds (almost 36 years) to travel across the diameter of our solar system.

Are my calculations off?

Agree... The following made me think of these things

There are even things in the middle of space that are planets without stars next to them.

http://www.space.com/23143-lonely-alien-planet-discovery.html

while the first half is right I think the second half is incorrect here's my math on it although I might be wrong

299 792 458          m / s    speed of light
299 792 45.8        1/10th speed of light

149 597 871        kilometers 1 au
149 597 871 000        meters 1 au


4990.  time in seconds to travel 1 au at 1/10th speed of light
83.2    time in minutes to travel 1 au at 1/10th speed of light
1.4      time in hours to travel 1 au at 1/10th speed of light
0.058   time in days to travel 1 au at 1/10th speed of light
11.6     time in days to travel 200 au at 1/10th speed of light
2887.8  time in days to travel 50000 au at 1/10th speed of light
7.9       time in years to travel 50000 au at 1/10th speed of light

23 days to to just under 16 years to cross our solar system assuming its 400 AU to 100,000 AU in diameter

double post

Well as long as everyone agrees that you should not be able to arbitrarily close off your borders without more force than the other guy have I'm satisfied.

Thanks for the updates. Next time I suggest something no more quoting from Scifi stories.

If I remember the dread lords manual correctly it said that game wise the distances in the solar systems and between solar systems were different.

I thought that the distance to pluto was 36 Au that's what my textbook on current astronomy said. Honestly sizes and distances change so much it doesn't really matter. The size of the solar system is debatable. They have found planets that are 100 Au from their stars. About including Pluto means that you are saying that pluto is a planet. I have no problem with that. Just remember that pluto is classified with a type of object with an estimated number between 150 and 3000 in our solar system. Only 40 of them have been discovered to date.

Rogue planets are fascinating. They estimate that their are twice as many of them as stars. I'm not sure if they are guessing that they are part of the Oort cloud or not. We really didn't cover them in class. Some can be Terran with or without an apnosphere, ice, or gas as far as I know. If they are in the Oort cloud they would be accompanied with a lot of planets.

It does, as has been explained here.

It's a supply constraint, because the range increases, the more life support modules are on board. Also, one sector is a square of 15 parsecs on edge, not sectors.

Really parsecs? Not AU?

1 AU = 8 light-minutes = 480 light-seconds. So yes, I made a math error. Thanks for catching it. It's still too little time for ships with relatively normal speeds in GCII to be taking a full move action, unless the ships are either accepted take very different amounts of time for each move action or are accepted to sit still in space for large amounts of time.

I used Neptune, which has an orbital radius of ~30AU. Using that, the system diameter is about 60 AU, which at 0.1c would take about 80 hours to cross. Using your figure of ~50AU for Pluto, I get 133 hours to cross the system at 0.1c. Since we don't really know where the edge of the solar system is in terms of where GCII drives can go to superluminal velocities, I just did the calculations for getting it away from the planets. Obviously there are much larger numbers that you could choose.

Yes, parsecs. Well, adjusted parsecs, to be precise. Take a look at the post I linked to above.

I like the idea of border sensors..   Sort of like Mini spacestations.

I also like the idea someone mentioned about territory.  Planets inside territory could be consitered hostile when trying to colonize in someone else territory.

I would like the ability to add ships into orbit to protect colonized planets. I think that could solve many issues.  

the game play could go like this...  Pass border sensors, warning is sent about being in another territory.

get to planet, ships are in orbit, when the colony ship goes to land on said planet, a pop up box happens. If an AI is trying to land, a dialoge like,  We are the Torians, we would like to use this planet to help our people prosper, will you let us colonize this world?

Yes,  the colony ship passes, and it is now a torian world.   If No, the AI has the choice to goto war with you to land the ship. 

the player on the other hand, can now start a war and blow up the ship to show force of the territory, Or let the ship move on..

Yep. Parsecs. 15 AU wouldn't even get you out of our solar system.

 Obviously I forgot to account for 24 hours in a day. Our calculations now match. Thanks.