Some people may think you’re tossing out a sarcastic joke here… but unambiguously fuck yes … because doing this kind of preemptive typing, the forward thinking to “frame of reference” is basically the next step after overhauling everything to disambiguate between calendrical and chronological timekeeping and units…
Because fundamentally you can’t correct for the reference frame if you can’t work out if your dealing with chronological or calendrical units. Calendrical units are in a weird liminal space outside of the earth reference frame. We measure the history of most deep space missions by earth reference frame mission elapsed time and do so by keeping a clock on earth and silently keeping records of the vehicle clock.. but on Mars we have a per mission Sol count that brings Mars time into the mix, and I know for a fact a lot of people neglect the barycentric gravity gradient difference between Earth and Mars because for literally 99.9% of things it doesn’t matter… but if you measure a transit of an Astronomical body from instruments on Mars and don’t deal with the relative reference frames your fractions of an arc second are basically pointless false precision.
Alpha Centauri is simply a weird earth. I think that a game around long-lived creatures that colonize a galaxy and have to work with relativistic effects could be different and fun. At some level it builds on all these different ways of looking at time. Breathe some life via simulation into this tongue-in-cheek interstellar economics: https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
They will not have to work with relativistic effects. Nobody is going to fly faster than 0.1C. It is prohibitively expensive energy-wise and there is no point of doing that. Just accelerate to 0.01C, and arrive at the neighbouring system in 400 years. 400 years is a blink of eye, anyway.
Because fundamentally you can’t correct for the reference frame if you can’t work out if your dealing with chronological or calendrical units. Calendrical units are in a weird liminal space outside of the earth reference frame. We measure the history of most deep space missions by earth reference frame mission elapsed time and do so by keeping a clock on earth and silently keeping records of the vehicle clock.. but on Mars we have a per mission Sol count that brings Mars time into the mix, and I know for a fact a lot of people neglect the barycentric gravity gradient difference between Earth and Mars because for literally 99.9% of things it doesn’t matter… but if you measure a transit of an Astronomical body from instruments on Mars and don’t deal with the relative reference frames your fractions of an arc second are basically pointless false precision.