tehforsch

The primary stuff you need to form stars is hydrogen and helium which is absolutely everywhere in the universe. In order for stars to form, however, you need a lot of it. This usually happens if you have a strong gravitational force, which pulls in more and more gas (very very slowly). If the gas cools sufficiently, at some point the gravitational force will overcome the thermal pressure of the gas, causing it to collapse and form stars.

This is the basic mechanism of star formation everywhere and it probably isn't much different in this particular system. The strongest gravitational forces are caused by dark matter haloes which are usually larger than the galaxy itself and much heavier. On smaller scales, the main gravitational force is caused by the collapsing gas itself. Both probably still exist in this system and provide the required gravity for stars to form.

A note: While dust has an impact on star formation (it might help the gas to cool, for example) it is not a required ingredient for stars to form. In fact, the first stars formed at a time when there was no dust in the universe.

Not an expert either but Sagittarius A* has a mass of 10^6 solar masses, the Milky Way itself has a mass of approximately 10^12 solar masses. So I doubt that Sagittarius A* is even relevant in terms of the Milky Ways gravitational potential. That said, the existence of Sagittarius A* does (most likely, this is an area of debate) have an impact on the Milky Way due to the strong, high-frequency radiation from its accretion disk, which affects the gas surrounding the central region of the galaxy. Still, this is probably not an incentive for anyone to destroy the black hole (if that were technologically possible). In addition, keep in mind that any galactic-scale effects take on the order of millions of years to take place. (With supernovas or other super high energy events being an exception)

So my intuition is your novel would need to ignore a few physical facts, but its fiction after all :D

For people who are not willing to provide their credentials: I wrote

https://github.com/tehforsch/striputary

which also records the music (meaning you need to wait for the entire length of the playlist for it to finish) and cuts it into songs. It doesn't require you to provide any credentials (and it should in principle work with other streaming services as well, but I haven't tried). It is probably not the smoothest user experience, given that nobody except me has ever used it, but I've successfully recorded thousands of albums with it so far.

I completely agree with everything you said, however I'd like to comment on the last thing you said - Just because the best possible strategy changes depending on the skill of your opponent(s) does not mean that there can't be a strategy that cannot be exploited by your opponent. I think the mistake many people make is that they tend to look at games with a "chess mindset" (there is a single move that is the perfect response to my opponents move) when games with hidden information (such as cs:go) will require a "poker mindset" - a strategy isn't given by a single move but by a probability distribution of actions. In your example, there is an "optimal" way to play this scenario in which you aim at jumping height p% of the time and at normal walking height (1-p)% of the time where the value of p depends on many different factors such as you hitting the headshot if you aim correctly, you hitting it anyways if you don't aim correctly etc.

This is not the strategy that will win the the most (if you know for sure that your opponent will jump every time, of course you would never aim at walking height), but it is one that cannot be exploited by your opponent deviating from whatever their optimal strategy is.

Of course, improving your skill enough to see these changes in behavior in your opponents takes a long time, which is why we naturally adapt the more exploitative strategies that you mentioned.