NovaSilisko

May make a blog post about the development history of the game up til now... might also release the first playable prototype from around July 2013 or so.

That's not how it worked at all. Dig up some of the old dev posts about it, I think they're still lurking around reddit.

At some point a moderator is going to post and then lock this topic and win, happens every time a thread of this sort comes up

There probably will be a few tiers of harpoon, yeah. This would be the super heavy duty one, smaller ones probably would be powered by compressed gas. By the way, I've updated my IRC notification settings so it should be easier to get my attention in the IRC chat. I keep missing whenever you come in, Gregrox

Further developed crossbow: Rather, I suppose it's more of a ballista, given the arms don't flex and instead use torsion. Going to shorten the arms and increase the bulk of the joints, to give it more of a ballista shape...

Creating harpoon launcher. Elected to switch from a gas-based launch mechanism to a mechanical system. eg. space crossbow ^

Spacecraft questions: How much cost reduction did the use of a modular frame result in? How much reduction could be expected for future missions using the same modular system? How well did the laser communication system perform in practice vs expectations? Mission questions: Why was the spacecraft located in an equatorial orbit as opposed to a polar orbit? Are there any followup missions being thought of? For example, a similar spacecraft to LADEE but with a secondary impactor, to provide a "control sample" of an impact-related dust plume for it to measure. Does the lunar atmosphere seem to be more or less sensitive to human activity than was previously thought, given the near-complete lack of detection of Chang'e 3's landing?

Stupid ffffffffffffffffffffffffffunctionless idiots... I wonder how many Bowie albums they sold as a direct result of this video being made? Certainly above zero. I'd hope the public outcry as this gets more widely known will make both sides strike a new deal (ex. an indefinite one)

Link to source that says it's going to be taken down?

Forgot to say. There's an IRC channel on espernet now, too. #ScienceOfTheSpheres, or access it here: http://webchat.esper.net/?nick=&channels=#ScienceOfTheSpheres&fg_color=000000&fg_sec_color=000e63&bg_color=ffffff

Well, things like gravity, light, heat, etc, function the same way as in our universe, but almost everything else is alien and up to the player to decipher and understand. As I've mentioned before, your science team will draft up theories based on observations (some of which may not be correct!), organized into a sort of wiki structure, becoming more and more filled out as you perform more observations. You can also write observations of your own.

2/10 I remember taking a while to figure out how to pronounce your name.

The elaborate and macabre execution of a rabbit named Paul...

Well, for example, the article states one design is 20x the size of the ISS:

Well, every single instance of in-space maintenance ever attempted has shown that it's not by any standard "very, very low cost" and is pretty much always a tremendous pain in the rear. That pain goes up by an order of magnitude if you stick the thing in geostationary orbit... The scale of these things would mean debris is a constant problem, which would mean constant repair/part replacement missions, which would mean a neverending stream of launches, each costing - even in the most optimistic of scenarios - millions of dollars. Good for the launch providers, horrifying for the integrity of the project. Ground-based solar power just requires a pickup truck full of equipment and a few workers. On a related note, you can't exactly have a fast response if the beam transmitter gets nailed by an undetected piece of debris. Launch preparations take time, and even if you had a maintenance spacecraft on 24/7 alert (extremely unlikely...), ready to launch at any moment, it would take the better part of a day to rendezvous and repair the damage. Depending on the severity, it could be much, much longer. I will concede there's less debris at geostationary altitudes but it's still going to be a major issues as the collectors need to be quite large for the idea to really work on a large scale. Edit: Another side note, something of this scale at geosynch would become a large debris source in itself from the unending slow trickle of micrometeoroid hits. Each of those hits knocks off more debris, which will remain crossing GEO altitudes for centuries, if not millennia. Other operators of satellites in those orbits might not feel comfortable with that.

Decided to just roll with SotS for the acronym. I mean, look at Space Engine vs Space Engineers. Not only do they share the same acronym, but 80% of the same name Anyway, now that that's out of the way, I have a new twitter account for the development process which will retweet anything of note as well as notify of blog posts: https://twitter.com/SotS_Dev

It's far better to invest all the money needed for a space-based solar solution into other forms of clean energy, like more efficient ground-based solar, tidal, geothermal, wind, improvements to nuclear, etc. Even if launch costs are reduced by multiple orders of magnitude from today, the cost for such a thing would still be enormous simply due to all the work needed. I really don't think it's worth it.

The cameras on Rosetta and Philae are VERY nice. Rosetta example, of the asteroid 21 Lutetia: Philae example, of Rosetta's solar array and Mars:

I'm beginning to get a little concerned. While the name "Science of the Spheres" seems unique, the abbreviation "SotS" is not. Sword of the Stars, as one major example that we managed to be totally unaware of. As such, the current plan is to crowdsource a plan. Does anyone have any ideas for a new abbreviation? It has to be simple and memorable and most importantly, unique.

You're confusing Rosetta with Dawn I believe - Rosetta doesn't use an ion drive. It's got a normal thruster. 300 m/s over 8 hours calculates to about 1 cm/s2 acceleration. An ion thruster is something like 1 mm/s2 or less. Spaceflight is not very fast Anyway, greatly looking forward to Rosetta. My estimates put the current apparent diameter of the comet viewed from Rosetta to be comparable to the apparent diameter of Ceres as viewed from Earth, so alas, it'll be a while before we get good images.

Doing some of the "science" part of the game's name, lately... untextured for now, just focused on producing sensor models en masse for later refinement. From left to right: Environmental monitoring system (Temperature, air pressure, humidity) Atmospheric sampling system Magnetometer + boom Alpha particle X-ray spectrometer Geiger–Müller tube Laser Rangefinder Dust impact detector Dust collector (via aerogel) Infrared radiometer (long-range thermometer, effectively) Solar cell test unit (required research device to determine what sort of solar arrays work under microverse sunlight, more on that research later) Langmuir probe The intent/hope is to make these instruments function closely to their real-world counterparts. The only unavoidable departure from reality in this case will probably be speeding up some slow processes (the APXS takes hours to scan something in real life, for instance) The actual scientific part roster will be divided up into three general categories - Observation, Sampling, and Analysis. What I've done so far is a good number of the observation parts (and two samplers), sampling will be things like drills, scoops, siphons (for water samples), and things of that nature. Analysis will be larger pieces of equipment that you feed the samples into to garner information on them, like the Viking biological experiments or the TEGA instrument on Phoenix. However, if you're skilled enough to bring the ship back to the launch platform, Analysis is unnecessary, as the MEA's home labs can be used instead (assuming you've bought the necessary equipment for them...)

Would've been quite easy to explain had they just given the station a bit of a tumble - the centrifugal force would indeed have him thrown outward. No reason that's not feasible, if you have an efficient enough propulsion system. Indeed, you wouldn't really need any thermal protection if you could simply decelerate and gently descend into the atmosphere.

Personally, I find it a waste of energy to get worked up about this stuff. Films gon' be films, majority of audiences gon' continue to be entertained by them regardless of how accurate they are. I prefer to instead simply shrug at inaccuracies and praise that which gets the science right. For its flaws, Gravity did get a lot of stuff right, for which I applaud it. The inaccuracies I believe were acknowledged by the writer and were deliberate compromises, to help the story work better. Well, sometimes an indie film crew for instance doesn't really have the money for a full up zero-g simulating rig. The L5 miniseries (wherever it may be, now...) is a good example. Personally, I'd rather have a well-written film with a few compromises than a potentially great film shelved due to something like that.

One seed = one galaxy with several thousand stars, each with at least one planet, all procedural. I'd like to have a wiki eventually where people can put down what systems are coolest. There's also the possibility of maybe having a solar system editor, so you can create your own personal systems. Those would be manually assigned a seed string, and to access them you'd just enter that string into the transporter.

Some new physics joints are in, testing them in the predictable fashion: