We’ve just released version 0.08 of High Frontier, which adds a bunch of new parts for your colony: solar panels, power plant, radiators (including “skirt” style), docking bay, and communications dish. These are currently cosmetic, but will start impacting the simulation soon.
We’ve begun early prototyping work for the internal colony management. You can see one of our early graphics tests here. But this week, we’re thinking mainly about the city simulation itself. The growth of a city is primarily a function of demand for housing, jobs, and services; and transportation of people and goods. Transportation will
We’re pleased to announce version 0.07 of the High Frontier video game!
We’ve started prototyping the internal colony management mode for the High Frontier video game. This is where you’ll actually go inside the colony you’ve designed, and help the residents lay out roads, parks, public works, etc. (Building houses and commercial buildings will be up to them.) [youtube=http://youtu.be/zGOLDHs7P5I]
Version 0.06 of High Frontier is out today! Here’s a little video demonstrating the new rotational dynamics. [youtube=http://youtu.be/cfFhHiUUtVw]
It’s been a long few weeks. Since we first announced High Frontier, we’ve been releasing new versions about once a week. After version 0.05 was released on July 24th, we expected version 0.06 to come out around the end of July. All we had to do was implement rotational dynamics, so we could have realistic
In 2007, I worked with the original designers of the Kalpana One orbital settlement to revise the design for rotational stability. To recap, you can measure how much rotational inertia an object has around any axis, but in the case of a space colony, what really matters is how the intended spin axis compares to
I’ve long been an advocate for thinking carefully about rotational dynamics in space colony design. For any given object, some spin directions may be inherently unstable, as you can see in this video. In the spacecraft industry, there is a well-known rule of thumb that the desired spin axis must have a moment of inertia
Welcome to the High Frontier blog! This blog will chronicle our progress, challenges, solutions, feedback, and other adventures down the road to the world’s best space colony simulation game.
