Hello everyone,

I've recently purchased the game and am enjoying getting to grips with designing new space habitats and learning more. It seems rather sophisticated and I'm looking forward to getting more into it.

I have a keen interest in space settlement and write a blog about it which can be found here: http://projection3.blogspot.co.uk/.

I'm also a member of the British Interplanetary Society and am part of their study project on reviewing the reports on space colonies by Dr Gerard O'Neill and his colleagues.

Cheers!
Adam Manning

I tried out 0.20, and now 0.21, on Ubuntu and found a few new issues with 0.21.

First, there are the menu buttons. When the mouse moves over them, it looks like static shows up for a frame. After doing this a few times, I think the texture has white text with odd coordinates that scale it in odd ways. Not a big deal, but it didn't happen with 0.20.

Next, full-screen is no longer usable. When selected, it does result in a full-screen display, but it looks like the menu animates moving somewhere up and to the right off screen resulting in a black window with no user interface. It still responds to alt-f4, but that seems to be the only option.

Finally, the zones in the colony now render to make the different densities indistinguishable. They are all solid, which looks like high density from 0.20. In 0.20, low and medium density were indistinguishable from each other, but easily distinguished from high.

I've also caught some people walking on the grass parallel to the walkways. Shame on them.

We are tickled pink to announce the release of version 0.21 of the High Frontier video game!

More evidence of how agriculture is changing... and what it will probably look like in space.

MIT’s Food Computer: The Future of Urban Agriculture?

Here's a great article at The Space Review:

Settling space is the only sustainable reason for humans to be in space

It tears apart a rather Luddite essay by the head of Google X and his wife.  (Though to be fair, the original article is mostly objecting to making Mars our first colonization target, and I agree with them on that; cislunar space is obviously the best and only practical place to begin.)

We're getting close to the next release of High Frontier!  We just knocked this item off our to-do list: fusion plants and solar power satellite rectennas.



That big mesh thing there is a rectenna (receiving antenna), and it receives continuous power beamed in the form of microwaves from a solar power satellite in some other orbit, far away (which is why we don't actually draw it!).  The rectenna is basically just a big wire mesh; it's lightweight and cheap.  And you don't have to worry about building or maintaining the actual solar power satellite; market forces take care of that, at least out to the orbit of Mars.  (Beyond that, and it's no longer cost-effective.)

You do have to help kick-start the space power industry by completing the Space Solar Power project, though.


Similarly, the fusion plant part becomes available once you complete the Fusion Power project.  It's about half the size of a fission reactor, and quite a lot cheaper and lighter, but produces the same amount of power.


These new parts will give you lots of ways to power your civilization as you expand out into the solar system!

We're finally getting around to redoing our Help page, which hasn't kept up with the actual game.

Here's the new overview video we'll be adding there soon.

Well, that sure took a while, but it's finally done!  We now have little people going about their business in city view.

The Blue Origin rocket that went to the edge of space and landed a couple months ago has just done it again — the very first time a vertical take-off-and-landing rocket has done so.

(Though not the first time for rocket-powered craft in general; that would be SpaceShipOne.)





This friendly rivalry between Blue Origin and SpaceX is great for all of us.  I expect that in 5-10 years they will both have reusable orbital launch vehicles, and costs are going to continue to drop sharply.

What I really dig about Blue Origin is "Our vision: Millions of people living and working in space."  That's space colonization they're talking about... High Frontier, here we come!

Kalpana Two is a small cylindrical space colony some colleagues and I have been designing over the last few months.  Awesome space artist Bryan Versteeg has made an interactive fly-through; that is, while the camera is flying through the colony, you can click and drag to rotate the view.






Pretty neat!