The idea goes back to Arthur C.  Clarke. I hope these guys can make it work.

http://www.maglaunch.com/

Sounds like some cheezy 1950s sci-fi flick, but it's actually just an amusing result of a test we were doing today:

Moved by the holiday spirit, we're offering High Frontier for $10 — 50% off the current normal price — for the rest of this month.

Yes, that's a purposely provocative subject line.    The real question is: how important is it to see little people and vehicles moving around in your cities?

Right now, we draw buildings, trees, water, etc., but we don't actually draw the people.  You know they're there because they're constantly Squawking about things (and in version 0.21, their squawks will be even more connected to what's in your colony).  But you don't see them.



There is a rationale for this: the time scale is such that one simulated day takes about 30 seconds of real time.  That's a speedup of 2,880.  So a person walking at 3.5 mph (about 1.5 m/sec) would be moving 10,000 mph, or 4,500 meters per second.  Or, about 75 meters per frame if you're running at 60 frames/second.

So if we're realistic about the time scale, you'd never be able to see them.  It's all just happening too dang fast.

But the real reason we haven't done it yet is that it's hard.  Unlike some other city simulation games, which have a pretty restricted camera angle, in High Frontier the angle between the camera and the ground can be extreme, due to the curvature of the habitat.  This makes it quite hard to use common graphics tricks, like 2D images of people seen from various angles, to maintain performance.  And if we try to use real 3D models for hundreds of little people, it's likely to drag the frame rate way down.  There are probably tricks we can do, but it's going to take a fair amount of time to make it work well.

The original SimCity didn't draw people either, or even individual cars really; they just drew an animated texture of cars moving, in proportion to the calculated traffic density on each road segment.



We are going to add vehicle-bearing roads as an option in High Frontier, but you probably won't use them much, because cars really don't make a lot of sense in a space colony.  But we could do something similar for pedestrian/bicycle/etc. traffic, perhaps drawing colorful motion-blurred people whizzing by.

Or, we could bite the bullet and attempt to draw individual people going about their business, ignoring the discrepancy in the timescale (because hey, it is a game after all).

What do you all think?  We really want to hear your opinion!

I received the following interesting facts, culled from the 2010 U.S. census, from Stephen Covey:

In the USA, there are 250-500 persons per restaurant, 1000-2000 persons per tavern. They also report that for every 1,000 people there are:

• 3 physicians
• 5 dentists
• 2 grocery stores
• 10 nurses
• 0.2 coffee shops
• 1 tavern or sports bar
• 2.5 restaurants
• And 1995 square meters of restaurant, retail, and services
  

An explanation of how fusion is safer and cheaper than fission. Fusion reactors would make space colonies easier to build and safer to fly around without all those solarpanels flapping around.

If you haven't seen this news already, go check it out!

I've been disappointed with the very slow test flight program at Blue Origin, but they must be doing a whole lot of simulations in between each flight, because they nailed this one beautifully.

I hope they will now step things up, proving the safety of the craft, and start carrying paying passengers before too long.  The serious possibility of that should light a fire under Virgin Galactic, who otherwise is going to start losing customers soon to Blue Origin.  So, hopefully we'll have both of these guys providing suborbital flights, albeit through very different methods.

Meanwhile, the fact that both Blue Origin and SpaceX have independently developed powered landings of first-stage boosters (even though the former is doing it only from a modest suborbital velocity, and the latter hasn't actually stuck the landing yet) is really interesting.  It suggests to me that this is how rockets are going to routinely work in the future — the boosters will fly back down and land themselves vertically, ready to be refueled and flown again.

Exciting times!

I have seen this idea used in an indoor farm producing a million pounds of fresh herbs and veggies. At this scale with only a slight modification could be used in low or micro-G.

http://3dprint.com/103138/3d-printed-cascaqua-aquaponics/

We just released version 0.20 of the High Frontier video game.  This is an exciting release because it is the first to add a real “game” mode to the game, including opportunities (which earn you Experience Points, or XP) and a project tree (on which you can spend your XP to open up cool new possibilities in the game).




This is a huge step forward for High Frontier as a game, and not just the world’s most advanced space colony simulator.

There are of course a number of other changes too, including some fun details like a day/night cycle if you use windows for lighting in a low orbit.

As always, you ran read the full release notes on the wiki.  And please post here on the forums to discuss the game, or real-life space exploration & settlement.  We’re getting into the phase of development now where your input can more directly set priorities and have an impact on what we add to the game, so we’d really love to hear what you think!

This article is a few years old, but still very relevant and interesting:

Asteroid Resources Could Create Space Habs For Trillions; Land Area Of A Thousand Earths


Highly recommended reading!