Wonderful info, Many thanks!

Too much CO2 getting you down?  Or, the opposite problem: all the CO2 has been turned into grass, leaving you feeling great but the grass turning brown?

What you need is an atmospheric regulator!

We've been researching how much CO2 is pulled from the air by a nice green lawn.  This is important for High Frontier since your colonies start out with quite a lot of grass, unless you either chose not to include soil, or have a water level so close to the surface that you get sand instead of grass.

We found this claim that one acre of well-managed grass (lawn) stores about 920 lbs of carbon (not CO2) per year.  We can convert this to CO2 by multiplying by 44 (the weight of CO2) / 12 (the weight of C), for 3400 lbs of CO2 per acre per year.  In modern units, that's 0.38 kg per m^2 per year.

Curiously, that works out to almost exactly 1 g per square meter per day!

An active person exhales about 1 kg of CO2 per day.  So, you would need 1000 square meters of grass to absorb one person's CO2.  That's a square about 32 meters on a side, or in archaic units, a quarter acre.  A one-square-kilometer park could support 1000 people, just with the grass.

More fun comparisons: New York's Central Park, which is 3.41 km^2, could support 3410 people with just the grass.  But there are also about 20,000 trees in that park.  Every 16 trees or so can absorb the CO2 of one person, so when you put it all together, Central Park could support over 4600 people indefinitely (at least, as far as respiration goes).

Now you see why so many of the buildings in High Frontier have grass on the roof!  Grass is photosynthesis, in a really convenient package.

...I've got two boys, 10 and 14 years old, and the three of us have been working for the past year or so on a video game about space settlement.


So starts the talk I'll be giving at the TEDx Youth conference tomorrow.  I'm the last speaker in the morning session — a position of honor, as it means people will be talking about space settlement as they go to lunch.

Like all TED talks, I expect the videography and editing will be very high-quality, and the final video will be posted on the web for all to enjoy.  I'll post a link here when it's ready.  The talk is mostly about real-life orbital space settlement, not about the game in particular, though I do mention it in several places as a way to make the topic more... er... topical.


And there, now the Welcome forum is no longer empty, and everyone who's been too shy to make the first post now has no excuse!

...and back to work on High Frontier!  We're working now on the O2/CO2 balance (see our notes here).  Meanwhile the art team has been hard at work making some high-density building models, so we can finally have zone density fully implemented.

We've also been thinking about adding more types of paths for you to choose from.  Right now the only path type is labelled "footpath," though it's big enough to be a mixed-use pedestrian/bicycle path.  Additional path types would be mainly cosmetic at this point, until we add path-finding around version 0.21 and budgets in 0.25 (see the Roadmap).


Also, we haven't forgotten about those KickStarter rewards we're behind schedule on... so we'll be pushing to get those out ASAP too.  Now that zoning, services, and basic building functionality are all working, there's no reason we can't start pushing out those special buildings for the KickStarter backers we love (which is to say, all of them).

I'm headed to Japan for a couple of weeks, starting tomorrow.  This will put a bit of a damper in development for the rest of the month... but we'll be back at it the second week of April.  We've already started planning for O2/CO2 exchange, which is going to be the focus of 0.15.  We also hope to have full support for low, medium, and high-density zones by then.

In the meantime, feel free to discuss amongst yourselves!  I'll try to check in every few days too and participate in any discussions you get going.

We've just posted version 0.14 of High Frontier!

Check out the blog entry for all the details... though if you've been following the Dev Log here, you already know about most of the new stuff.

You definitely want the improved population/building simulation, the new Options screen, farms, schools and playgrounds, and a long list of minor improvements.  So, if you're an owner, check your email for the download instructions.  And if you're not an owner, this might be a good time to fix that!

We've just added two new municipal buildings you can place: an elementary school, and a playground.



When placing a building manually, remember that you can press the 9 and 0 (zero) keys to rotate it before you plop it down.


Both of these new buildings will be available in version 0.14, which is coming out Real Soon Now!

Yep, it's true; we have low-density agricultural buildings now (as well as a few medium-density ones, too!).



We're not rendering actual crops yet; that's going to take a bit more doing, and will probably have to wait for later in the development timeline.  But at least now farms do appear, and as soon as we start tracking food, you'll be glad you put them in.
The image above shows a few of the low-density farms; below is one of the medium density polytunnel farms:



It's those rounded blue things just north of the pond.

Of course we're not yet actually paying attention to the zone density you specify, because we only have a couple of medium-density buildings.  But that's changing fast; every release now has substantially more artwork than the last, and pretty soon we'll start honoring the whole low/medium/high density designations.  So, think carefully about what sort of colony you want to nurture, and how to arrange those zones!

This interesting article was just pointed out to me:

Japan space scientists make wireless energy breakthrough

This isn't actually the first time energy has been transmitted wirelessly over such distances.  In fact a demonstration in Hawaii beamed power 92 miles, though it was only 20 watts.  But this is the largest amount of power that has ever been beamed wirelessly (though the "electric kettle" comment doesn't make it sound like a lot, it's actually more than the peak power generation of the solar panels on my house).

This is relevant to space colonization for two reasons.  First, instead of having its own solar panels, a colony might well just have a (much smaller) receiving antenna, and buy power from a big power satellite nearby.  Second, building and maintaining those giant solar power satellites, which mainly sell their power to Earth, could provide an important source of income for a space economy.