I found this blog post today, about the most common geometries for orbital colonies (torus, sphere, and cylinder).

Nothing here will be news to High Frontier players (in fact, the author seems unaware that the Bernal sphere is unstable, and will result in residents quickly having a very bad day).  But there's some truly inspiring artwork, neatly gathered in one post.  I think my favorite is this one:



Which is your favorite?

Check out this article: Making a Second Sun: Scientists Make Artificial Skylight That You Won't Believe.


It describes a new technique for making a very realistic skylight.  The designers have in mind to apply it to underground rooms, or interior rooms in large buildings.  But I wonder if something like this, scaled up considerably, could serve as an artificial sky within a space colony?



What do you think?

We've just implemented tracking of housing, jobs, and more.  You'll notice this in v0.14 in a variety of ways.  For one thing, the Economics tab of the Statistics palette finally has some content:



The "housing" and "jobs" numbers are a total for all the habitable parts in your colony, and are determined directly from the buildings present.  So you'll need to get busy zoning (as well as building municipal buildings) if you want your colony to grow.

The way it works is this: every city part (including buildings, trees, etc.) has a number of "services" it provides to the colony.  These services currently are:

• housing
• jobs
• lodging (for visitors)
• ambiance
• entertainment
• culture
  

A friend of mine pointed out this really interesting article about topology in the move Interstellar — including some interesting discussion of orbital space colonies:

Our art team has been making some really cool buildings lately... including some bigger ones.  Some of them are big enough that we have to face this fact: "up" isn't a constant direction in a space colony.

Of course it's not a constant direction on Earth, either; "up" means away from the center of the Earth, so if you made a building many thousands of kilometers long, it would have substantial curvature to it.  But because the Earth is so big, on normal human scale, we can ignore this, and build as if the world were flat.  Walls meet floors at 90° angles, and stay parallel to each other as they go up.

A space colony, however, is substantially smaller than Earth.  If you have a big enough building in a small enough colony, then the fact that "up" always points towards the spin axis actually impacts the geometry of the building.  Walls no longer meet floors at a right angle, and they bend in a little as they go up.  The overall shape of the building has to curve a little, matching the curvature of the station around the Y axis, so that no matter where you stand in it, the walls seem vertical to you.

So we've implemented just such an adjustment (ticket #122) for version 0.14.



It's a pretty subtle effect, as it should be unless your colony is really tiny.  The above image is in a cylinder with a 300-m radius, almost as small as a reasonable cylinder can get.  If you look carefully at the strip mall, you may notice that it's slightly curved, matching the local gravity at each point.  This includes the water feature out front, which is a good thing, otherwise the water would slop right out!

I've just stumbled upon this amazing video by astronomer Scott Manley.  It shows the solar system out to Jupiter, with all the known asteroids over time.  Each is color-coded according to how far it comes into the inner solar system, and highlighted when they are first discovered.

It's a really fascinating watch — I recommend hitting the full-screen button so you can better see what's going on.





The video only goes up to 2012, by which time there were over half a million known asteroids.  Each one of those could probably supply all the materials needed for a decent-sized space colony (we can't yet see the really small ones except when they happen to buzz past the Earth, which is rare).

This is, unfortunately, one place where we're going to have to skimp on realism a bit in High Frontier... while you certainly will be able to build a lot of colonies in the main asteroid belt, the sheer scale of reality is too much to capture in a video game!

For version 0.14, we've implemented multi-part paths/roads.  Instead of clicking and dragging to place a road, you now click once to start the road, and then click at each "bend" in the road.  The road of course stretches to where the mouse is, so you can judge where it's going to be.

When done, you terminate the path by clicking the last endpoint again, or by pressing the Commit key (Return/Enter by default).

Here's an example:


We still need to deal with proper intersections, but this is already a big step up from the simple straight paths we've had up to now.  (And, any existing paths in your current colonies will still load just fine!)

As is common these days, our forum software bestows "titles" on people according to how many posts they've written.  This is just a fun way to encourage people to be active in the community.  The current titles are:

While the formulas used might be based on simple SWAGs, it would be fun to have a cost assigned to the build and materials for our creations. If the ISS could bankrupt a normal nation, the torus that I just created would probably sink half the galactic worth in asteroids.

Tim

Great to have the forums available.

Now - on to the creation of a world spanning toroidal station.

Tim