The colony here is actually orbiting one of the many minor moons of Uranus... looks an asteroid.  But I couldn't fit Uranus and the moon in the shot at the same time, and the planet is far prettier.

Everything is to scale; Uranus here is about 250,000 km away.

A small colony orbiting Europa:


(Right click and select "View Image" for the full-size version.)

This colony is powered by a nuclear reactor (bottom), thus the large radiators.  The Sun here is quite small.  Europa from orbit appears nearly as smooth as a cue ball.

Anybody get the reference in the thread title?

this weekend I was playing around with the demo version. I had a thriving station and got distracted and inadvertently hit the menu button and got popped back out to the solar system/earth orbit view. I could never figure out how to return to the interior of my station and I had to start over with a new build. I noticed after that when i exited the second station interior that the colony count on the game stats had gone up to 2. which suggests to me the system new there were 2 colonies in LEO.
so, is the fact that I can't return to the interior of my colony once I leave an artifact of the demo mode not having save capability?
or is there some other UI feature that I haven't found that would let me return to the interior of my previous colony?

thanks

Hi, I am a high school teacher and I am working with students to design Space Settlement. I have several questions:

1. Would High Frontier be appropriate for my students to use?
2. Is the Forum kid friendly? (school appropriate)
3. If I have a group of four students do I need to buy a game for each student?
4. Can the students work collaboratively on a settlement?
5. What else do I need to know to get started

I'm personally not into games but I see this as an excellent way to teach students about living and working in Space. Please advise.

THANK YOU!

(Right-click and select "View Image" to see the full-sized version.)

So, yeah, I know, I'm cheating a bit here by posting a screen shot from an unreleased version of the game.  But our testing process tends to generate a lot of screen shots anyway, and some of them are quite beautiful, so I've decided to start posting them here.

But hey!  You've got a lot of really beautiful locales in your version of the game, too.  Why not post some screen shots of your own?

Here's a little something that's been rolling around in my head for a while...


(Right-click and select "View Image" to see the full-sized version.)

This is in fact a blueprint of the colony design that appears in that "Ball falling in a space colony" simulation I posted a while back.  I keep coming back to this design because it strikes me as a very practical, achievable near-term space colony.  Spinning at 2 RPM, we get over 350 thousand square meters of 1-G living space in the outer deck.  But I'm very fond of the martian and lunar decks too, which provide good amounts of space at the gravity level of those bodies.

And then we have the zero-G deck in the center.  It's only 40 m across, but that's still a pretty huge space.  If we counter-rotate it, or in other words make that deck not rotate, then it would be 260 thousand cubic meters of true zero-G environment.

So what would we do with all that?  Well, the Mars and Moon decks would be ideal for training for operations (I don't like "missions" because they imply short-term visits) on those planets.  I can imagine all sorts of recreation and tourism, too.  A station like this, in equatorial low-Earth orbit, would be only a few minutes from the surface of the Earth; much easier and cheaper to reach than the actual Moon, and way easier than Mars.

For the same reasons, movie studios might want to rent out large spaces for filming; even with all our modern special effects, it's really hard to properly fake low gravity.  (The Martian, for example, didn't even try, despite being a fantastic movie in all other respects.)

I also suspect that the Mars and Moon decks might be reasonable places for adults to live and work.  Children would probably want to stay on the Earth deck most of the time, so their bones and muscles develop normally.  (Though the occasional visit to the lunar deck aviary, to strap on wings and fly around like a bird, would probably be a great form of exercise.)

Note that High Frontier does not currently allow nested decks like this one, alas.  Maybe someday!  In the meantime, you can at least simulate the colony with the outer deck, plus all the other parts not shown here — docking ports, power plant, radiators, etc.  I used it initially to plan the overall shape and stability, and when it comes time to pursue this design more seriously, I'll probably use it again to calculate mass, thermal balance, and so on.

OK, that's it.  This idea has been trying to barrel its way out of my skull for weeks, so now that it's finally out, maybe I can get some peace.    Any feedback is very welcome!

Space...The final frontier...
These are the stories of the LEO colony Babylon 22. Its mission; To test and survive new and wild designs, to seek out the perfect O2 levels for free entertainment, to boldly spin at 10 Gs with humans in it.

I'm going to have some fun with this software.  
I found this place with the Next big future article.

Brian Wang just posted about us on the very popular Next Big Future news/opinion blog.  He quotes from the TEDx talk I gave last year, which is mostly about space settlement in general, but also talks about the High Frontier game.

Given the high quality and forward-thinking nature of Next Big Future's readers, I expect we'll be seeing some of them find there way here soon.  So, welcome!  Please make yourselves at home, and feel free to introduce yourself.  We're glad you're here.

Also, everyone be sure to check out the Space Studies Institute, an organization founded by Gerard O'Neill himself, and which has been advancing the idea of orbital settlements for 40 years!

Now here's a guy who's got his head on straight!

Where does Jeff Bezos see putting space colonists?

We're trying to wrap up all these new orbits in the outer solar system (we've more than doubled the number of available orbits in the game!).  One of the things we have to work out is how much each one is hidden from the Sun.

That led to this fun fact: Jupiter’s shadow turns Io’s atmosphere to frost once every 42 hours.