As you can see from the screenshot attached, the bells detach from the spokes in my barbell stations. I've tested this with four and six bell stations, and interestingly every time I switch from interior to exterior view the angle of detachment is rotated differently.

As a related question, are the bells comprising the barbell stations all treated like independent stations, with no sharing of water or other resources between bells? It seems to be in my observations, but it could just be observer error -- the values displayed tend to jump around and make it hard to compare.

Running Win10 with an Nvidia 970 current drivers.

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Either I've got a bug, or maybe I'm just being clueless here, but I've built a Toroid station in low earth orbit that when I switch to inside view to place my buildings I get a light/dark cycle which seems, surprise surprise, to coincide with the spin of the station.

Both mirrors are in place (the big mirror floating "above" the station, and the angled ring mirror build into the spokes), and seem to be reflecting in the outside view. The station and big mirror seem to be oriented properly to the sun. Is this a known bug? I'm running win10 with an Nvidia 970, latest drivers.

Hello, Joe's page about living among the Centaurs was really great.....

For version 0.25 of High Frontier, we're working on adding the rest of the orbits in the outer solar system.

This has been challenging because there are so many great places to build out there — way more than we can reasonably include.  So, we're focusing on just the most important ones.  That includes the four largest moons of Jupiter, and the three biggest around Saturn.  Plus, around each gas giant, we're including a generic "minor moons" orbit you can choose.  Much like the main asteroid belt, this will place your colony around a smaller, randomly chosen hunk of rock and ice.



Of course in a standard game, these orbits won't be available until you've completed the required Projects.  Onward and outward!

Recently I've been working on adding the outer solar system to High Frontier.  That, along with this recent news story, has got me thinking about a population of minor planets in the outer solar system known as centaurs.


Centaurs are small bodies that orbit somewhere out between Jupiter and Neptune.  But they're not that small; the largest known, Chariklo, has a diameter of about 250 km.  Many centaurs (including Chariklo) have a system of rings, as shown in this artist's concept.

Blue Origin just now conducted another New Shepard test flight — the fifth flight for this booster (something that would have been ridiculous to say a few years ago!).

In this flight, they purposely triggered the launch abort system about 45 seconds into the flight, at the point of maximum dynamic pressure (i.e. just about the worst possible time to do it).  Everything performed flawlessly — the capsule blasted its way well clear of the booster, and the booster handled the extra stress without breaking a sweat.  The capsule parachuted down to a gentle landing, and the booster continued on up to the edge of space, and then came back down, and landed propulsively right on target.



I know this is just a suborbital hop, and I'm eager to see the much bigger New Glenn start flying soon.  But still, in Blue Origin's slow, methodical way, they are making steady progress towards safe, reliable, repeatable flight into space.  In a few years they will be real competition for SpaceX.

Congratulations, Blue Origin!

Man, it's hard to concentrate today.

Rob Myerson, president of Blue Origin, just gave a talk this morning at IAC 2016 (Internatinoal Astronautical Congress) in Guadalejara.  There wasn't a lot of new news there, except that it's clear Blue Origin has its eye on the big picture: the Moon, Mars, and "millions of people living and working in space" (which is long the mantra of orbital space settlement enthusiasts).  See Alan Boyle's report for more.



And now, in about 5 minutes, Elon Musk is going to start his presentation, "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species."  It's widely reported that he will provide details on his plan to settle Mars, including routine flights ferrying 100 tons (or 100 colonists) every 2 years.  Supposedly this will be live streamed, though since early this morning, the stream has shown me nothing but an animated logo.  (Edit: but it's also available on SpaceX's website here.)



So, yeah... it's a bit hard to focus today. 

...or in an orbital colony designed for 1/6 G!

All beautifully explained in this XKCD What-If.



We have got to do this in real life!

I was playing around this evening with simulating actual physics in a realistic space colony.  (No, this isn't something that's going to go into High Frontier.  It's the weekend, cut me some slack!)

Here's my first ever virtual space colony "ball drop" experiment.  The little yellow sphere starts out 6 meters above the deck, initially stationary with respect to the rotating colony.  (Imagine it's being held by somebody on a platform, though that somebody, and the platform itself, are invisible.)  Then we drop it, much like Galileo dropping stones from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  But we get a behavior that Galileo never saw:

The camera here is lined up for optimal viewing of that slight pull to the left.  In reality, of course, there is no pull to the left... the ball is traveling in a straight line, at a constant velocity from the moment it was released, and the colony is rotating around it.

Details for the curious: the deck here has a 224-m radius and spins at 2 RPM, simulating 1G.  The white ceiling at the top of the view is about 130 m up. Those deck plates are 2 m squares, though unfortunately they don't line up perfectly with the ball's starting position — but if you can detect a slight bend in the plating, that does align with where the ball starts.  So the ball's apparent sideways motion is about a meter or so, over a 6 meter drop.

The physics simulation here is pretty simple.  On each physics timestep, we apply the ball's true (Newtonian) velocity to its position.  Then we account for how much the colony rotates around the ball.  But, for computational efficiency, we do this backwards: the colony stays put, so we counter-rotate the ball position and velocity by the same amount.  That's it.

Finally, note that there is no air here; the ball is falling as in a vacuum.  In a real colony, of course, air would apply a force in the direction of the colony's spin, reducing this Coliolis effect by some amount that depends on the aerodynamics of the object.

I was thinking that perhaps the best shape for an habitat is not supposed to be a circle.
For example in a thorus habitat the G at the bottom of the thorus would be different from the G experienced near the side, due to the difference of radius.
Even a 0.01G difference could provoke weird feelings to the peoples (a 100kg person would "lose" 1kg basically walking a couple hundreds meter) and/or structural problems to large buildings.

It would be cool if we could "draw" the section of an habitat, even just by a drawing in 2d using differently coloured straight lines.
Each colour would represent a different "material" for the wall/floor. for example, brown for soil, grey for steel/structural element, blue for windows.

then the software could check if the drawing is a closed form and create the solid simply by making a 360° turn of the 2d form.
the "G" indicator will need to be only calculated on "soil" level.