Blue Origin has announced a new rocket they've been working on for several years, called New Glenn.  This one is an orbital launcher, nearly as big as the Saturn V.

Here's a nice graphic showing how current and near-future offerings stack up (with the Saturn V for reference).



Wired has a great article about it.  This New York Times piece is pretty good too, if you can forgive the imperial units.

Like SpaceX, Blue Origin is planning to land the first stage (probably on a barge) and reuse it on multiple flights.

This is really exciting news for space development — to drive performance up and costs down, you need a mature industry with some actual competition.  SpaceX has been so far ahead of the "old guard" that they essentially had no competition.  Now they will — I expect to see both companies launching frequently, with prices continuing to drop.  Falling prices will widen the market, enabling customers and applications that weren't possible before.  And a larger market means more flights, which will cause prices to fall further.

And I also dig Jeff Bezos (leader of Blue Origin)'s attitude about space development.  From what I've read in the past, he has a very practical view, where first we develop cislunar space, and then expand our way outward from there.  This makes a lot more sense than the current obsession with Mars that you see in some circles. 

All in all, very exciting times.  Who knows?  Maybe we will finally start settling the high frontier in the next few decades!

For version 0.25 we're planning to open up the outer solar system, including the main asteroid belt (and probably the Trojans too).

So we're going to need some asteroids!  We started today working on generating these procedurally, so that there would be an essentially limitless supply of unique asteroids.  Here's what our first afternoon of work has produced...

There's a lot more work to do, of course, but it seems like a decent start.  What do you think?

Is there anyone here who would be interested in playing High Frontier in a language other than English?

We're planning localization support, both built-in and through mods.  But it'd be great to do this in collaboration with some actual players who are fluent in some other language.

So: Parlez-vous français?  ¿Hablas español?  日本語を話せますか？  क्या आप हिंदी बोलते हैं?  If so, please let us know!

I've been chatting with some friends this week about population density — a very convenient shorthand for working out how many people can comfortably live in a given amount of space (such as a space colony).

Of course it varies a lot, but it looks like in general, a "small town" has a density of 1000 people per square mile or less, while a major city is much higher — Tokyo is 16,000 people per square mile, and New York is a whopping 27,000 people per square mile.

Apparently O'Neill himself looked to Italian hill towns as a model of good living — they are widely renowned as beautiful and pleasant places to live.  So I looked some up:

• Cortona is apparently one of the most famous such towns, but Wikipedia gives its area as 132 sq mi, and density as 170/sq mi
• Perugia, the capital of the Umbria province, has an area of 174 sq mi with a density of 970/sq mi.
• Montepulciano: 64 sq mi area, 220 people/sq mi.
• San Casciano: 42 sq mi area, 400 people/sq mi.
• Sorano: 64 sq mi area, 59 people/sq mi.
  

I've been pondering transportation recently.  Even a small colony, say a radius of 250 m, is about 1.5 km around.  People walk about 5 kph, so that's 9 or 10 minutes to walk from one side to the other.

That's not awful, but I can easily imagine being in more of a hurry than that.

But it's short enough that something like a train doesn't seem to make much sense.  If you have to wait 5-10 minutes for the train, it'd often be faster to just walk.

I looked into moving sidewalks, but most of these today only go about 3 kph, i.e. slower than walking.  Of course if you walk on them, then you're going about 50% faster.  That gets you to the other side in about 6 minutes, which isn't bad, but of course you have to walk to/from the walkway endpoints, so it probably ends up being about a wash.

In the Toronto airport, they have a cool high-tech moving walkway that actually accelerates at the beginning, and decelerates at the end, by expanding the tiles.




The speed is about 2 kph at the ends, and 7 kph in the middle.  If you walked on it, that'd get you up to 13 kph, which gets you to the other side in about 4 minutes.  Pretty good!  But very complex, and you still have to get to/from the endpoints.


At this point, I mentioned all this to my older son, who said: Why not just ride a bike?



Duh.  Average bicycle speed is 15.5 kph, and that gets you to the other side of the habitat in 3 minutes flat.  Assuming frequent bike racks, you can take your bike right from wherever you are to wherever you're going; no waiting, and no going to special on/off points.  Easy peasy.

Not as young as you used to be?  No problem; you could use an electric bike, or take a bike taxi.

Of course there are other personal transport vehicles these days: Segway (20 kph), so-called hoverboards (~12 kph), etc.  Probably space settlers will use all of these (and others we haven't thought of). But the good old-fashioned bike is hard to beat.

With High Frontier finally getting close to done, the boys and I have started thinking about what might come next.  This is all just speculation at this point, but it's fun speculation, so please join in!


So, what if we made a MMO (massively multiplayer online) space game set in the solar system of, say, 1000 years from now?  This would be a time when space colonies have proliferated, all the way from Mercury to the Kuiper belt.  Most of these would be free-floating orbital colonies, as in High Frontier, but it would also include a handful of terrestrial colonies (or in the case of Venus and the gas giants, floating cloud cities).

As a player, you'd be an individual in this universe, able to move around, explore the colonies at ground level, and purchase and operate a ship to fly from place to place.  There would be opportunities for missions and trade — colonies in the inner solar system are always hungry for light elements, and happy to trade the heavy elements which the outer solar system mostly lacks.  And then there would be plenty of NPCs (non-player characters) willing to pay for transport, etc.

We'd keep the scale and positions of everything as realistic as possible, but in order to make a decent game, I think we'd need to cheat on the travel.  Players aren't going to want to take months or weeks to get from point A to point B, and since it's an MMO, we can't just compress time while in transit.  So, we're thinking about having some sort of sub-light "warp drive" that lets you go up to, say, 0.9 c, without experiencing any acceleration (i.e. you don't get smushed into a thin film on the back wall).  At that speed, you could go from Earth to Pluto in about 5 hours (depending on their relative positions), which seems pretty reasonable for such a long trip.

(Actually, maybe we should set the game in the year 2494, when the outer planets are all clustered on one side of the sun, like this:

...though who knows where Pluto and other major Kuiper built objects would be at that point.)

Any thoughts?

It's been a long (and rather painful) summer, but version 0.24 of High Frontier is finally available!  This one has some fun new features, including the construction & destruction animations we've mentioned here before, and a new "Advisor" panel that should be a big help for new players.

The next version (0.25) will be focused on polish: adding small enhancements, and buffing out any rough spots, to make the whole thing even more easy and fun.  So please do give 0.24 a try, and let us know what you think!

(Why painful?  I tore my knee out about six weeks ago while working out.  I'm scheduled for knee surgery next week, and it's going to be a bit of a long recovery, but in the end it should be stronger than it's been in a very long time!  This may delay version 0.25 a bit, but hopefully not by too much.)

Space colonies in High Frontier are (mostly) limited to a radius of 1 km.  But I've been in a discussion recently with somebody who wants to think bigger — he proposed a cylinder with an 8 km radius.

He wants a big, expansive interior space.  But he wants his design to be realistic, so I spent a little time extolling the virtues of a 1 km cylinder.  I thought y'all might find this interesting (and please chime in with your thoughts!).


A 1 km radius still makes for a pretty huge internal space, especially if (as I recommend) we make use of multiple decks.

For example, if with radius=1 km and length=1 km, the area of the main (1G) deck is 6.28 km^2, which is really quite a lot of room.  And then the Mars deck (0.38G, radius 380 m) would have another 2.4 km^2, and the Moon deck (0.16G, radius 160 m) would provide another 1 km^2.  Plus a few more decks in between for agriculture/industry, leaving all the decks mentioned for living/recreational areas.

The envelope (pressure vessel) thickness scales with the size.  I have some notes about that here:

  https://app.assembla.com/spaces/high-frontier/wiki/Air_pressure

For steel, it happens to work out pretty close to some nice round numbers: 1 m thick to contain 1 atmosphere at 1 km radius.  It scales linearly with both air pressure and radius.  So an 8 km radius would require a shell 8 meters thick of solid steel -- the sheer mass of steel required stretches credulity.  And might not work at all; there is a point at which the stress on the structure from its own mass is greater than its tensile strength can bear.

There are advanced materials which can probably do the job better, while being considerably more expensive (at least per unit mass).  But how much better, and where do they fail?  I don't really know.  I'm not a structural engineer.  But 1 km is pretty widely acknowledged as "doable" since people much smarter than us studied this in the 70s, so we won't raise any eyebrows with that.

[He wrote that he wanted clusters of 20-story high-rise towers overrlooking parks and lakes, with gravity on the 20th floor still very close to 1G...]

Gravity scales linearly with radius too.  So, if your floors are 3 m apart, then your 20th floor is 60 m up, where the gravity is 940/1000 = 0.94 G.  That'd probably put a spring in your step, but I'm guessing it would be barely noticeable.  (And the sky -- the underside of the Mars deck -- would still be over half a kilometer above the top of the building, so you'd definitely have an outdoorsy feel!)


So, everyone, what do you think?  Is a 1 km radius space colony "big enough" even in the far future?  Or do you think we should keep pushing for 5 km, even 10 km radius habitats?

SSI (the Space Studies Institute) has just announced that, for a few days, anyone can get the Kindle version of The High Frontier for free!

This is Gerard O'Neill's classic work on orbital space settlements, and of course the primary inspiration for both our game and its title.  It was a hugely influential book, and happens to be a very good read too.  Every space enthusiast should read this book, probably more than once!

For our next release, we've already got a couple of fun new features done (like this, and this).  But a very important part of version 0.24 is: we want to smooth out the sticking points.

We know people are playing High Frontier.  But we have reason to suspect that most people aren't getting very far.  (Nobody's yet complained about the solar system ending at Mars, for example.)

We're aware of some of the sticking points — for example, new players often don't realize that they need to lay down some paths, and paint a nice mix of zones next to them, before buildings can appear.  But there are probably other sticking points we haven't thought of.  High Frontier is a complex game, but we've been playing it so long that it all seems obvious to us (even when it isn't!).

So: please give the latest version a try, and let us know where you got stuck!  If you are forced to stop playing only because of family members/work/school demanding your attention, that's great!  But if you stop for any other reason, please let us know (1) where you stopped, and (2) why.  This could be anything from "I got frustrated trying to snap parts together the way I wanted in design mode" to "I got bored watching my city grow," but is most likely something like "I didn't know what to do next at this point."

Whatever it is, please tell us, so we can make it better.  You can post your observations here, or send a private message, or use email.  We really want your feedback!  High Frontier is now within sight of the finish line, and it's really time to polish it up and make sure that people have fun from start to end.

Thanks,
- Joe