04-12-2017, 11:54 AM
More great stuff, as always! Thanks very much for the time you spend typing these things up.
The point of the government grant is really just to encourage good design — before that, people would build completely nonviable designs (having forgotten to spin their colony, or check the temperature, or some such), and then be baffled about why nobody was moving in. Now, if your design is nonviable, you probably can't build it at all; and the better it is, the bigger the grant you get (or that's the idea, anyway).
Yes, fission and fusion generate a lot of heat. If your colony was comfy anyway, then you're lucky, it must have plenty of passive cooling (perhaps due to that crazy skinny-but-wide torus design you showed in the other thread
).
Yes, Closed Ecology should provide a new building. I'll check on that, and also the cut-off text on Shielded Suit.
On the Gas Gun Launcher: at a space conference last fall, I spent lunch with a guy who thinks he could build one today if he can get the funding. This was a real physicist, not some guy off the street, and he made a pretty good case.
Crime, fire, and land value calculations have been substantially revised for the next version, so let's revisit those after that.
Yes, there is (alas) no collision checking among trees, paths, and buildings. This is often quite convenient: you can plant trees right next to buildings, paths that go right up to the door, etc. But it also means you can do silly things, like run paths right through buildings etc.
And you're right, we're not actually ray-tracing the light paths, though we do try to make sure each module has a view of a mirror pointed the right way. I'll see if we can make that more robust, as you've clearly found an exploit!
Good ideas in your suggestions above. Some of these might make good opportunities for mods — we have some mod support (e.g. custom buildings) now, and would like to expand this to allow custom components, specialized colony types, etc. If anybody has an interest in making High Frontier mods, do let me know!
The point of the government grant is really just to encourage good design — before that, people would build completely nonviable designs (having forgotten to spin their colony, or check the temperature, or some such), and then be baffled about why nobody was moving in. Now, if your design is nonviable, you probably can't build it at all; and the better it is, the bigger the grant you get (or that's the idea, anyway).
Yes, fission and fusion generate a lot of heat. If your colony was comfy anyway, then you're lucky, it must have plenty of passive cooling (perhaps due to that crazy skinny-but-wide torus design you showed in the other thread
).Yes, Closed Ecology should provide a new building. I'll check on that, and also the cut-off text on Shielded Suit.
On the Gas Gun Launcher: at a space conference last fall, I spent lunch with a guy who thinks he could build one today if he can get the funding. This was a real physicist, not some guy off the street, and he made a pretty good case.
Crime, fire, and land value calculations have been substantially revised for the next version, so let's revisit those after that.
Yes, there is (alas) no collision checking among trees, paths, and buildings. This is often quite convenient: you can plant trees right next to buildings, paths that go right up to the door, etc. But it also means you can do silly things, like run paths right through buildings etc.
And you're right, we're not actually ray-tracing the light paths, though we do try to make sure each module has a view of a mirror pointed the right way. I'll see if we can make that more robust, as you've clearly found an exploit!
Good ideas in your suggestions above. Some of these might make good opportunities for mods — we have some mod support (e.g. custom buildings) now, and would like to expand this to allow custom components, specialized colony types, etc. If anybody has an interest in making High Frontier mods, do let me know!
Joe Strout
Lead Developer, High Frontier