Something somewhat unrelated but still important news

Hey all,

Seeing that there's many 4X and hard scifi fans on this page, and that usually these people have a deep interest in space, I'd like to point something out to the ones who have lived the past few days under a stone and give my thoughts on it.

First to start, even since my early childhood I've been fascinated by space. That was even to the point of going to JFK Space Center (in Florida) to see the rockets used for the Apollo missions, the launch sites and even a space shuttle itself. It was a very costly trip, especially for a household of my standard, but it was worth it to see the things from closeby. I still hold that passion for outer space to this day.

Now back to the point. First of all, watch the video just below:

This is the first meteor impact on a city in known history, as far as we can confirm. Impacts like these occur once every 100 years, but so far all of them hit the ocean or some uninhabited place. The last one was in Russia too, in the early 1900's.

First of all, this is the very first real case study of what the potential effects of such an impact can be. It allows us to look how to prevent large loss off life in the aftermath of such an event. It´s also the first time people managed to study the effects of it on buildings. While there were smaller impacts before, none has been so damaging as this one recently. So this is an excellent casus for post-impact damage control. It does make little sense to weapon buildings against impacts of these. There's not much which can withstand going 108000km/h.

This does raise a question for me again. Why aren't we investing full speed in space flight, regarding that we only know of 1% of these objects and bigger ones regularly crossing our path? It is clearly essential to human survival. Even if space flight weren't critical for preventing extinction during a cosmic impact event, there's an even more direct reason why we want to utilize space just beyond letting rovers explore some distant rocks or setting one foot outside our door and then going back inside. Even while these things are good in their own right, they are an insult to what we can really do if our governments weren't spending money on useless things like petty wars.

How easy would it be to send solar-powered robots to the moon. Let them be controlled by humans from normal communication networks (Mars has a bit too much of a lag, but might work with semi pre-programmed tasks). These would be able to repair themselves (or another robot in their "swarm"), set up manufacturing facilities for raw materials and possibly even manufacture a new copy of themselves when ordered to by humans. These would simply extract resources and ship them back to the Earth. This is an idea which has been mentioned many times before.

What this idea basically means is that you'd only have to pay for a landing facility for the cargo craft and the people to control the robots and for the rest you get resources delivered to you by the craft. This would mean that there won't be any big costs besides the initial set up if done right. It'd even make tons of profit for the organisation running it, funding further endavours into space once kickstarted (pun intended). It seems to me like a perfect way to alleviate the resource shortage we're currently dealing with in the world (and which is the main cause for the global economic crisis).

You might think, why is this posted on the Star Apocalypse game page and not on some place else? Well, it's posted here as concepts like this one were intended to be included in it. Resource scarcity and cosmic impact survival were very important aspects to be included in the game. Mars might seem like an ideal colonization target but in terms of cosmic impact survival you'd want to head to Titan really. So these concepts would eventually be included, besides many others. In the source code you see already a very basic version of atmospheric pressure and its effects on temperature. We attempted to mimick real scientific models as closely as possible in order to provide a realistic atmosphere. Concepts like resource shortage and cosmic impacts events fitted exactly into this picture.

I intend to have a real source code demonstration ready. I really lack a lof of time lately due to having to spend a lot of time at work. But I currently am planning to get a basic prototype of the new project done sometime soon and to update the Alpha sourcecode to modern standards (not something awkward like a hack on windows forms to let SFML display into it). Those are things currently planned. As with Star Apocalypse (which isn't dead at the moment. Just lack the time to code something as big as this), the new project will have a big hard scifi core together with something I think many of you will like out here. But more to follow as things have really solidified. Help is always welcome!

That's the update for this time. Thanks for reading and feel free to share your opinions and comments!