To all SSC Station occupants
Thank you for the donations over the past year (2024), it is much appreciated. I am still trying to figure out how to migrate the forums to another community software (probably phpbb) but in the meantime I have updated the forum software to the latest version. SSC has been around a while so their is some very long time members here still using the site, thanks for making SSC home and sorry I haven't been as vocal as I should be in the forums I will try to improve my posting frequency.
Thank you again to all of the members that do take the time to donate a little, it helps keep this station functioning on the outer reaches of space.
-D1-
Greetiungs, and Welcome aboard I am your captain and we are going to safari Antares, 600 light years away (this is my 3rd attempt to make it there, the first attempt failed because I was going the wrong way for over a year and then... they got into an area they couldn't get out of. 2nd attempt got a little farther, but I went into hostile territory and couldnt get out...but I made a map I'm going to follow this time, avoiding Cannes system if possible.
(can I post from my dropbox screenshots directory?
did that work?
As you can see the ship is fitted out well for what I assume will be a 3 year trip with 30 multi-billionairs as passengers on a sight-seeing shooting safari ( I may have forgot to bring guns).
I took her for a test trip, here we are blasting off from London, heading East, I think we accelerated to about 1k a second, and we followed the ground at 25,000 feet. We were chasing the sun, and by the time we were over Florida day has slid backwards for us to morning on the Eastern Coast of North America.
that's Florida down there, what's left of it after global warming and the ocean levels rising just 8 or 10 feet.
then over the Missisippi river valley towards the Rockies. (I'm from Savannah, Georgia, so I always try to fly over my hometown in Pioneer)
you can just see the rockies peaking over the horizon. by the time we were flying over the Rockies (I'd decsended to 15k feet to give the passengers a good look out the windows) .... we took off at London at night the previous day and now it was noon, just 20 minutes later... in two minutes we'll serve tea and leave Earth for a Short trip to Sirius (turns out the standard hyperdrive that comes with the Deneb just gives us a jump of 3.6 light years so after Sirius, getting a new one put in.
Awesome. Keep posting!
Here is a detail image from my map of the galaxy.
and the full thing, mostly incomplete, but represents 3 attempts to make it to Antares.
For our shakedown trip (where we discovered that a class 3 hyperdrive wasnt going to cut it, we went to Sirius, a binary system I think. went to Sirius B b first a great planet, with some nice illuniated regions. Oddly the yellow-orange glowy bits all seem to be all across the planet but only glow under the light of one of the 2 suns. (there isnt' much of a "night" on Sirius B b)
and before leaving the system to return to Sol, we stopped by Sirius B d a small greyish world, not as exciting as her neighbor b.
But we got in really close and sailed over the broken landscape.
I didn't see anywhere landworthy, so we stayed at 25k feet and sailed over the edge of the world back into space and hyperdrived it back to Sol.
hmmm... the big set back I've been having with pioneer lately is the texturemaps in .dds format. I'm just having trouble extracting them into photoshop in a way that useable to me. See, i want to paint up my spaceship some and customize it. Can someone reccomend a targe to dds and back converter or something... Legacy tools doesn't like my version of photoshop..
Deneb had dds textures for quite a while if I'm correct. We only have dds textures in the model source files too. Maybe a build prior to 2014 june have them in png, but I'm not sure. If not, try to ping Zordey.
Or you could try the gimp dds plugin for conversion.
I think that GIMP has support for DDS, or a plugin for them at least, otherwise there's DXTBmp which I found for extracting FSX textures originally but it does the job ok.
For compressing them I usually use the AMD/ATI Compressonator which lets you load in standard images, generate mip-maps (always do this please), compress them in various ways and compare the differences.
Note that Pioneer only supports 3 of the DXTn output formats, DXT1 / DXT1 with alpha (aka DXT1a), and DXT5
awesome (b/c my photoshop is an older version) but I like Gimp too.
So after Sirius, came back to the Sol system. But I figure that there's no reason to go all the way to Earth, and any decent safari cruise line would pick passengers up from one location, and passengers would arrange their own passage to there. So I picked Pluto, because their economy sucks and they can use the incomming revenue. My son (who is my 8 year old co-pilot, he can nagivate the auto-navigation computer, which I'm only barely able to do) also picked out some passengers for us, so we got some clones, 2 luke skywalkers and some lego people and the angry birds I made for him out of sculpy.
the obligatory planet and moon shot
So afetr filling up on fuel and passengers, we headed out, and out around Delta Pavonis, after mayeb 6-7 jumps, I found a green world. (I mean there were a few awesome stops on the way, but in my exp green worlds are few and far between.
half the world seemed orange, lit by the sun, but there was this greenish orceanish part scattered with small mountain islands, we landed on one for the night.
Your travel company need a posters: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/media_categories?category=6
colorwise, the grass should be at a 33 decree angle off the color wheel from the color of the local star. Our sun in yellow, so grass is shifted 33degreen towards blue. (I've heard alot of arguments about that, the color of grass and how that would better absorb, what photons or whatever God or the Elves use to make photosynthesis work.) so if Kepler-186 is cooler and redder than our sun... I'd say the grass would be blackish-purplish-green.
but, I understand that even though the Sun or a star has a color, only white light is emited. is that correct? in which case maybe the grass really is greener
So we spent about 3 days on Delta Pavonis G E, during which time the Seahawks (I'm lucky and I get to work at the stadium) won a game last Saturday, Go Hawks!
I wish I could give G-E a nickname... and I really wish there was a Pioneer webpage I could log into and log some planets, and be the first to discover them and give them a better name than Stanley's Grave (which is a great place to visit, but there are quite a few worlds named After Stanely alredy...) and maybe be able to download a textfile with all the other planets people have discovered.
Might work better as a mobile phone app. (hey anyone wanna make that?, I could do all the screens and button art, add a galaxy for Elites players... some other stuff. Something that would run alongside Pioneer and just update a huge text file with info on it.
I do realize that instead of "Stanely" all the plants shaped like an ass or has two craters that look like crudely drawn breasts are going to get some silly names.
After delta Pavonis we contined Coreward... I'm pretty sure we are going Coreward... if the Galaxy is 30,000 ly across, and we are going 600 ly on our safari.... that means our trip will cover .001% of the Galaxy. Damn big place. I'm about 26ly from Earth at the moment.
Did you know that 3-4 ly is the average distance of stars from their neighbors in the Milky Way? My kid told me that yesterday.
Wise World
here's a pretty shot of us comming into the planets well.
now we are caught by the planets gravity and thrusting forward (sorry) to move that little green trapezoid to the other side of the planet so we dont crash into it.
and getting into Orbit, this is a brown orange world, with like 1 green lake somewhere, and a bunch of colonies and more space stations than I've ever seen before.
some nice features are visible through the thick atmos
and a beautiful shot of the Deneb... Which i'm namming the "Star Princess" after the awesome cruise ship Princess of the Sea (which I've never been on, but I just really like the design) But, I'm telling my wife I'm namming it after her.
it's called the Sea Princess, actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Princess
and they have a live cam!, I just discovered http://www.princess.com/bridgecams/cp/sea_bridgecam.html
I'm really enjoying this. I think it would have been cool to post a pic of your passengers. 😉
You said you're from Savannah, but you live in Seattle now. In my hometowns mod I have you located in Seattle. Would you like me to add Savannah as well?
I'm playing Scout+ and Delta Pavonis has no spaceports at all. 🙁 Too bad, I want to check that out. Are all the space stations orbiting like a ring, all at the same distance from the planet or is it more varied?
Also, our galaxy is ~ 100,000 - 120,000 ly in diameter. Nearly twice as big as you thought. Damn big place indeed! :biggrin:
but strangewiaely it's not larger as a needle's head
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