1

That's amazing looking, but as I was watching it I kept thinking that they need some serious traffic control to prevent ships from hitting each other or the station.

How close are they to being done? (Evidently their rendering engine is done, but there's a lot more to the game than that. For instance, they've got a lot of model making to do.)

2 It's due out this year.  They apparently have over 10,000 people playing the phase 1 beta, so it's pretty far along already.

I pledged on Kickstarter for the phase 2 beta, which should be starting in a couple of months, but I might sit tight until the 1.0 release.  (As I'm doing with Starbound.  So far, anyway...)

3 1. Wouldn't you want the spokes of your torus NOT to be bent?  Seems like poor engineering 2. I would think you'd prefer your hub didn't rotate, if that's where you dock. 3. I suspect nobody who's in charge of a rotating station would willingly allow ships to transit through the wheel like that. 4. You could potentially solve the traffic situation (at least partly) by doing what real airports and the like do:  you only move in one direction.  Incoming traffic at one end of the station, outgoing at the other. 5. Interesting that the departing ships don't rotate; I would think they would carry station-imparted rotation on the way out.

4 Apparently the Edit button doesn't work in Chrome.

5 They had to make the station hub rotate, because that was a formative experience of every teenage Elite player back in the mid-eighties.  Trying to line up your ship in three dimensions not only with respect to position and velocity but rotation so that you could dock cleanly with a space station was something never seen before.*
 
...

And it was a royal pain in the ass, and everyone bought a docking computer as their very first upgrade.

* And of course, the reason this game raise millions of dollars on Kickstarter is because of all those mid-eighties teenagers.  Actually, if we'd known it would turn out so well, it would probably have raised tens of millions.

6 It's probably not rotating NEARLY fast enough to generate any appreciable pesudo-gravity.

The other problem is that rotating a ship about its own axis while you're lined up with the axis of the station doesn't make you rotate around the station's axis once you approach that landing pad.

The resulting wreck should be spectacular.

7

Really wanted to pledge to the Elite Dangerous Kickstarter, but since it only accepted donation denominated in UK pounds, which meant the Amazon Payments would not work.  I could have used PayPal, but card on record might not have worked with a UK transaction.

I am a bit curious to see who they have writing the sequel to The Dark Wheel, which is suppose to come out with the game.  They can not ask Robert Holdstock to do so, since he passed away in 2009.

8 I read everything I could find on experiences with the current beta, and it sounds like they've still got a long way to go before they have a game I want to play. When they've got their instancing to the point that they can deliver a PK-free online experience with the promised elbow room, I'll give them money.

-j

9 Mauser, I think the rotation rate is in the right ballpark.  According to SpinCalc, a space station of the size quoted by the Elite: Dangerous team (8km diameter) would only need to rotate at about 0.5 rpm to produce 1g at the rim.

10 Hmm. so that ship would be trying to land on a surface moving sideways under it at 376.8 km/h.  (Radius 4 km, circumference 12.56, at half an RPM, 6.28 km/min, x 60).

Okay, that's assuming the landing dock is the same diameter as the rim.

The landing problem is that you're trying to match bodies on a circular path with no gravitational influence.

Far better to have a non-rotating landing platform on the axis, land, strap down, begin matching rotation, and then ride an elevator down to the hangar floor.