I know realistic scales are the current favorite, with 5 for, and 1 against, but I’ve run into some problems that I don’t think can be solved. First, there’s the problem that asteroids are miniscule compared to even Earth, and are nearly invisible unless you’re touching them. And while the planned 3D minimap will make knowing their location easy, I’d still think you’d want to see them with your own eyes. If I could calculate the physics for thousands of asteroids, it wouldn’t be as much of a problem if they were individually tiny, but I just can’t at the moment.

Here’s an example of the asteroid scaling problems:

And then there’s the problem of distances. The Sun is 8.3 Lightminutes from the Earth, meaning that even traveling at the speed of light, you still have to spend 8 minutes holding down w to get there. Now I will be adding an ability to warp to objects by selecting them from a list, but it still will make traveling anywhere a major pain, even just from the Earth to the Moon, which is only 1.2 lightseconds, but physical travel will have to be much slower, otherwise you’ll have absolutely no control. Also, distance on top of scale will make even large objects like the sun very difficult to spot.

Here’s a screen shot showing the sun off in the distance:

On a positive note though, I’ve added 4 more types of solar flare particles, adding more variety to the solar flare effect, and now a bit of animation to the corona, which was taken from a real photograph of our sun during a solar flare. It’s still stationary for the most part, but the edges warp and waver now. I’ll be looking for a better way to do the corona in the future, but for now it’s at least better than the current version, which has no corona.

I’ve also used the Stefan-Boltzman law to get the energy output of the star based on a roughly accurate temperature for it’s class, which I’m currently using for proper light output, but will also be using to calculate the lifetime of stars, as a star 1/10th the mass of the sun will last for trillions of years, yet a star 10x the mass will only live for 32 million years. Our Sun has a rough lifetime of 10 billion years, so you can see how mass and temperature affect lifetime.

Also, here’s a nice picture of a blue B Class star, the second highest class of star:

And on a side note, there a several Let’s Plays recently that I’ve forgotten to mention for one reason or another, for which I’m sorry, but I’ll include links below:

TheTrueLasec did a brilliant Let’s Play, very in depth and a lot of fun to watch, make sure to check it out!

JoeyGhost did a great and very in depth Let’s Play, including the largest war in a Let’s Play to date, make sure to check it out!

DubbsPlays also did a cool Let’s Play, check it out here!