I actually liked the gameplay concept. There's nothing wrong with the concept for many people. The problem is that they failed to actually deliver the concept.
I think the difference between the concept and the reality does, however, lay bare a more important element. What most people want out of procgen isn't just that the algorithms can generate diversity... it's that they can generate scenarios that even the coders wouldn't have expected. Some algorithms can do that. Others cannot. NMS's absolutely cannot, they're just standard fractal noise terrain with random primitives, animals that are just armatures with random parts swapped out, etc. For anyone thinking of taking up the mantle of such a game after the failure of NMS, I think that's really going to be a key aspect. Because players are always going to explore worlds faster than developers can make new content, so if your engine is limited to making "things that the devels have thought of", it's always going to wear thin rather quickly.
The real world we live in always keeps presenting new fascinating worlds every time we explore a new place, for a key reason. Real worlds are built by fluid and rigid body interactions (primarily fluid, at least on the large scale) with variable chemistry. Physical properties like viscosity vary over numerous orders of magnitude in different pressure and temperature environments, and there's thousands of different chemical constituents that can be found in bulk, depending on the environment. Furthermore, each body is exposed to anisotropic conditions (bombardment, solar radiation, Coriolis force due to its rotation, etc), and widely varying local conditions like gravity. Basically, the computer equivalent would be CFD with chemical equilibria. Now, of course you can't do some extreme-detail CFD simulation of planets in realtime. But IMHO, if you want interesting generation, you want a generation algorithm that can emulate these sort of *effects*, even if the underlying core mechanism is radically different. Terrain generation algorithms generally make a goal of emulate the effects of uplift/folding, erosion, volcanism, impacts, etc. Recognizing how radically, many-orders-of-magnitude different these can all be in different environments, and with different materials in the same environment, seems key to making landscapes that can defy even creator expectations.
I think Pluto should be the gold standard. Before NH arrived, who would have thought that what we'd find was a giant scar facing Charon where the mantle bubbles out in supermassive convection cells, with mountain-sized icebergs drifting around the soup and collecting in iceberg-mountain ranges on the shore (just to name a couple of the really bizarre things New Horizons discovered)? The issue isn't "could you code a generation algorithm to emulate Pluto?"; of course one can. The question is, "could you code a generation algorithm that would have come up with things as weird as Pluto, without having to explicitly spell them out, without you ever having seen them before"?
I tried to convince myself that it was a "relaxing", "meditative" experience, a "palate cleanser" if you will.
After a while, I just couldn't convince myself of even that minimal goal. It's just... nothing. The terrible gameplay actively discourages you from doing the only thing that the game really offers (exploration), and the exploration is only skin deep due to the shallowness of their generation algorithm.
And really, how can you say NMS feels "solid", when you can walk right through the animals and things don't fall when you mine out the ground from underneath them? What's the opposite of "solid" in this context?
They do! Those big firefly-esque ones handle differently than the little colonial-viper-ish ones.
No, they don't. They all have the same speed, turning radius, etc. The only difference is that on the big ones, when you get out you can take falling damage;)
You could do it by going to a world someone will later return to and mining resources
Nope. It has no effect. Resources don't sync between instances.
they were planning on getting, or taking a crashed ship, or if they did any terraforming with the grenades, using your own grenades to destroy what they did. (If you do enough terraforming, it sticks)
No, it distinctly does not. And this has been known since the first day after release. Two players even sat around mining stuff in front of each other - even day/night and locations of sentinels, etc aren't synced between player instances. Heck, more to the point, if you mine something, leave the system, then go back to the same spot, all of your changes will be lost, even in your own local instance.
And I do believe that selling enough of certain items to vendors will change the prices offered. You sell enough Emeril to a vendor...it will lower the price it offers.
It does not. More to the point, it escapes me how you could not realize this, as this is the way most people make money - searching out a starred system and selling the same item over and over again, because the price remains fixed no matter how much you sell.
Is there anything more you'd like to just make up about the game? Or did you pick up a copy from Bizarro Universe or something that's a different game from the one that the rest of us have?
Nice reading comprehension. In the game files. The game files distributed contain the actual assets used by the game, and then a bunch of random stuff not used by the game, in different directories. These unused assets range all the way to the whimsical, such as a lego-man dummy player model on a unicycle, to a monkey in a hat, to the Fallout logo. Among the "not used by the game" stuff are the files that were used to fake the E3 demo, in an "E3" directory. These models are only partially rigged, and thus could not actually be used in the game. More to the point, if you try to include a model that large in the game, you can't even see it. Creatures in game don't behave like in the trailer, their actions don't affect the landscape like in the trailer, etc - all of that was hard-coded. Faked.
Really, once you start digging into the game files, it's amazing the depth that their fakery went. Even the "player-named star systems" that you see during the loading screen are just from a hard-coded list in the game files.
More to the point, they continued lying about the content right up to launch (e.g. incl. at the release party) and in tweets after the release (the "slowed down planet rotation", the "people can't see each other because too many people are playing" lie, etc).
Indeed. I was amazed at how weak the generation engine is. Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty - they're using a good graphics engine and have artists with a good eye. But the terrain is just standard diamond-square (fractal noise terrain) modified with random hard-coded primitives. No biomes, no continents, just noise and a global sea level. The animals are just built by swapping out pieces of armatures and randomly choosing premade textures. They don't even bother to check that any of the parts make sense (lots and lots of "derpasauruses" who missed leg day), or that the metadata about the animal matches its form (it's amazing how many vegetarian T-rexes you'll encounter). Plants are often not modified at all. In a lot of cases they inexplicably put the exact same thing on numerous planets (the same aggro crab), or even every planet (the same giant coral, the same mushroom-covered rock, etc - found on every planet in the game).
Indeed, it's amazing how many people on the NMS reddit sub have written posts about "I'm trying to find a way to enjoy this game and it hasn't been working... please make suggestions!"
Sadly, you can't force fun. I think people would have been a lot more likely to forgive the missing features and even the explicit unambiguous lies** if the game had at least been fun. Except that it's not. HG is terrible at gameplay design. Their formula for gameplay is really simple: "don't let them get hurt, make everything available and easy to acquire, and then - so that the game isn't over in a matter of minutes - load the game down with grind." And if people finish too quickly? "Dramatically increase the grind."
** While a lot of people singled out the multiplayer lie as a big one (where even the manufacturers had been duped, with the boxes having to add a sticker to cover up the multiplayer label), the whole planetary dynamics one may be even more brazen. With multiplayer, they tried to pretend that the reason players couldn't see each other was because the servers were overloaded - even though there's no player model in the game files, no attempts to send packets, no open ports, no references to multiplayer anywhere in the game files, day/night cycles and NPC positions aren't synced between instances, and you can outright pause the game. But in the rotation case, after having made fun of games that just use skyboxes and talked up their real-world dynamics, they made up this whole story about how playtesters had been "confused" by things moving around, so they "slowed down" planetary motion. The reality is, of course, that they use skyboxes. Nothing moves relative to anything else, and nothing can; planets are just placed at random coordinates in a box. You can't have things orbit the sun when the sun is just a painting and doesn't even match the location of your light source. Unless they want us to believe that to "slow down rotation", rather than simply setting speeds to zero, they removed their entire solar system model and entire lighting model and re-did them with an entirely faked one.
More to the point, a lot of the statements made by Sean / Hello Games and their actions seem to have been deliberately designed to keep people in past the refund point. They spent a lot of time plugging the concept that there's "secrets" and "easter eggs", that planets / star systems get more interesting the closer one gets to the center, etc. Then - after someone managed to get to the center on the first day by grinding nonstop all day (the game is extremely focused on grind), their first reaction was to.... quadruple the grind with a day-one patch (introducing a distance-measuring bug at the same time). Basically:
1) Tell people that there's amazing things at the center 2) Make it take a long time for people to actually get there 3) By the time people discover that there's nothing there, they're long past the time that they can claim a refund
The very nature of the game works against players in this regard. A player's first thought, upon discovering that they're not finding anything like in the trailers is, "Well, there's 18 quadrillion planets... the stuff in the trailers must exist somewhere, the game can't be just the derpy stuff I've been encountering so far." By the time one has explored a statistically significant number of planets to come to the realization that, no, they've basically seen the whole game, that it really is that shallow... they're long past the time in which they can claim a refund. The game is also packed with "trophies" for doing trivial actions - which is also something companies take into account when deciding whether to give refunds ("Sorry, you've already done X % of the trophies....")
It's amazing how many people you find (or at least used to find;) ) on the reddit sub for the game who seem to basically be trying to find a way to make themselves enjoy the game while they searched for things that they had been led to believe existed. They usually transitioned from this phase to very angry as they learned the extent of the fakery. Even the named stars you see in the loading screen aren't actually places people have named, they're just a hard-coded list.
Don't get me wrong, there are some people who actually enjoy it. But they're an extremely small number; the game is approaching half a percent of its initial player base. For a while most seemed to be using it as a screenshot-generating walking simulator. Now a lot of them seem to be spending their time carving rocks into very poor approximations of statues via the crude mining system.
If they're having trouble finding donors, I suggest they try Hoxton, Brighton, the House of Commons, and the BBC media city in Salford; there's plenty of wankers there to choose from.
All in all that suggests the human colonists aren't going to be competitive with robotic miners, and thus can't make money by mining.
Have you seen how slow Mars rovers move and how carefully they have to weigh each action, in an environment where if you mess up, there's nobody there to rescue / repair you? Have you seen how much maintenance and consumables is involved in mining?
There's a world of difference between a (multi-billion dollar) rover that slowly inches along a surface looking at rocks, and one that mines and ships commercial quantities.
The concept that "robots will do everything" is simply not realistic. Do robots do everything for the astronauts on the ISS? Of course not; the astronauts there are basically glorified construction workers and lab techs. Why? Because it's cheaper and higher throughput - and that's without serious communication delays. It's certainly an arguable point as to whether it's worth the cost sending humans in the first place - but once they're there, there's no debate at all about whether it's cheaper to use their labour or to engineer, build, and send robots to do the same task.
Hydrogen does not have to be shipped as a liquid or gas (more to the point, it wouldn't persist as a liquid without a significant cooling system). By mass, water is 13% hydrogen, hydrazine is 14% hydrogen, polyethylene is 17% hydrogen, lithium borohydride is 18% hydrogen, ammonia is 22% hydrogen, and methane is 34% hydrogen. Most of those compounds (and others) are useful to have on a ship regardless. And any sort of effective radiation shielding is going to have to be hydrogen rich no matter what; there's nothing that moderates down neutrons to easy-to-capture energies anywhere near as well as hydrogen.
The fun part of it is that the hydrogen enters and leaves the rocket in exactly the same form; it's simply there to function as a working gas for the lithium fluoride.
I'm actually somewhat of a fan of metalized propellants, although that one is certainly extreme.;) While there's no getting around fluorine's toxicity so I can't really get onboard with that particular propulsion system, I can picture lithium being managed - yes, lithium is dangerous, but so are chemicals like LOX (really, pretty much all oxidizers are extreme fire hazards, if not outright explosion hazards). Aluminum doesn't provide as much of an isp boost as lithium, but it provides a small one, plus a major density boost (and is cheap, too), and is nice and stable. I'm actually working on some experiments for a somewhat hybrid-esque design which involves aluminum structural elements designed to burn away and contribute to the exhaust stream.
The troll persists because people keep feeding him.
Honestly, I don't know what has to be wrong in a person's life for them to feel the need to spend their time acting like that. But it's the case for some people. I hope that whatever is wrong, things turn around for them.
He's not "asking" anyone to do anything. It's a simple reality that if there was a mission to Mars coming up shortly and you passed a signup sheet around, and at the top of it was written in large letters "YOU WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY DIE AT SOME POINT DURING THIS TRIP", you'd still get thousands of signatures from people who are utterly thrilled at getting the chance and couldn't give a rat's arse about the risk.
I knew there was a reason back in school that my binders all had pictures of sci-fi landscapes on them... it all comes full circle. Mars needs a breading program for colonists to survive... breading requires a binder... binders have pictures of Mars to encourage people to go and support the breading program!
Is that not exactly what the Mars rovers were supposed to be investigating?
No, the rovers have not been gem prospecting. But the data that they've recovered would be useful for doing so. There's a lot of heavy hydrothermal veining near curiosity for example (primarily gypsum, but it's a good start!). What I wouldn't give to be there with a rover with good range...
I've read some papers on the subject, and it really depends on what sort of mineral you're talking about. Mars lacks or is deficient in, as you note, a lot of the processes on Earth that concentrate ores, making certain types of ores deficient. However, there are some types of ore deposits that it's expected to be rich in. A good example is bolide deposits, like the Sudbury deposit on Earth. There a large impactor created a basin which is rich in nickel, copper, and precious metals. It's not that the precious metals came from the impactor - it's that by liquefying a large chunk of the crust, it allows it to separate out into layers. Mars is struck more often by large bolides and the resulting basins are more slowly eroded, so such deposits are predicted to be notably richer on mars.
A problem with mining on Mars however is... well, mining. Overburden problems are likely to be even worse on Mars than on Earth, and I'm sure you've seen what lengths people go through to get rid of overburden. Doing that with equipment light enough to ship to Mars and keep operating? Anything but an easy task. Now, surely there's some deposits in some places that, with good prospecting effort, are low overburden and easy to mine. But then you hit the other problem which is... not everything is found in the same place, and many things distinctly aren't. And furthermore, once you build in a particular place, you're pretty much locked in there. So how do you get everything from point A to point B? Aircraft can work on Mars, but their payload capacities are terrible compared to their size, and you have to make them very fragile. Over a few hundred kilometers, your best bet is probably "mountain roads", aka you plow aside the rocks and dirt as best you can, and accept that you're going to get low throughput/high maintenance hauling over such bad roads. Over longer distances? Honestly, your best bet (in the foreseeable future) is rockets, as expensive as they are. In the long term you can talk durable cross-planet roads, high speed rail, railguns, etc. But those sorts of things aren't practical in the near term - they represent too much embodied mass, power, and/or and labour.
It's not an easy challenge
Site selection is going to be critical. The goal in the near future shouldn't be 100% independence, because that's not realistic. It should be, "what's the highest percentage of this import mass that we can eliminate?" Pick those low-hanging, high-demand fruits first.
I'd think that, considering the risks, a single failure in power and all the frozen embryos will die.
A single failure in power that prevents you from keeping even a small cryopump operating, and you have much bigger problems than keeping (replaceable) embryos alive.
There is no "need" to ever send a human male. Whenever you want a local source of sperm, you can send any number of male embryos. But again, from a "maximizing reproduction rate" perspective, there is no need to send men. It's far lower mass / higher capacity to send embryos, by many orders of magnitude. And provides the corresponding orders of magnitude increased genetic diversity, rather than having everyone be siblings.
In practice, of course, travel to Mars will be an equal opportunity endeavour.
Shame about the atmospheric pressure and temperature... I mean, if you're a deep sea fish who likes it HOT, sure. No oxygen, either.
Why do people automatically think of planets as only existing at their surface? Yes, the environment at Venus's surface is hell. But in the cloudtops (specifically the middle cloud layer), it's the closest place in the solar system to Earth outside of Earth. Earthlike gravity, temperature, pressure, sunlight levels, and a radiation shielding equivalent to having several meters of water overhead. Yes, there is some (sparse) sulfuric acid mist, like a bad smog/vog, but then again, skin contact with Martian dust will also burn you (due to its oxidizing salts it's been described as similar to handling lye), and probably a lot faster. You can't breathe either of them, but the water won't boil out of your skin on Venus. It might well be possible (although inadvisable) to be outside in Venus with nothing more than a full face mask; contact dermatitis at those sort of H2SO4 levels will happen eventually, but not quickly. You could actually feel an alien breeze on your skin. In any case, no pressure suit is needed.
Not to mention that normal Earth air is a lifting gas on Venus. Or that H2SO4 is more of a resource than a hindrance (there's no shortage of plastics that tolerate it well, it's easy to adsorb, and it's easy to thermally decompose into water, oxygen, and SO2, as well as being one of the most important industrial acids; most of the other major industrial acids are also available straight from the atmosphere, in lesser quantities)
Access to the surface is more difficult than on Mars, but not impossible. Surface probes thusfar have used what humans would need to use to survive: the simple combination of insulation and thermal inertia. Probes have survived for over 2 hours in that manner, and it's possible to engineer to even greater survival times. These were in the lowlands as well, where the air is hotter and thicker than in the highlands. Soft suits would not be viable; as the environment most resembles deep sea diving, you need hard suits. Hard suits were actually prototyped by NASA for use with Apollo, and worked quite well (they're less restrictive to movement than soft suits); however they went with soft suits because they were lighter. One neat thing about operation near Venus's surface is that flight is very easy. Any manned suit at the surface would almost certainly be paired with a bellows balloon, which is an metallic accordion-like adjustable-lift system (which has already been prototyped and tested in Venus surface conditions)
All of that said, there's not really any good reason to put people on the surface, as you can teleoperate dredges for mining the surface (operated from the cloud deck) without any meaningful delay.
The perchlorates appear to be ubiquitous. Not to mention other chemicals like arsenic and hexavalent chromium (the latter is almost absent in nature on Earth but abundant on Mars), and fine particulates that almost certainly are bad for the lungs.
Meh, limited trade with Earth is certainly in the cards; the question of "how limited" depends on a lot of factors, but particularly their return launch costs. Even simple "Martian rock", sold as collectables or decorative stone, in small quantities could fetch tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. Collectables markets and luxury goods markets ("Oh, the foyer in your palace is granite from Tuscany? How quaint - my foyer is from Mars") are very real things. But one order of magnitude difference in return prices equates to multiple orders of magnitude difference in the size of the market. Likewise, what exactly is available will also affect the value. A brittle sandstone for example isn't going to get the same market for the same price as big chunks of agate. We don't know what all will be found on Mars, but the presence of hydrothermal systems is encouraging; they're associated with quartz, calcite, chalcedony (agate, onyx, etc), zeolites, opal, etc. The jewelry market would be excellent to be able to break into, in terms of the scale versus what they pay per kilogram.
Honestly, if you wanted to maximize population expansion rate and you were hand-selecting the crew, you'd send 100% female and cryopreserved female embryos. You'd choose women with small stature to maximize how many you can send / keep alive with a give payload mass, and ideally from families/cultures that tend to have large numbers of children starting at a young age.
In practice, of course, there are other factors beyond maximizing reproduction. Particularly if the people going are paying customers rather than people being selected by some external organization.
Large numbers of manual laborers won't be required due to the large amount of advanced machinery that'll be involved
This trope is unfortunately not reality. Do we have large numbers of advanced machinery doing all of our work for us here on Earth where it's far easier to build and test them and deliver them to consumers in bulk? We only use these billion dollar robots so heavily in space exploration because we don't have people there. These general-purpose, teleoperated robots have extremely low throughput - and would have improved-but-still-low throughput even if operated locally by the absurdly-expensive local labour (expensive because their consumables are so expensive). We only put up with the tiny throughput from general-purpose robots because it's so long between launches; there's no lives hanging in the balance. And if you want higher throughput, specialist robots (as are used extensively in industry on Earth), sure, you can make and deliver those too - each one at great expense, and you need one for each task, working within tightly controlled parameters.
If you have people locally, you're not going to spend billions engineering and delivering robots for them, you're going to use them as your labour. Is ISS teeming with robots doing all of their work for them? No, the astronauts are glorified construction workers and lab techs. When you have hands in space, they're your best option - regardless of whether it would have been cheaper not to send humans at all.
Well, it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. The slower you go, the more radiation shielding and in-transit consumables you need, as well as having your capital costs locked up for longer. So the optimal use case can indeed be to spend more fuel to go faster.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually liked the gameplay concept. There's nothing wrong with the concept for many people. The problem is that they failed to actually deliver the concept.
I think the difference between the concept and the reality does, however, lay bare a more important element. What most people want out of procgen isn't just that the algorithms can generate diversity... it's that they can generate scenarios that even the coders wouldn't have expected. Some algorithms can do that. Others cannot. NMS's absolutely cannot, they're just standard fractal noise terrain with random primitives, animals that are just armatures with random parts swapped out, etc. For anyone thinking of taking up the mantle of such a game after the failure of NMS, I think that's really going to be a key aspect. Because players are always going to explore worlds faster than developers can make new content, so if your engine is limited to making "things that the devels have thought of", it's always going to wear thin rather quickly.
The real world we live in always keeps presenting new fascinating worlds every time we explore a new place, for a key reason. Real worlds are built by fluid and rigid body interactions (primarily fluid, at least on the large scale) with variable chemistry. Physical properties like viscosity vary over numerous orders of magnitude in different pressure and temperature environments, and there's thousands of different chemical constituents that can be found in bulk, depending on the environment. Furthermore, each body is exposed to anisotropic conditions (bombardment, solar radiation, Coriolis force due to its rotation, etc), and widely varying local conditions like gravity. Basically, the computer equivalent would be CFD with chemical equilibria. Now, of course you can't do some extreme-detail CFD simulation of planets in realtime. But IMHO, if you want interesting generation, you want a generation algorithm that can emulate these sort of *effects*, even if the underlying core mechanism is radically different. Terrain generation algorithms generally make a goal of emulate the effects of uplift/folding, erosion, volcanism, impacts, etc. Recognizing how radically, many-orders-of-magnitude different these can all be in different environments, and with different materials in the same environment, seems key to making landscapes that can defy even creator expectations.
I think Pluto should be the gold standard. Before NH arrived, who would have thought that what we'd find was a giant scar facing Charon where the mantle bubbles out in supermassive convection cells, with mountain-sized icebergs drifting around the soup and collecting in iceberg-mountain ranges on the shore (just to name a couple of the really bizarre things New Horizons discovered)? The issue isn't "could you code a generation algorithm to emulate Pluto?"; of course one can. The question is, "could you code a generation algorithm that would have come up with things as weird as Pluto, without having to explicitly spell them out, without you ever having seen them before"?
I tried to convince myself that it was a "relaxing", "meditative" experience, a "palate cleanser" if you will.
After a while, I just couldn't convince myself of even that minimal goal. It's just... nothing. The terrible gameplay actively discourages you from doing the only thing that the game really offers (exploration), and the exploration is only skin deep due to the shallowness of their generation algorithm.
And really, how can you say NMS feels "solid", when you can walk right through the animals and things don't fall when you mine out the ground from underneath them? What's the opposite of "solid" in this context?
Nothing that the person wrote in that post is in any way accurate.
No, they don't. They all have the same speed, turning radius, etc. The only difference is that on the big ones, when you get out you can take falling damage ;)
Nope. It has no effect. Resources don't sync between instances.
No, it distinctly does not. And this has been known since the first day after release. Two players even sat around mining stuff in front of each other - even day/night and locations of sentinels, etc aren't synced between player instances. Heck, more to the point, if you mine something, leave the system, then go back to the same spot, all of your changes will be lost, even in your own local instance.
It does not. More to the point, it escapes me how you could not realize this, as this is the way most people make money - searching out a starred system and selling the same item over and over again, because the price remains fixed no matter how much you sell.
Is there anything more you'd like to just make up about the game? Or did you pick up a copy from Bizarro Universe or something that's a different game from the one that the rest of us have?
Nice reading comprehension. In the game files. The game files distributed contain the actual assets used by the game, and then a bunch of random stuff not used by the game, in different directories. These unused assets range all the way to the whimsical, such as a lego-man dummy player model on a unicycle, to a monkey in a hat, to the Fallout logo. Among the "not used by the game" stuff are the files that were used to fake the E3 demo, in an "E3" directory. These models are only partially rigged, and thus could not actually be used in the game. More to the point, if you try to include a model that large in the game, you can't even see it. Creatures in game don't behave like in the trailer, their actions don't affect the landscape like in the trailer, etc - all of that was hard-coded. Faked.
Really, once you start digging into the game files, it's amazing the depth that their fakery went. Even the "player-named star systems" that you see during the loading screen are just from a hard-coded list in the game files.
More to the point, they continued lying about the content right up to launch (e.g. incl. at the release party) and in tweets after the release (the "slowed down planet rotation", the "people can't see each other because too many people are playing" lie, etc).
Indeed. I was amazed at how weak the generation engine is. Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty - they're using a good graphics engine and have artists with a good eye. But the terrain is just standard diamond-square (fractal noise terrain) modified with random hard-coded primitives. No biomes, no continents, just noise and a global sea level. The animals are just built by swapping out pieces of armatures and randomly choosing premade textures. They don't even bother to check that any of the parts make sense (lots and lots of "derpasauruses" who missed leg day), or that the metadata about the animal matches its form (it's amazing how many vegetarian T-rexes you'll encounter). Plants are often not modified at all. In a lot of cases they inexplicably put the exact same thing on numerous planets (the same aggro crab), or even every planet (the same giant coral, the same mushroom-covered rock, etc - found on every planet in the game).
So. Weak.
Indeed, it's amazing how many people on the NMS reddit sub have written posts about "I'm trying to find a way to enjoy this game and it hasn't been working... please make suggestions!"
Sadly, you can't force fun. I think people would have been a lot more likely to forgive the missing features and even the explicit unambiguous lies** if the game had at least been fun. Except that it's not. HG is terrible at gameplay design. Their formula for gameplay is really simple: "don't let them get hurt, make everything available and easy to acquire, and then - so that the game isn't over in a matter of minutes - load the game down with grind." And if people finish too quickly? "Dramatically increase the grind."
** While a lot of people singled out the multiplayer lie as a big one (where even the manufacturers had been duped, with the boxes having to add a sticker to cover up the multiplayer label), the whole planetary dynamics one may be even more brazen. With multiplayer, they tried to pretend that the reason players couldn't see each other was because the servers were overloaded - even though there's no player model in the game files, no attempts to send packets, no open ports, no references to multiplayer anywhere in the game files, day/night cycles and NPC positions aren't synced between instances, and you can outright pause the game. But in the rotation case, after having made fun of games that just use skyboxes and talked up their real-world dynamics, they made up this whole story about how playtesters had been "confused" by things moving around, so they "slowed down" planetary motion. The reality is, of course, that they use skyboxes. Nothing moves relative to anything else, and nothing can; planets are just placed at random coordinates in a box. You can't have things orbit the sun when the sun is just a painting and doesn't even match the location of your light source. Unless they want us to believe that to "slow down rotation", rather than simply setting speeds to zero, they removed their entire solar system model and entire lighting model and re-did them with an entirely faked one.
More to the point, a lot of the statements made by Sean / Hello Games and their actions seem to have been deliberately designed to keep people in past the refund point. They spent a lot of time plugging the concept that there's "secrets" and "easter eggs", that planets / star systems get more interesting the closer one gets to the center, etc. Then - after someone managed to get to the center on the first day by grinding nonstop all day (the game is extremely focused on grind), their first reaction was to.... quadruple the grind with a day-one patch (introducing a distance-measuring bug at the same time). Basically:
1) Tell people that there's amazing things at the center
2) Make it take a long time for people to actually get there
3) By the time people discover that there's nothing there, they're long past the time that they can claim a refund
The very nature of the game works against players in this regard. A player's first thought, upon discovering that they're not finding anything like in the trailers is, "Well, there's 18 quadrillion planets... the stuff in the trailers must exist somewhere, the game can't be just the derpy stuff I've been encountering so far." By the time one has explored a statistically significant number of planets to come to the realization that, no, they've basically seen the whole game, that it really is that shallow... they're long past the time in which they can claim a refund. The game is also packed with "trophies" for doing trivial actions - which is also something companies take into account when deciding whether to give refunds ("Sorry, you've already done X % of the trophies....")
It's amazing how many people you find (or at least used to find ;) ) on the reddit sub for the game who seem to basically be trying to find a way to make themselves enjoy the game while they searched for things that they had been led to believe existed. They usually transitioned from this phase to very angry as they learned the extent of the fakery. Even the named stars you see in the loading screen aren't actually places people have named, they're just a hard-coded list.
Don't get me wrong, there are some people who actually enjoy it. But they're an extremely small number; the game is approaching half a percent of its initial player base. For a while most seemed to be using it as a screenshot-generating walking simulator. Now a lot of them seem to be spending their time carving rocks into very poor approximations of statues via the crude mining system.
If they're having trouble finding donors, I suggest they try Hoxton, Brighton, the House of Commons, and the BBC media city in Salford; there's plenty of wankers there to choose from.
Have you seen how slow Mars rovers move and how carefully they have to weigh each action, in an environment where if you mess up, there's nobody there to rescue / repair you? Have you seen how much maintenance and consumables is involved in mining?
There's a world of difference between a (multi-billion dollar) rover that slowly inches along a surface looking at rocks, and one that mines and ships commercial quantities.
The concept that "robots will do everything" is simply not realistic. Do robots do everything for the astronauts on the ISS? Of course not; the astronauts there are basically glorified construction workers and lab techs. Why? Because it's cheaper and higher throughput - and that's without serious communication delays. It's certainly an arguable point as to whether it's worth the cost sending humans in the first place - but once they're there, there's no debate at all about whether it's cheaper to use their labour or to engineer, build, and send robots to do the same task.
Hydrogen does not have to be shipped as a liquid or gas (more to the point, it wouldn't persist as a liquid without a significant cooling system). By mass, water is 13% hydrogen, hydrazine is 14% hydrogen, polyethylene is 17% hydrogen, lithium borohydride is 18% hydrogen, ammonia is 22% hydrogen, and methane is 34% hydrogen. Most of those compounds (and others) are useful to have on a ship regardless. And any sort of effective radiation shielding is going to have to be hydrogen rich no matter what; there's nothing that moderates down neutrons to easy-to-capture energies anywhere near as well as hydrogen.
The fun part of it is that the hydrogen enters and leaves the rocket in exactly the same form; it's simply there to function as a working gas for the lithium fluoride.
I'm actually somewhat of a fan of metalized propellants, although that one is certainly extreme. ;) While there's no getting around fluorine's toxicity so I can't really get onboard with that particular propulsion system, I can picture lithium being managed - yes, lithium is dangerous, but so are chemicals like LOX (really, pretty much all oxidizers are extreme fire hazards, if not outright explosion hazards). Aluminum doesn't provide as much of an isp boost as lithium, but it provides a small one, plus a major density boost (and is cheap, too), and is nice and stable. I'm actually working on some experiments for a somewhat hybrid-esque design which involves aluminum structural elements designed to burn away and contribute to the exhaust stream.
The troll persists because people keep feeding him.
Honestly, I don't know what has to be wrong in a person's life for them to feel the need to spend their time acting like that. But it's the case for some people. I hope that whatever is wrong, things turn around for them.
He's not "asking" anyone to do anything. It's a simple reality that if there was a mission to Mars coming up shortly and you passed a signup sheet around, and at the top of it was written in large letters "YOU WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY DIE AT SOME POINT DURING THIS TRIP", you'd still get thousands of signatures from people who are utterly thrilled at getting the chance and couldn't give a rat's arse about the risk.
I knew there was a reason back in school that my binders all had pictures of sci-fi landscapes on them... it all comes full circle. Mars needs a breading program for colonists to survive... breading requires a binder... binders have pictures of Mars to encourage people to go and support the breading program!
No, the rovers have not been gem prospecting. But the data that they've recovered would be useful for doing so. There's a lot of heavy hydrothermal veining near curiosity for example (primarily gypsum, but it's a good start!). What I wouldn't give to be there with a rover with good range...
I've read some papers on the subject, and it really depends on what sort of mineral you're talking about. Mars lacks or is deficient in, as you note, a lot of the processes on Earth that concentrate ores, making certain types of ores deficient. However, there are some types of ore deposits that it's expected to be rich in. A good example is bolide deposits, like the Sudbury deposit on Earth. There a large impactor created a basin which is rich in nickel, copper, and precious metals. It's not that the precious metals came from the impactor - it's that by liquefying a large chunk of the crust, it allows it to separate out into layers. Mars is struck more often by large bolides and the resulting basins are more slowly eroded, so such deposits are predicted to be notably richer on mars.
A problem with mining on Mars however is... well, mining. Overburden problems are likely to be even worse on Mars than on Earth, and I'm sure you've seen what lengths people go through to get rid of overburden. Doing that with equipment light enough to ship to Mars and keep operating? Anything but an easy task. Now, surely there's some deposits in some places that, with good prospecting effort, are low overburden and easy to mine. But then you hit the other problem which is... not everything is found in the same place, and many things distinctly aren't. And furthermore, once you build in a particular place, you're pretty much locked in there. So how do you get everything from point A to point B? Aircraft can work on Mars, but their payload capacities are terrible compared to their size, and you have to make them very fragile. Over a few hundred kilometers, your best bet is probably "mountain roads", aka you plow aside the rocks and dirt as best you can, and accept that you're going to get low throughput/high maintenance hauling over such bad roads. Over longer distances? Honestly, your best bet (in the foreseeable future) is rockets, as expensive as they are. In the long term you can talk durable cross-planet roads, high speed rail, railguns, etc. But those sorts of things aren't practical in the near term - they represent too much embodied mass, power, and/or and labour.
It's not an easy challenge
Site selection is going to be critical. The goal in the near future shouldn't be 100% independence, because that's not realistic. It should be, "what's the highest percentage of this import mass that we can eliminate?" Pick those low-hanging, high-demand fruits first.
A single failure in power that prevents you from keeping even a small cryopump operating, and you have much bigger problems than keeping (replaceable) embryos alive.
There is no "need" to ever send a human male. Whenever you want a local source of sperm, you can send any number of male embryos. But again, from a "maximizing reproduction rate" perspective, there is no need to send men. It's far lower mass / higher capacity to send embryos, by many orders of magnitude. And provides the corresponding orders of magnitude increased genetic diversity, rather than having everyone be siblings.
In practice, of course, travel to Mars will be an equal opportunity endeavour.
Why do people automatically think of planets as only existing at their surface? Yes, the environment at Venus's surface is hell. But in the cloudtops (specifically the middle cloud layer), it's the closest place in the solar system to Earth outside of Earth. Earthlike gravity, temperature, pressure, sunlight levels, and a radiation shielding equivalent to having several meters of water overhead. Yes, there is some (sparse) sulfuric acid mist, like a bad smog/vog, but then again, skin contact with Martian dust will also burn you (due to its oxidizing salts it's been described as similar to handling lye), and probably a lot faster. You can't breathe either of them, but the water won't boil out of your skin on Venus. It might well be possible (although inadvisable) to be outside in Venus with nothing more than a full face mask; contact dermatitis at those sort of H2SO4 levels will happen eventually, but not quickly. You could actually feel an alien breeze on your skin. In any case, no pressure suit is needed.
Not to mention that normal Earth air is a lifting gas on Venus. Or that H2SO4 is more of a resource than a hindrance (there's no shortage of plastics that tolerate it well, it's easy to adsorb, and it's easy to thermally decompose into water, oxygen, and SO2, as well as being one of the most important industrial acids; most of the other major industrial acids are also available straight from the atmosphere, in lesser quantities)
Access to the surface is more difficult than on Mars, but not impossible. Surface probes thusfar have used what humans would need to use to survive: the simple combination of insulation and thermal inertia. Probes have survived for over 2 hours in that manner, and it's possible to engineer to even greater survival times. These were in the lowlands as well, where the air is hotter and thicker than in the highlands. Soft suits would not be viable; as the environment most resembles deep sea diving, you need hard suits. Hard suits were actually prototyped by NASA for use with Apollo, and worked quite well (they're less restrictive to movement than soft suits); however they went with soft suits because they were lighter. One neat thing about operation near Venus's surface is that flight is very easy. Any manned suit at the surface would almost certainly be paired with a bellows balloon, which is an metallic accordion-like adjustable-lift system (which has already been prototyped and tested in Venus surface conditions)
All of that said, there's not really any good reason to put people on the surface, as you can teleoperate dredges for mining the surface (operated from the cloud deck) without any meaningful delay.
The perchlorates appear to be ubiquitous. Not to mention other chemicals like arsenic and hexavalent chromium (the latter is almost absent in nature on Earth but abundant on Mars), and fine particulates that almost certainly are bad for the lungs.
Mars isn't exactly a good environment for health.
Meh, limited trade with Earth is certainly in the cards; the question of "how limited" depends on a lot of factors, but particularly their return launch costs. Even simple "Martian rock", sold as collectables or decorative stone, in small quantities could fetch tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. Collectables markets and luxury goods markets ("Oh, the foyer in your palace is granite from Tuscany? How quaint - my foyer is from Mars") are very real things. But one order of magnitude difference in return prices equates to multiple orders of magnitude difference in the size of the market. Likewise, what exactly is available will also affect the value. A brittle sandstone for example isn't going to get the same market for the same price as big chunks of agate. We don't know what all will be found on Mars, but the presence of hydrothermal systems is encouraging; they're associated with quartz, calcite, chalcedony (agate, onyx, etc), zeolites, opal, etc. The jewelry market would be excellent to be able to break into, in terms of the scale versus what they pay per kilogram.
Honestly, if you wanted to maximize population expansion rate and you were hand-selecting the crew, you'd send 100% female and cryopreserved female embryos. You'd choose women with small stature to maximize how many you can send / keep alive with a give payload mass, and ideally from families/cultures that tend to have large numbers of children starting at a young age.
In practice, of course, there are other factors beyond maximizing reproduction. Particularly if the people going are paying customers rather than people being selected by some external organization.
This trope is unfortunately not reality. Do we have large numbers of advanced machinery doing all of our work for us here on Earth where it's far easier to build and test them and deliver them to consumers in bulk? We only use these billion dollar robots so heavily in space exploration because we don't have people there. These general-purpose, teleoperated robots have extremely low throughput - and would have improved-but-still-low throughput even if operated locally by the absurdly-expensive local labour (expensive because their consumables are so expensive). We only put up with the tiny throughput from general-purpose robots because it's so long between launches; there's no lives hanging in the balance. And if you want higher throughput, specialist robots (as are used extensively in industry on Earth), sure, you can make and deliver those too - each one at great expense, and you need one for each task, working within tightly controlled parameters.
If you have people locally, you're not going to spend billions engineering and delivering robots for them, you're going to use them as your labour. Is ISS teeming with robots doing all of their work for them? No, the astronauts are glorified construction workers and lab techs. When you have hands in space, they're your best option - regardless of whether it would have been cheaper not to send humans at all.
Well, it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. The slower you go, the more radiation shielding and in-transit consumables you need, as well as having your capital costs locked up for longer. So the optimal use case can indeed be to spend more fuel to go faster.