A little under a year ago I suffered a ridiculous combination of idiocy, misfortune, and possibly a thuster-related bug, all of which conspired to cost me an Asp Explorer which I smeared across a canyon wall on the moon of a gas giant out in the back of beyond. It was documented in all its grisly glory in this thread.
Over the past few weeks, having spent some time in Colonia but not yet ready to return to the bubble, I decided to pay a return visit to that fatal moon. This evening I arrived, located the correct canyon, and managed to position the ship more or less where it was just prior to the moment when I tested its resistance to rocks.
This is a two-frame GIF showing the original impact site (lower resolution frame extracted from a video capture) compared with the same location a year later (higher resolution frame from an in-game screenshot):
Ignoring the much lower resolution and lack of detail in the first image compared with the second, which is probably a combination of both graphical improvements in the game and updates to my PC's hardware and drivers, there are two things to note here.
First, I recorded in the original thread that the system in question (OGIARY IM-U D3-2121) contained an Earthlike World. I really hope this is the result of my failing memory and not of changes in the Stellar Forge that have resulted in whole ELWs disappearing. I had scanned an awful lot of ELWs and WWs on that first trip so it's quite possible I got a couple of systems mixed up.
Secondly, and perhaps more interesting, is the obvious change in surface coloration between the two images. The first is clearly icy, which is how I described it in the original thread, while the second is definitely rocky and almost Martian in appearance. Even on orbital approach the world looked very different to how I remembered it. Alas I don't have any detail of how the game described the moon itself a year ago because I was targeting another system, but at the moment it's described as a "Rocky Ice World" which covers a little of both.
This raises the intriguing possibility, and I would love love love for this to be the case, that the Stellar Forge calculates surface temperature based on the relative positions of moons and stars, magnetic effects from parent gas giants, and geothermal activity to decide whether or not to render ice over all or part of the surface of such bodies at a particular time in their orbit.
The pragmatist in me realises that it's far more likely to be the result of general changes to the seeds and algorithms of the Stellar Forge, the same thing that's been responsible for the overall beigification of the galaxy and the apparent reduction of surface details on other worlds. But how fantastic would it be if some moons weren't permanently rocky or icy but had "seasons" based on movement within their stellar systems?
Would anyone from FD like to claim credit for this? Or am I just looking for complex answers where none exist, while the shade of William of Occam rolls his eyes in the background? In fact would this even work in the real galaxy? Can ice melt into subsurface water on airless worlds then expand out again when it cools? Does a mechanism even exist for this in the absence of an atmosphere to hold vapour?
Over the past few weeks, having spent some time in Colonia but not yet ready to return to the bubble, I decided to pay a return visit to that fatal moon. This evening I arrived, located the correct canyon, and managed to position the ship more or less where it was just prior to the moment when I tested its resistance to rocks.
This is a two-frame GIF showing the original impact site (lower resolution frame extracted from a video capture) compared with the same location a year later (higher resolution frame from an in-game screenshot):
Ignoring the much lower resolution and lack of detail in the first image compared with the second, which is probably a combination of both graphical improvements in the game and updates to my PC's hardware and drivers, there are two things to note here.
First, I recorded in the original thread that the system in question (OGIARY IM-U D3-2121) contained an Earthlike World. I really hope this is the result of my failing memory and not of changes in the Stellar Forge that have resulted in whole ELWs disappearing. I had scanned an awful lot of ELWs and WWs on that first trip so it's quite possible I got a couple of systems mixed up.
Secondly, and perhaps more interesting, is the obvious change in surface coloration between the two images. The first is clearly icy, which is how I described it in the original thread, while the second is definitely rocky and almost Martian in appearance. Even on orbital approach the world looked very different to how I remembered it. Alas I don't have any detail of how the game described the moon itself a year ago because I was targeting another system, but at the moment it's described as a "Rocky Ice World" which covers a little of both.
This raises the intriguing possibility, and I would love love love for this to be the case, that the Stellar Forge calculates surface temperature based on the relative positions of moons and stars, magnetic effects from parent gas giants, and geothermal activity to decide whether or not to render ice over all or part of the surface of such bodies at a particular time in their orbit.
The pragmatist in me realises that it's far more likely to be the result of general changes to the seeds and algorithms of the Stellar Forge, the same thing that's been responsible for the overall beigification of the galaxy and the apparent reduction of surface details on other worlds. But how fantastic would it be if some moons weren't permanently rocky or icy but had "seasons" based on movement within their stellar systems?
Would anyone from FD like to claim credit for this? Or am I just looking for complex answers where none exist, while the shade of William of Occam rolls his eyes in the background? In fact would this even work in the real galaxy? Can ice melt into subsurface water on airless worlds then expand out again when it cools? Does a mechanism even exist for this in the absence of an atmosphere to hold vapour?
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