We got "Kerbal Space Program" at our house last Friday; my two boys and
I played it as much as we could (perhaps a bit more than we should!)
over the weekend. If you haven't tried it, please do -- I think anyone
on this list would find it very entertaining and educational.

http://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com

And that brings me directly to my point: this game is growing wildly
popular, and it really is nothing more or less than a realistic
spaceflight simulator. Yes, it's a little "cartoony," but the physics
are quite real. You'll come to understand orbital dynamics far better
by playing this game than you would by, say, getting a college degree in
physics, as pointed out in this XKCD cartoon:

http://xkcd.com/1356/

On the surface, you might not expect such a game to be very popular.
After all, the general public seems to be rather apathetic about space
since the Apollo days of yore. But this game has not only caught on,
but it's my belief that it's training a whole new generation of space
enthusiasts. You can't build your own space program (albeit for little
green kerbals) without learning a deep appreciation for rockets, space
stations, and planetary outposts -- and I believe this will translate
directly into interest in real-life space development.

However, KSP only goes about as far as current-day space stations and
their lunar/Martian equivalents. It doesn't, for example, let you build
space settlements, or even rotating space stations with artificial gravity.

It makes me wonder (again) whether a game focused more squarely on
designing and building orbital space settlements would have benefit for
our goals. Just as KSP has a "design" phase and a "flight" phase, I
imagine this game would have a "design" phase where you set the geometry
and various parameters (such as rotation speed) of the station, and then
an "exploration/building" phase where you enter your colony to explore
and build Minecraft-style.

It would need to be further gamefied in some way, so that you start out
able to build something so tiny it hardly deserves to be called a space
colony, but work your way up to million-inhabitant tropical paradise
type settlements. Perhaps, as with SimCity, you need to attract
residents, and use the taxes (or residence fees or whatever you want to
call it) to fund then next one.

What do you think?

Best,
- Joe

.
Space Hotel Tycoon
Youstart with a set volume of a set orbit (usually one cubic kilometre of acircular 500 kilometre altitude equatorial Earth orbit) and a set amount ofmoney, half of it borrowed.

Your job isto build and sell space hotels to demanding travel/tourism companies.

You can borrow money (up to a point), butthen you have to pay it off, eating into your profit.

You have a deadline, and if you do a goodjob, you can outfit the next one more luxuriously (and sell it for more money).
Alongthe way, you run into problems (some of them randomly generated) such as solar flaresthat shut down work outside the shielded construction shack for days (could putyou over schedule, but you can make it up by paying out lots of overtime, whichcould put you over budget), orbital debris which isn't cleaned up as fast asyou were promised, and so on.
The fisthotel would hold fewer than twenty guests and offer small cabins and fewamenities, though eventually you could host a thousand guests or more, holdconventions, charity dance balls, sporting events, and more! You canchoose to have artificial gravity (more expensive), or not (cheaperguests).

A sports facility will cost abundle (and isnt available at first), but can generate a lot of revenue.

And so on.

Space Habitat Tycoon

Y
oustart with an empty Stanford Torus and a set amount of money (from your hotelconstruction business?), and your job is to outfit it for a client.

This client has a few particular desires("I want a central park, featuring three 50-metre waterfalls!").

Otherwise, the nicer you make it, the moreyou can sell it for.

Perhaps a "pricerange" would be included, above which the client won't go, and you canmeasure success by how close to his top offer you get (without going over).
You canborrow money (up to a point), but then you have to pay it off, eating into yourprofit.

You have a deadline, and if youdo a good job, you can outfit the next one more luxuriously (and sell it formore money).

Make enough profit, and youcan start dealing in Island Two Bernal Spheres.

Eventually, you can expand business to include Island Threes.
Alongthe way, you run into problems (some of them randomly generated) such as abreakdown in the Lunar mass driver (leaving you with a workforce which has tobe paid, but no work for them to do), labor disputes, and clients who changetheir minds about things ("Hey, instead of three 50-metre waterfalls, howabout two 75-metre waterfalls instead?").

On 4/29/14 6:05 PM, sailorbarsoom@... wrote:

> I haven't played Kerbal Space Program, though I'm starting to think that
> I will. What I did play was Roller Coaster Tycoon. So I look at what
> you suggest and see a couple of "Space Tycoon" games.

Hey, thanks for the feedback! These are good ideas.

I still think it would be possible to combine them into one game, where
you start out building 20-person hotels, and work your way up to Island
Two (or bigger) space colonies. This gives you a big growth curve,
which is highly appealing to gamers. For space advocates, it also helps
demonstrate how to get from "here" to "there" without an undefined gap
in the middle.

Moreover, I don't think you should ever just be handed a basic colony
structure (e.g. a Stanford Torus) to outfit. Rather, let the player
choose the geometry by snapping together primitive shapes with whatever
dimensions they specify. Sure, they may make something that explodes as
soon as they pressurize it, or starts tumbling as soon as they spin it
up. Oops! They'll learn from this and move on.

(Every KSP player has had their fair share of rockets that have blown
up, fallen apart, made a crater, or otherwise undergone rapid
unscheduled disassembly. KSP has a built in "revert this flight"
feature that lets you roll the clock back and try again with no penalty
except the time you spent on it. Perhaps our game could have something
similar.)

For example, I'm a big fan of multiple decks and artificial lighting, as
you can get a lot more "land" area out of your pressurized volume. But
Mike prefers open plans with piped-in natural sunlight. OK, so we make
the game support any combination of these, and have the simulated
residents include a mixture of preferences. The player can build what
they prefer. I imagine an open-sky hab would be more popular and
command higher prices per resident, but a multi-deck hab would be
cheaper to build and fit more residents in. Such trade-offs make the
game interesting.

One thing I'd really want to include is some high-quality rendering.
Most people right now can't visualize a space habitat at all, and when
we try, we mostly have to reach back to paintings done in the 1970s.
Elysium helped, but that was only one (and not a very realistic one at
that).

Again this is something KSP does really well. The other night I was
flying a capsule around the Mun (Moon analogue) for the very first time.
On my way back towards Kerbin (the Earth analogue), I was in the
planet's shadow most of the way, so it appeared as a thin ring
surrounding darkness. Then I emerged into the light, and the sun
suddenly blossomed on the edge of the planet. It was gorgeous and moving.

THAT'S the sort of experience I would want players to get when they
enter some beautiful space colony they've designed, strap on a pair of
virtual wings, and swoop down the axis for the first time. (Yeah, I
know, I know, you can't really do that in a multi-deck design... score
one for Mike!)

Cheers,
- Joe

Thanks all for the thoughts.

I've had some more thoughts about it myself -- I no longer believe that
a Minecraft-style editable world within each hab makes sense. That's
too small a scale for even a moderately-sized habitat. I now think
something like SimCity would be a better model. You directly build
municipal buildings and public works like parks; you also zone land for
private development, but don't control exactly what gets built there.

So each plot of land would either be empty (apart from a terrain type),
or be part of a "building" (which would include things like playgrounds
or whatever). The game would need to include a large number of building
types, each with a 3D model, and simulation stats: how many residents
and employees it supports, its CO2 -> O2 conversion rate (and
direction), its power and food consumption (or production), its money
burn rate, etc.

So the overall game flow would be:

1. Design a habitat by combining parts from a parts library.
2. Deploy a design by selecting an orbit. (The orbit you select will
impact the build cost; material sources and delivery costs will vary
over the course of the game as folks here would expect.)
3. Manage a habitat, SimCity style. The chief high-level variables
you're managing are residents, power, O2/CO2, food, and probably water.
(Water is recycled, sure, but we could divide it into "potable" and
"unpotable," so you have to make sure you provide sufficient recycling
capacity for your population.) And of course money -- I'm imagining you
can set tax rates, which impacts prices for your residents but also
funds the whole enterprise.
4. Go back to step 1 at any time, or check in on a previous habitat at
step 3.

Cheers,
- Joe

I think that such a game should consider have attracting settlers as a core. SimCity sort of assumes that there is a pool of people who will show up. This is less certain for early settlements as the cost of transport to the settlement is high.

On May 2, 2014, at 5:44 AM, Joe Strout wrote:

> Thanks all for the thoughts.
>
> I've had some more thoughts about it myself -- I no longer believe that
> a Minecraft-style editable world within each hab makes sense. That's
> too small a scale for even a moderately-sized habitat. I now think
> something like SimCity would be a better model. You directly build
> municipal buildings and public works like parks; you also zone land for
> private development, but don't control exactly what gets built there.
>
> So each plot of land would either be empty (apart from a terrain type),
> or be part of a "building" (which would include things like playgrounds
> or whatever). The game would need to include a large number of building
> types, each with a 3D model, and simulation stats: how many residents
> and employees it supports, its CO2 -> O2 conversion rate (and
> direction), its power and food consumption (or production), its money
> burn rate, etc.
>
> So the overall game flow would be:
>
> 1. Design a habitat by combining parts from a parts library.
> 2. Deploy a design by selecting an orbit. (The orbit you select will
> impact the build cost; material sources and delivery costs will vary
> over the course of the game as folks here would expect.)
> 3. Manage a habitat, SimCity style. The chief high-level variables
> you're managing are residents, power, O2/CO2, food, and probably water.
> (Water is recycled, sure, but we could divide it into "potable" and
> "unpotable," so you have to make sure you provide sufficient recycling
> capacity for your population.) And of course money -- I'm imagining you
> can set tax rates, which impacts prices for your residents but also
> funds the whole enterprise.
> 4. Go back to step 1 at any time, or check in on a previous habitat at
> step 3.
>
> Cheers,
> - Joe
>

On May 2, 2014, at 5:44 AM, Joe Strout <
joe@...
> wrote:
Thanks all for the thoughts.
I've had some more thoughts about it myself -- I no longer believe that

a Minecraft-style editable world within each hab makes sense. That's

too small a scale for even a moderately-sized habitat. I now think

something like SimCity would be a better model. You directly build

municipal buildings and public works like parks; you also zone land for

private development, but don't control exactly what gets built there.
So each plot of land would either be empty (apart from a terrain type),

or be part of a "building" (which would include things like playgrounds

or whatever). The game would need to include a large number of building

types, each with a 3D model, and simulation stats: how many residents

and employees it supports, its CO2 -> O2 conversion rate (and

direction), its power and food consumption (or production), its money

burn rate, etc.
So the overall game flow would be:
1. Design a habitat by combining parts from a parts library.
2. Deploy a design by selecting an orbit. (The orbit you select will

impact the build cost; material sources and delivery costs will vary

over the course of the game as folks here would expect.)
3. Manage a habitat, SimCity style. The chief high-level variables

you're managing are residents, power, O2/CO2, food, and probably water.

(Water is recycled, sure, but we could divide it into "potable" and

"unpotable," so you have to make sure you provide sufficient recycling

capacity for your population.) And of course money -- I'm imagining you

can set tax rates, which impacts prices for your residents but also

funds the whole enterprise.
4. Go back to step 1 at any time, or check in on a previous habitat at

step 3.
Cheers,
- Joe

On 5/2/14 5:39 PM, Al Globus wrote:

> I think that such a game should consider have attracting settlers as a
> core. SimCity sort of assumes that there is a pool of people who will
> show up. This is less certain for early settlements as the cost of
> transport to the settlement is high.

I would agree. I'm currently imagining two axes for classifying people
in the settlement:

1. Residence: Permanent Resident, Temporary Resident, Visitor
2. Employment: Public Employee, Private Employee, Unemployed

So, for example, tourists would be Unemployed Visitors, park staff would
be mostly Permanent Resident Public Employees, and (hopefully) the bulk
of your population would be Permanent Resident Private Employees.

But if you build a habitat with no gravity over (say) 0.1G, almost
nobody is going to want to live there permanently. So almost everyone
would be Temporary Residents or Visitors. Temp residents who are public
employees effectively cost you a lot more, because you end up paying for
their transport to/from the colony. So you better have some good source
of income (such as really attractive tourist facilities) to offset that.
And yeah, tourism too is going to be highly dependent on transport costs.

Transport costs in turn will be determined mainly by (1) the orbit you
choose, and (2) "background" developments in the game. If your hab
relies largely on tourism or temp workers, you might want to build it in
LEO (though you have to worry about reboost cost there). But as you
build successful colonies, a background simulation will build up other
infrastructure & economy in the neighboring areas. So, over time,
you'll find both materials and people becoming progressively more
available on orbit, on the Moon, on and around NEAs, etc.

So it would be a constant balance between "build it and they will come"
and "build where they already are."

I'm pretty excited about this prospect at the moment. One thing I'd
like to include is a fairly complete model of all the major bodies in
the solar system. So if, say, you're really interested in making a
thriving Jovian community, you can push that by building a small hab
orbiting Europa or whatever. That first colony will probably struggle,
and may be a net drain on the rest of your empire... but it will also
encourage development of that area, making the next colony easier.
Pretty soon you could have dozens or colonies thriving around the
various moons (as well as Jupiter itself).

But one problem with this whole-solar-system model is, of course, that
it's so darn BIG. It could easily seem overwhelming to the player.
Maybe we only include objects over 400 km radius -- there are about 35
of these I believe. That leaves out an awful lot of very useful stuff,
but I guess it includes just about everything you could easily orbit around.

Anyone who's still with me after all this, perhaps you'd consider
joining a technical advisory board? I'm getting fairly serious about
pursuing this project (though I have a couple of other projects I need
to wrap up first). I think it could be a great help in spreading the
idea of space settlement. I would welcome input from technical-minded
folks, to help ensure I'm not screwing up the physics or missing some
important angle.

If this is interesting to you, let me know (off-list if you like) and
I'll set up some collaboration tools as the project starts to take shape.

Thanks,
- Joe