Elite Dangerous launches 10,000 player fleet
Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2019 9:29 am
Elite Dangerous got a write up in last weeks - sorry, 2 weeks back - New Scientist
https://www.newscientist.com/article/21 ... ce-voyage/
"On 13 January, more than 10,000 people fired up Elite Dangerous, charged their ship’s faster-than-light drive and set off on the first hyperspace jump on an epic eight-month journey to the outer edges of the Milky Way.
The 200,000 light-year voyage to Beagle Point, one of the galaxy’s most distant star systems, will take the giant fleet across vast regions of uncharted space, including the Boreas Expanse, the Galactic Aphelion and the Abyss. “It’s a challenge in both endurance and navigation,” says Erimus Kamzel, one of the mission’s leaders."
It seems - as far as I can tell from the review, that the current version of ED can now get star data in real-time (I'm going to guess from SIMBAD, or some version of the recent Gaia data release, possibly hosted on ED's servers, otherwise they're really going to piss off the astronomers) and then make some inferences about the system. For example, there is a moderate association between a star's spectroscopic "metallicity" and it's number of orbiting gas giants.
I signed up for ED away back when, but I hadn't noticed that it was a Windows-only game so haven't made any effort to pursue it further.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/21 ... ce-voyage/
"On 13 January, more than 10,000 people fired up Elite Dangerous, charged their ship’s faster-than-light drive and set off on the first hyperspace jump on an epic eight-month journey to the outer edges of the Milky Way.
The 200,000 light-year voyage to Beagle Point, one of the galaxy’s most distant star systems, will take the giant fleet across vast regions of uncharted space, including the Boreas Expanse, the Galactic Aphelion and the Abyss. “It’s a challenge in both endurance and navigation,” says Erimus Kamzel, one of the mission’s leaders."
It seems - as far as I can tell from the review, that the current version of ED can now get star data in real-time (I'm going to guess from SIMBAD, or some version of the recent Gaia data release, possibly hosted on ED's servers, otherwise they're really going to piss off the astronomers) and then make some inferences about the system. For example, there is a moderate association between a star's spectroscopic "metallicity" and it's number of orbiting gas giants.
I signed up for ED away back when, but I hadn't noticed that it was a Windows-only game so haven't made any effort to pursue it further.