Children of a Dead Earth

This is an indie game which I have been following for a while. It has a lot of real science. If you liked Kerbal Space Prog then you should look at this. This has guns :D

Children of a Dead Earth

The most scientifically accurate space warfare simulator ever made.

Official site: Click here
Official Forum: Click here
Steam: Click here
TV Tropes: Click here

Official Gameplay Trailer

About This Game
The Most Scientifically Accurate Space Warfare Simulator Ever Made.

Children of a Dead Earth is a simulation of true-to-life space warfare. Design your spacecrafts using real world technologies. Traverse the solar system using actual orbit mechanics. Command fleets as the solar system descends into war, and see if you have what it takes to become the victor.

Features
• REAL SCIENCE, REAL TECHNOLOGY - Every technology, from the Nuclear Thermal Rockets, to the Railguns, to the Magnetoplasmadynamic Thrusters, was implemented using actual equations from Engineering and Physics textbooks and white papers. Everything aspect of these systems, efficiency, size, mass, power usage, heat dissipation, are all derived from valid equations.
• CAMPAIGN AND SANDBOX MODES - Assume the role of an admiral and fight through a detailed storyline chronicling the descent of the solar system into all out war, spanning every planet in the solar system and everything in between. Or simply play in the sandbox, designing ships and pitting them against other ships.
• EXTREMELY ACCURATE ORBITAL MECHANICS - With an N-Body Simulator (the kind NASA uses to plot actual spacecraft trajectories), all orbital phenomenon from hyperbolic orbits, Lagrange points, and orbital perturbation are all correctly simulated. Spacecrafts can stationkeep orbits, or enter into free falling perturbed orbits.
• 1:1 SCALE - The solar system is modeled completely to scale. The sizes of all planets, moons, and asteroids are accurately enormous, and the distance between them is similarly mindboggling huge. The extremely high orbital speed of your ships deep in high gravity orbits is correspondingly correct.
• FREEFORM SHIP DESIGN - Build your spacecrafts out of rockets, propellant tanks, weapons, powerplants, radiators, and crew modules. Wrap it all up with multiple armor layers, and maybe a Whipple Shield to boot. The acceleration, moment of inertia, delta-v, and much more are all correctly calculated for all spacecrafts you design.
• HIGHLY GRANULAR MODULE DESIGN - Tweak everything from the nozzle length or stoichiometric mixture ratio of your bipropellant rockets to the armature and rail dimensions of your railguns. The results of every change is seen in real time, from the change in your rocket’s exhaust velocity, to your railgun’s inductance or muzzle velocity.
• PHYSICALLY ACCURATE MATERIAL PROPERTIES - All materials, chemical reactions, and spectra are physically correct. When your arclamp pumps your solid state laser, the pumping bands are need to have to match up with the actual emission spectra of your excitation gas. When the photon absorption of a material is needed, it is derived from actual refractive index spectra data.
• IN-ENGINE MOD SUPPORT - The engine supports black box creation of untested or far future technology for modders to work with. All other game data, from levels to material properties, is also accessible to modders.

All of the above aspects combine to yield a space warfare simulator that is unparalleled in scientific realism. No other game combines the extremely accurate orbital mechanics, 1:1 scale of the solar system, and technology which is implemented 100% by scientific equations. If you ever wanted to know what space warfare would actually be like, this is the game for you.

No thanks, Kerbal is hard enough without being shot at.

+1 for the game’s name.

Posted about this in one of the “Indie Games You Should Know About” threads a couple days ago, but those don’t seem to get a ton of traffic so I fully support this new thread.

Only played for a little under 2 hours so far, but my first impression is positive. The production values (especially the menus) are very low-budget and it definitely skews much more towards simulator than game so it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. However, if you have ever wondered what space warfare could actually be like in the future the developer for this certainly seems to have put some real thought into it.

Imagine Kerbal Space Program, but without the whole getting into orbit from the ground thing and add rail guns, missiles and lasers. It is also “turn based” in that you plan your maneuvers ahead of time and then progress time in chunks of your choosing from 1 minute up to multiple days. This wasn’t obvious to me just from the steam store page, but i think it is a point in the game’s favor personally. There is a campaign, sandbox mode and a ship designer. Both the sandbox mode and ship designer are locked behind at least partially completing the campaign so I cannot comment on those.

The campaign does a pretty good job of easing you into things (at least as a person somewhat familiar with orbital mechanics via KSP) through a mixture of flavor text, scientific descriptions of various game elements (some with references to journals and white papers), and pop-up tutorial messages if you don’t mind a fair bit of reading. Haven’t played enough yet to tell how crazy it might get.

I’m looking forward to giving this one a try.

Wishlisted. Waiting for Brian’s take on it of course.

Three missions in so far and really liking it.