Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Parts of it are just watching things happen, and then there are interactive sequences like docking with the LEM and landing. It’s a must-have for space fans, but it’s the “wow, this is what it looked like to do this” aspect, not the game aspects, that make it great.
The one I really enjoyed was the initial demo of Go for Launch: Mercury. The alpha demo is Alan Shepard’s ballistic flight, and you have about as much control as he did (you can spin around when you reach space), but if you turn off the music, it’s amazing to see and hear what he experienced. The real audio from the launch is played as you go through the sequence from launch to reeentry.
It’s alpha now, but I supported it and am anxious for the full game!
It’s one of the few games I have returned on Steam. As a VR experience it just made me ill once it started moving the camera around. Doing a circle pan around the rocket was… not fun.
Not really an issue for me, as I don’t get motion sickness. I have yet to try anything in VR that has felt anything more than eerie, and that includes a rollercoaster simulator.
I went out last night from midnight - 1am PST, and saw about 5 meteors in that hour. They were very bright meteors though - one was so bright it cast shadows. Did anyone else go out?
If you’re a Seattle-area QT3er, you might like this NASA photo of the Olympic Peninsula, with the entire Seattle metropolitan area visible at the top. Taken from the ISS. Pretty freaking amazing. It’s crazy how you can see the strip-mall awfullness of Aurora Avenue/Highway 99 from that far away.
(click on the photo for full size; it’s about 8,000 pixels wide).
Angular sizes are wild like that. Most humans have good enough eyes to make out a 300m skyscraper from the ~700km slant range I’d expect for a picture from low earth orbit, were it not for the ground clutter and the atmosphere. If you stand a penny on its edge and look down on it from standing height, it’s only about twice as large in terms of angular size as the aforementioned building (assuming you’re about 5’10").
Much of the universe is made of dark matter, the unknowable,
as-yet-undetected stuff that barely interacts with the “normal” matter
around it. In the Milky Way, dark matter outnumbers regular matter by
about 5 to 1, and very tiny dwarf galaxies are known to contain even more of the stuff. But
now scientists have found something entirely new: a galaxy with the
same mass as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of our galaxy’s star
power. About 99.99 percent of this other galaxy is made up of dark
matter, and scientists believe it may be one of many. The galaxy Dragonfly 44, described in a study published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters,
is 300 million light years away. If scientists can track down a similar
galaxy closer to home, however, they may be able to use it to make the
first direct detection of dark matter.
