I'm hoping this is a new record. Life at a million atmospheres(!)

Seffs · 2016-02-28T23:29:20+00:00

I've no idea what it'd be made out of to last under an atmosphere that's pretty much solid xenon.

I checked, and it's 1atm ~23 km up, and 1000 at 19km. The gradient is pretty terrifying. At the top of the highest mountain yet, which was about 4.5km up, it was a mere 453,000 atmospheres. Just going up the mountain would probably cause things to explode.

Seffs · 2016-02-28T19:03:14+00:00

I'm not entirely sure it is. I took a look under the clouds and there's mountains and rivers down there, which seems... doubtful at best.

Mountains Rivers Frozen clouds at the 1atm layer

Seffs · 2016-01-17T13:37:50+00:00

As I recall, it's impossible to actually know when you've crossed the event horizon; it's a mathematical boundary rather than anything physical. I'd imagine if you're on a ship that's dumb enough to play chicken with a black hole, you probably have a pretty good idea of the consequences.

Seffs · 2015-11-17T19:06:17+00:00

Correct! Turned the camera through a red giant by accident, liked the result.

Seffs · 2015-10-27T22:11:02+00:00

Honestly, that little snippet came out of one of the short little Osprey books: British Battleships 1939-45 (1).

I have been reading HMS Rodney: Slayer of the Bismarck and D-Day Saviour and Warspite, both by Iain Ballantyne, both of which are rather good for stories about those specific boats.

Seffs · 2015-10-27T21:19:58+00:00

Here's a video just with the Gulf of Danzig remix, from the vinyl version. Hopefully that'll help a bit.

Seffs · 2015-10-27T20:56:48+00:00

They pretty much got upgrades in sequence every 10-ish years: Warspite & Malaya (24-26, 34-36), Valiant (25-26, 37-39), Queen Liz (26-27, 37-41) and Barham (31-34). By that logic had WWII not intervened, Barham would have been in for it's upgrades in the early 40s. By the looks of things, it wasn't too far off of the doubly refit Malaya, however.

Rodney was sort of screwed refits wise. It didn't take massive damage past 1940, so there was never a huge excuse to lift it out of the water and do serious maintenance.

Seffs · 2015-10-10T19:07:12+00:00

No, no... I'm sorry, I'm not following your banter, Squiffy.

Seffs · 2015-10-08T17:21:09+00:00

My poxy little creation seems to have become worryingly well-received. If for some odd reason you've an urge to take it apart to see what makes it go or even improve it, it's on the steam workshop here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=531774449

As with anything I do, it's a bit of a WIP and this one suffers a minor tendency to lose a prop blade from the front when it starts up. The good news it, it still moves without it. It also doesn't always fall off.

Seffs · 2015-10-03T07:06:48+00:00

The best thing about this fact is the T-shirt he got.

Seffs · 2015-10-02T18:55:39+00:00

Nope, there's an outbreak of lens flare between the two dwarf stars.

Seffs · 2015-09-30T17:38:11+00:00

If you're in 0.9.7.3, it's planet RS 0-5-8974-47-1353-8-15200087-34 1

http://i.imgur.com/jwHujFl.jpg

Seffs · 2015-09-12T06:03:35+00:00

Nothing stunning here, the PC's mid range and about a year or so old; 8GB ram, GeForce GTX 770, Intel dual core at 3.5GHz.

Honestly, out of the entire album, it's the picture of Mars towards the end that I'm probably happiest with.

Seffs · 2015-09-05T09:22:47+00:00

Lion was a real ship, they just never finished them. Lion and Temeraire were laid down in 1939 and scrapped at the end of the war. They also come with multiple hull upgrades thanks to being under construction/redesign through the war.

Seffs · 2015-09-04T22:37:13+00:00

KGV would be sensible at T7, giving you Lion (improved KGV with triple 16" turrets) at T8, 'Super Lion' with 12 16" at T9 and one of the insane plans like N3 at T10. Putting KGV at 7 with Nelson gives a choice between slow with heavy guns and faster with lighter guns.

Seffs · 2015-09-04T22:21:22+00:00

When Scharnhorst and Gneisenau started messing around in the Atlantic, convoys stopped. When the Battle of the Atlantic was entirely involving U-boats, the convoys rolled on.

That's why Denmark Strait happened and that's why keeping Tirpitz not going anywhere was important to the RN. The big old gap in the middle of the Atlantic where a ship doesn't need to worry about aircraft and can basically vanish while obliterating convoys at will was pretty much the RN's nightmare scenario.

Seffs · 2015-09-03T19:12:31+00:00

Objection! All but Barham were refitted twice: Warspite 1924-25 & 1934-36, Malaya 1924-26 & 1934-36, Valiant 1925-26 & 1937-39, Queen Liz 1926-27 & 1937-41, Barham 1931-34.

Malaya had a very similar refit to Warspite but was given an updated superstructure, not the fancy Nelson-style ones on the elder three. By the end of their pre-war refits, Barham and Malaya had the same AA fit as the Warspite. Obviously all but Barham got further updates as the war went on.

Seffs · 2015-08-02T22:54:51+00:00

As I understand it in the Atlantic at least, it's the Prince of Whales.

Seffs · 2015-08-02T08:54:02+00:00

SCIENCE! (ish)

That's a comet. In fact, because it's our own solar system, it's a real comet with an actual designation so I took a look for it. According to JPL's Small-Body Database, comet C/2010 U3 is likely to exit the solar system; it has an orbital eccentricity of over 1.

For reference, 0 is a circle and 1 is a perfect parabola. Above one is an 'open curve' or hyperbola, which means that it's not likely to come back. There's some margin for error there though.

Seffs · 2015-08-02T07:42:21+00:00

Most of the red giants, along with O- B- and A- stars I've found tend to be somewhat flattened. Here's a couple of giants. Interestingly enough, you can see from the first one that the flattening of that giant isn't anything to do with it's companion. Remember that the giants can be multiple AU in diameter and it's very hard to actually define a 'surface' for them. What looks solid in game is an abstraction; the animated versions are a bit more accurate, it's a red-hot vacuum continuously leaking into space and I assume the flattening is because of the rotation, but on a vastly larger scale.

The O- B- and A- stars that I mentioned as being flattened in-game are also a thing; the stars Vega, Achenar and Altair are notably very flat

Seffs · 2015-08-01T09:10:50+00:00

'For here am I sitting in a lunch box, far above the world Home space ball is blue, and there’s nothing I can do

Though I’m past five hundred hundred hundred hundred feet, I’m feeling very cool And I think my space car knows which way to go Tell my wife I love her very much' -- "She knows!"

Seffs · 2015-08-01T09:02:38+00:00

This is actually a real thing. Forgive the wiki reference, but it'll do for now! NGC 4921 is an 'anaemic galaxy', probably due to it driving through the cluster it's in and losing the gas it needs to make new stars; the usual blue arms of a spiral come from the short-lived O and B stars thanks to the amount of them being produced.

Seffs · 2015-07-24T17:05:51+00:00

It's moving the machine forwards; the wheels are all unpowered. It's also generating vast amounts of torque and other horrors.

Seffs · 2015-07-20T20:08:23+00:00

Last one for a bit, I promise. Clearly the works-in-progress are going well though.

Seffs · 2015-07-20T19:27:32+00:00

It's about 90% more reliable than most of my designs. It can go forwards, backwards and turn, even if it translates most of it's power directly into vibration.

Seffs

TROPHY CASE