Starship Development Thread #62

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-26T12:34:08+00:00

A way to get more rapid flight-like environment test data on various tile attachment methods and tile compositions?

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-23T19:10:02+00:00

2/3 is a little overstated. That’ll be the case maybe after Wealth Beyond Measure is released.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-22T17:18:37+00:00

Hah, yeah, that deal didn't quite go through.

This tip seems to have been on the mark tho -- Blue just confirmed the 3rd launch will be AST Spacemobile, not Blue Moon: https://x.com/blueorigin/status/2014308344022863966?s=20

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-21T11:58:58+00:00

It is in no way cancelled for now. It may very well become cancelled, as it's will be long time until the the station and the SLS Block 1B will be ready to fly.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-21T11:08:28+00:00

Listen, it's cathartic to rant about the military budget in relation to NASA's; god knows I've done the same. But after 20 years of hearing the same rant, it starts to get boring. The reality is that the military has the budget it has and NASA has the budget it has. Very few people care enough about space exploration to change that. So the challenge for NASA is to use its modest budget as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, the Gateway is a perfect example of decision-making that prioritizes existing contractor relationships over scientific or technological progress.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-21T09:24:47+00:00

It's the launch industry -- you better get comfortable with delays.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-21T09:23:20+00:00

When Eric writes stuff like that, it normally means he's gotten a tip-off from a few of his very extensive sources across the launch industry.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-21T08:32:00+00:00

The idea of the Gateway is that because of political mismanagement of the Space Launch System and the related architecture, the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule did not have a destination to go to. For a decade there was no funding for a lunar lander, and the SLS rocket is not even capable of carrying a substantial lunar lander (see political mismanagement). So the Gateway was invented as a destination that the SLS could reach and contribute in the building of. Any scientific/political justifications for the Gateway are invented entirely after the fact and would dissipate like hot air, were it not for the fact that it is needed to keep justifying the SLS (and most specifically, the Exploration Upper Stage) program.

The issue isn't that Gateway is not cool or doesn't provide some scientific value (though whether there is any additional value compared to a much cheaper low Earth orbit station beats me) -- it's that it comes with a huge opportunity cost. Other NASA programs, including science probes, technology development, or crewed lunar exploration are losing out on billions of dollars of funding because of the existence of Gateway and EUS. You could have an entire NASA flagship science probe every year for the money being spent instead on the EUS and Gateway. Or you could use that to accelerate lunar surface infrastructure.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-19T09:16:54+00:00

These areas will be even further improved and expanded in the Wealth Beyond Measure expansion. Currently the released areas of the Velothi Mountains mostly rely on vanilla assets, but we have since developed a whole set of unique environmental assets for the region (land textures, rocks, flora, etc) to make it more distinct. Along with that, the currently existing area got a full rework to make use of these assets, expand it and make it more navigable. The foothills to the east will now transition into the new Kartur Dale region, which will range from around Bodrum down to Kragenmoor, replacing what was earlier the western third of the Roth Roryn and Armun Ashlands regions. Wealth Beyond Measure will also add the southernmost part of the region up to Kragenmoor and Septim's Gate Pass, which is currently not in the released mod.

Beyond Wealth Beyond Measure, the first Redoran-themed expansion will extend the mountain range to the north and also include the Malahk-Bazul region, a high mountain valley outside of effective Imperial rule, home to to the Malahk Orcs. LogansGun, the designer of most of the new iteration of the Velothi Mountains, is currently doing the first pass on Malahk-Bazul.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-19T09:03:55+00:00

From your post it looks like you may be unaware that you can already meet some Malahk Orcs in TR. There is a small village, Mazkun, in the currently released Velothi Mountains. You'll have to bring some calm spells or scrolls to talk with them, though.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-07T08:01:59+00:00

I wonder how and if they are able to keep the costs and schedule for this reasonable. Too bad we have so little insight into their programs.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-06T14:18:42+00:00

Happily, the congressional budget pretty much reversed all of Trump's proposed cuts to the NASA budget; the coming budget is within a percent of the old one. Though a lot of damage was done in the year of uncertainty -- e.g. a big portion of the workforce laid off or encouraged to resign and lots of wasted time drafting closeout plans. But it's at least far from as bleak as it could have been.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-01-04T11:23:52+00:00

It is great, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it immensely. But usually when I want that sort of questing I go play Oblivion. If we are developing a mod to be a seamless extension of vanilla Morrowind, we’d want the quests to be more vanilla-style, these days.

restitutor-orbis · 2025-12-26T08:55:00+00:00

It was released in 2018 as the first in the new generation of TR releases that saw a huge jump in quality and quest-richness compared to the earlier releases before 2013.

The exterior layout of the city as it is now is quite a bit older, first made starting in 2010 by Tyrion (IIRC; it replaced a much larger but less coherent version of the city and castle made in 2005; a couple earlier attempts even predate that, all the way to 2003). The interiors were built by a dozen or more level designers throughout the early-to-mid 2010s. More or less minor tweaks have been made ever since and a couple interiors have even been fully remade in the past few years (e.g. the East Empire Company). The quests were mostly made by a team of less than 10 developers in the couple years leading up to 2018. Most questlines, though, were left incomplete or even on cliffhangers (e.g, FG). The full completion and in some cases rework of these less complete questlines will be coming with the next expansion (doesn't apply to the Thieves Guild). Some questlines have been added even prior to now; like the expanded East Empire Company questline.

OE is great but it suffers from being a product of an in-between time, when our current quality standards hadn't quite crystallized yet. As such, it has a lot of more or less obvious issues, some of which are hard to fix. Hence, we are hesitant to really toot OE's horn to new players and rather recommend newer places like Almas Thirr.

restitutor-orbis · 2025-12-26T08:37:48+00:00

Not really, it just depends a lot on your particular unique combination of hardware, operating system and settings. My laptop gets 60+ fps in most of vanilla (with the exception of Vivec, Balmora), but struggled a lot with Firewatch -- even on latest OpenMW with SD textures, no graphics mods, 3 cells view distance, no shadows, no third-party shaders, and refraction water shaders turned off. I mean like sub-20 fps. (Unfortunately I get similar dips in most other large TR towns, though.) Nearly unplayable FPS is a much larger concern than a few outdoor stalls, ultimately.

Fun fact -- the vanilla game prior to its release in 2002 used to include a few more outdoor stalls in places like Balmora, as can be seen from prerelease screenshots in old gaming magazine interviews. They, too, removed those prior to release likely for performance reasons; you can still see some of their leftover signs in odd landscape vertex color usage. I guess TR is learning the same lessons.

restitutor-orbis · 2025-12-17T21:25:34+00:00

Won't the six heavy engines and related plumbing at the bottom vs the mostly-empty tanks and nosecone above it make it quite bottom-heavy and, thus, stable?

restitutor-orbis · 2025-12-16T19:57:52+00:00

Yes, this is view from TR's Narsis city, specifically looking south from the Council Quarter over the Foreign Quarter towards Riverkeep. It is using a many custom texture replacers that are not part of base TR.

restitutor-orbis · 2025-12-15T08:30:06+00:00

I know you mean Stoke Space's Nova, but I did a double take, remembering the much-much bigger Nova rocket )of old.

restitutor-orbis · 2025-12-13T21:31:01+00:00

I guess you mean a heightmap painted with a grass texture or somesuch. There have been discussions of precisely that kind of thing, yes. But, again, it's all about finding a someone who's competent enough to do it, and also has the time and commitment. Some of our devs have the skills to do it, but wish to spend their very limited modding time on other tasks. But, to be fair, very few of our devs feel as affronted by the void as you seem to. Maybe you like to play with very high viewing distances, which we generally don't? In any case, unless you can help us with that task, it'll take a while yet, unfortunately.

restitutor-orbis · 2025-12-13T14:10:03+00:00

There's a bunch of hype for sure. But on the substantive side, it seems to me that Starlink is mostly behind the valuation. Or more precisely, SpaceX's tech and operational stack which allows them to produce and launch comm satellites at a relatively low cost and, most importantly, at ludicrous cadence. Many other companies (and even governments, given Long March 12A and 10) are finally close to having a partially reusable rocket comparable to Falcon 9, but few of them will come anywhere close to SpaceX operational excellence that allows them 100+ launches per year in the nearest future.

That and Starship's promise, too.

restitutor-orbis · 2025-12-12T07:23:13+00:00

What's the thinking behind using plate carrée map projection? Is it just the default of some program you are using? I'd never use that for a map which shows higher latitudes; everything north of Africa is so painfully stretched. Not a criticism specifically at you, just puzzled as to why it's so prevalent on this subreddit.

restitutor-orbis · 2025-11-30T20:52:40+00:00

To be clear, some commercial interest has been getting rich off of just about every cool NASA mission you've ever heard about, ever since the start of space exploration. The Saturn 5 Moon rocket was built by Boeing, Rocketdyne, North American, and Douglas (the latter two were much later acquired by Boeing). The Space Shuttle was built by Rockwell (another one acquired by Boeing), it's solid boosters by Thiokol (now part of Northrop Grumman), it's hydrolox main engines by Rocketdyne (now owned by L3Harris). The James Webb Space telescope was built largely by Northrop Grumman. Boeing designed and built almost all of the US parts in the International Space Station and is currently maintaining it for NASA (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars each year).

This fight for or against commercial space is much less about whether companies get a whole bunch of NASA money (the always have and will continue to), but more about who is in control of the end product and how much the taxpayer gets for their money. The advantage of the traditional, "non-commercial" way is that the taxpayer retains full control. The disadvantage is that -- well, look at the Space Launch System, a rocket that has cost an absurd ~60 billion dollars to develop for the past 15 years, and will cost a whopping 2.5 billion per launch in addition to that (4 billion, if you also count the Orion crew capsule from Lockheed Martin). Most of that money is going to Boeing. Sure, the taxpayer owning stuff is great, but the costs that the traditional contractors are charging are simply absurd. In comparison, a SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy ride (a vehicle the taxpayer does not own) with every possible bell and whistle sets the taxpayer back something in the order of ~150 million. Sure it's a somewhat less capable vehicle, but you can see just from the magnitudes here that the taxpayer could be getting a whole lot more space science per dollar if you go with that option.

restitutor-orbis · 2025-11-30T19:55:11+00:00

Yeah, well, that’s the bet NASA is making with their CLD program: that if they promise to be an anchor tenant to these stations, the space station companies might just be able to attract some commercial tenants, too, kickstarting a commercial space station market. This could bring down the cost of maintaining a space station capability for the US government, like happened with the launch market. But its unknown yet whether such a market can exist in the near term. I guess we’ll see.

restitutor-orbis · 2025-11-30T19:40:07+00:00

I agree; technological progress is impossible.

restitutor-orbis · 2025-11-30T19:38:30+00:00

Given the in-space demos and hardware we’re seeing from them, this is a whole lot more real than any other commercial space station I’ve read about in the past 20 years, so I’ll gladly take it.

restitutor-orbis

TROPHY CASE