Minor tutorial bug : when it tells you to access your email and then back out of it, if you hit escape instead of pressing the back button you’re stuck until you do it “right”.
Thematically you really should have a “skip” button your tutorial, both skip all and skip this portion.
First impressions from tutorial mission 1: this is awesome work. I felt I’d spent my money well the very moment you show off the ability to change reference frame and see your destination a different way.
Is there a place to submit bug reports so we don’t have to clutter up this forum and you can sort by priority?
I had two ships in orbit around Mars, aligned and retrograde to the enemy ship. My support ship released a cloud of nuclear missiles, and the pair of them boosted to a higher orbit, with the intention of reversing the orbit for less dV.
The missiles struck and took out the enemy ship’s ultraviolet lasers, allowing my drones to be released when they descend back into the gravity well, and to attack more or less unmolested. The nuclear missiles then attack on a second pass, the next time around, and eventually the capital ship guns finish the job.
Holy hells, Children of a Dead Earth is *fantastic*.
Rocked upon this game by chance on Steam, and whoah!
Thanks, thanks, thanks for making this game! The physics are just amazing and the gameplay – structured as a “choose your impulse length” WEGO “strategic” layer for maneuvering is genius (why isn’t the tactical combat structured in a similar way,btw?)! Looking forward to join the community and play the heck out of this.
Got it, played it, left a glowing review. Honest – this is not a game for everyone, it’s complex, difficult, and the subject matter often unintuitive. But it’s fantastically well done, and deserves all the praise, and playing it will teach you things.
This is the game I’ve been waiting on for years. Absolutely magnificent! The attention to real physics and science is such a great thing to see. This is a challenging game, and a game that isn’t going to appeal to anyone note very interested in the subject matter. But if you are interested, it is well worth the very reasonable price.
Kudos on the release and on making something so interesting!
I’m reading through the blog and I find the information very educational, finding myself actually looking things up on wikipedia, reading them, getting surprised and awed.
Can you please compile all blog articles into a single PDF (with images and links, exactly as they are) and post it for download? No need to be fancy or anything, just a quicky copy-paste job would suffice.
I’d have a lot of fun studying all this technology, especially if I find myself on a trip with no internet and need something to fun to read.
This has my vote too. Not having to reboot into Windows to play would be very nice for me. I couldn’t get it to run under Wine, it kept freezing, so I would really like a native Linux version. Many of us niche realism nerds like the Linux. 😉
Are there any plans on improving heat dissipation? Because huge external heat conductors, outside of peacetime and civilian ships, really seem like the absolute worst idea for heat management.
Beside huge internal heat reservoirs and directly dumping heat in the form of a liquid off board, couldn’t some of the heat be conducted away in projectiles, and perhaps even with lasers? Instead of pumping energy directly into the laser, one thermocouples all the heat towards thermoluminescent materials which might help along with internalizing some of the heat dissipation.
And why not just thermocouple the rest of the heat into missiles and ammo? One could perhaps theoretically even inject solid mass driver ammo/missiles with a high thermal capacity solution which could force a much lower thermal resistance coating into a plasmatic state, protecting from lasers and maybe even aiding with armor penetration.
Then, of course, there’s the option of feeding excessive heat through pipelines directly to thermal engines, adding efficiency to any nuclear thruster with a disadvantage being the expensive piping and a slower stopping of any aided thrusters, as well as an inability to gymbal the assembly without some fragile vulcanized rubber tubing.
Anything is better than enormous, heavy and expensive, glowing targets flanking your ship.
Piping coolant into your engines means your engines have to always be on to remove heat. If not, you just have to dump your coolant overboard constantly, which is quite wasteful and your delta-v will plummet.
Can we have a bimodal radiator, wit either the radiator working normally or the coolant used to heat propellant (or dump the primary coolant itself it it makes for a good propellant) in an auxiliary thruster? With a good dV reserve, extra thrust + retracting radiator seem like a good plan for combat mode, despite the lowered dV and extra mass.
I realize that. I’m not suggesting converting the heat into electricity. Isn’t the thermoelectric effect reversible, though? By piping power into a properly customized thermocouple, one can enforce a greater heat gradient at a loss of effectiveness. A colder inner loop (between all the weapons, reactors and crew) and a hotter outer loop could boost radiator effectiveness enough to outdo the thermocouple’s transfer losses. One could even connect some ballistic weapons to the hot loop and conduct away some heat like that. Even then, heat can be processed with refrigeration and compression.
But wouldn’t at least a large heatbank filled with ammonia or heavy water also be a good alternative? It would give a ship some extra firing time even after the enormous cooling arrays are destroyed, and it could replace the cooling arrays for a small amount of high stress time.
And the thruster problem is solved by the heatbank and some piping elements, as well. In the midst of battle, a ship can switch to full engine cooling mode with a piping loop between the weapons/crew/reactors and the heatbank, making the radiators redundant for as long as it is thrusting. Combined with retracting radiators, similar to retracting solar panels of today, it would make a truly combat-worthy ship.
Children of a Dead Earth 
It’s at an excellent price right now. Will it last?
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The price will be fixed where it is at. I have no plans to change for a long while.
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Congrats on release!
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Congrats on the release! Any post-launch plans?
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Thanks! I plan to keep supporting it, and launch periodic minor and major content updates over the months.
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Minor tutorial bug : when it tells you to access your email and then back out of it, if you hit escape instead of pressing the back button you’re stuck until you do it “right”.
Thematically you really should have a “skip” button your tutorial, both skip all and skip this portion.
LikeLike
First impressions from tutorial mission 1: this is awesome work. I felt I’d spent my money well the very moment you show off the ability to change reference frame and see your destination a different way.
Is there a place to submit bug reports so we don’t have to clutter up this forum and you can sort by priority?
LikeLike
Absolutely, you can post issues/bugs/crashes you find on the forums: http://childrenofadeadearth.boards.net/
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I had two ships in orbit around Mars, aligned and retrograde to the enemy ship. My support ship released a cloud of nuclear missiles, and the pair of them boosted to a higher orbit, with the intention of reversing the orbit for less dV.
The missiles struck and took out the enemy ship’s ultraviolet lasers, allowing my drones to be released when they descend back into the gravity well, and to attack more or less unmolested. The nuclear missiles then attack on a second pass, the next time around, and eventually the capital ship guns finish the job.
Holy hells, Children of a Dead Earth is *fantastic*.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Rocked upon this game by chance on Steam, and whoah!
Thanks, thanks, thanks for making this game! The physics are just amazing and the gameplay – structured as a “choose your impulse length” WEGO “strategic” layer for maneuvering is genius (why isn’t the tactical combat structured in a similar way,btw?)! Looking forward to join the community and play the heck out of this.
LikeLike
Hour-1 buy – after all, I have been waiting for at least fifteen years for this game.
LikeLike
Got it, played it, left a glowing review. Honest – this is not a game for everyone, it’s complex, difficult, and the subject matter often unintuitive. But it’s fantastically well done, and deserves all the praise, and playing it will teach you things.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is the game I’ve been waiting on for years. Absolutely magnificent! The attention to real physics and science is such a great thing to see. This is a challenging game, and a game that isn’t going to appeal to anyone note very interested in the subject matter. But if you are interested, it is well worth the very reasonable price.
Kudos on the release and on making something so interesting!
LikeLike
I’m reading through the blog and I find the information very educational, finding myself actually looking things up on wikipedia, reading them, getting surprised and awed.
Can you please compile all blog articles into a single PDF (with images and links, exactly as they are) and post it for download? No need to be fancy or anything, just a quicky copy-paste job would suffice.
I’d have a lot of fun studying all this technology, especially if I find myself on a trip with no internet and need something to fun to read.
LikeLike
Please add a linux version. If it is supported on mac it can;t take that much effort.
LikeLike
This has my vote too. Not having to reboot into Windows to play would be very nice for me. I couldn’t get it to run under Wine, it kept freezing, so I would really like a native Linux version. Many of us niche realism nerds like the Linux. 😉
LikeLike
Are there any plans on improving heat dissipation? Because huge external heat conductors, outside of peacetime and civilian ships, really seem like the absolute worst idea for heat management.
Beside huge internal heat reservoirs and directly dumping heat in the form of a liquid off board, couldn’t some of the heat be conducted away in projectiles, and perhaps even with lasers? Instead of pumping energy directly into the laser, one thermocouples all the heat towards thermoluminescent materials which might help along with internalizing some of the heat dissipation.
And why not just thermocouple the rest of the heat into missiles and ammo? One could perhaps theoretically even inject solid mass driver ammo/missiles with a high thermal capacity solution which could force a much lower thermal resistance coating into a plasmatic state, protecting from lasers and maybe even aiding with armor penetration.
Then, of course, there’s the option of feeding excessive heat through pipelines directly to thermal engines, adding efficiency to any nuclear thruster with a disadvantage being the expensive piping and a slower stopping of any aided thrusters, as well as an inability to gymbal the assembly without some fragile vulcanized rubber tubing.
Anything is better than enormous, heavy and expensive, glowing targets flanking your ship.
LikeLike
Thermocouples convert a heat gradient into power, not heat itself. All the heat remains after you extract power out of the gradient.
More: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/thermodynamics.php#id–The_Problem_With_Heat
Piping coolant into your engines means your engines have to always be on to remove heat. If not, you just have to dump your coolant overboard constantly, which is quite wasteful and your delta-v will plummet.
LikeLike
Can we have a bimodal radiator, wit either the radiator working normally or the coolant used to heat propellant (or dump the primary coolant itself it it makes for a good propellant) in an auxiliary thruster? With a good dV reserve, extra thrust + retracting radiator seem like a good plan for combat mode, despite the lowered dV and extra mass.
LikeLike
I realize that. I’m not suggesting converting the heat into electricity. Isn’t the thermoelectric effect reversible, though? By piping power into a properly customized thermocouple, one can enforce a greater heat gradient at a loss of effectiveness. A colder inner loop (between all the weapons, reactors and crew) and a hotter outer loop could boost radiator effectiveness enough to outdo the thermocouple’s transfer losses. One could even connect some ballistic weapons to the hot loop and conduct away some heat like that. Even then, heat can be processed with refrigeration and compression.
But wouldn’t at least a large heatbank filled with ammonia or heavy water also be a good alternative? It would give a ship some extra firing time even after the enormous cooling arrays are destroyed, and it could replace the cooling arrays for a small amount of high stress time.
And the thruster problem is solved by the heatbank and some piping elements, as well. In the midst of battle, a ship can switch to full engine cooling mode with a piping loop between the weapons/crew/reactors and the heatbank, making the radiators redundant for as long as it is thrusting. Combined with retracting radiators, similar to retracting solar panels of today, it would make a truly combat-worthy ship.
LikeLike
What a fantastic game. Wonder how it would do on an iPad with a touch interface?
Never had so much fun slinging missiles around and trying to trick the AI into wasting deltaV.
Real Space Battles turn out to be vastly more interesting than the fake movie nonsense.
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