2018-10-03 Server Crash, Black Holes, Neutron Stars

[Haxus]

Server Crash
The servers crashed three times in the past few days. Two crashes happened over the weekend.

All three crashes were caused by the same bug, triggered by a spacecraft lighting up its FTL drive while someone aboard was in a design studio instance. The bug was fixed.

Stellar Black Holes
I had a to-do item to make more black holes that are not supermassive black holes.

Stellar black holes may now be encountered as you explore the universe.

• These are the smallest of the black holes and they do not have intergalactic wormholes.
  
• Stellar black holes are always accompanied by one or two companion stars that may have planets.
  
• Wormholes in a black hole system terminate at the first companion star, like at the core. Errors were fixed here. They may have been positioned incorrectly at the core, before this update.
  

Neutron Stars
Someone asked once.

Neutron stars may now be encountered as you explore the universe.

• Neutron stars are the dead husks of large stars that went supernova, not quite massive enough to collapse further and form a black hole.
  
• Neutron stars have twice the mass of regular stars. This is adequate for game purposes.
  
• Neutron stars spin. The surface speed of some real ones approaches the speed of light.
  
• Neutron stars pulse in a repeating pattern that is unique to every neutron star.
  
• Neutron stars pulse in the visible light spectrum, though most real ones emit only invisible radiation.
  
• Neutron stars may be primary or companion stars.
  

Black Hole Mass
Neutron stars have twice the mass of stars. That is the same as black holes.

Black holes now have 4x the mass of stars. This increases the strength of their gravity.

Companions on Sensors
Companion stars are not drawn correctly on sensor stations.

Fixed a client-side star positioning bug discovered while working on black holes and neutron stars.

Sun Halo Missing
Suns are supposed to render a halo to help enhance the appearance of brightness. It is missing.

Fixed a rendering error discovered while working on black holes and neutron stars.

System Catalog Name in Scan Report
Scan report has the catalog name of systems that are named, in addition to the system name. The formatting is bad.

Fixed system names in scan reports and the XML export file. This bug was introduced when catalog names were added to system names in the star map tree control.

Life Support Q
It was suggested once (7 years ago) that the quality of a spacecraft's life support system should affect the rate collected for passengers.

Life support Q now modifies the fare collected when passengers debark.

[Vectorus]

Life support Q... that's pretty funny. "Fly Cunard line, 1000 cronodollars with mild hypoxia, 10,000 without!"

Will crew AI be smart enough to take extra care in high gravity systems? I've certainly never trusted them at the Core...Perhaps increase the satisfaction range for a "travel to" order in those systems? I've noticed the helm sometimes likes to get really close even after the officer has completed the order.

I look forward to meeting these objects, though with slight trepidation I must say.

[Deantwo]

Very interesting! Can't wait to find some of those new celestial bodies.
I guess some old decayed systems might become black holes when they are regenerated?

Some kind of long range wormholes between black holes has always been on my wishlist. But it might not be simple to implement, unless it would just send you to a random black hole?

These new celestial bodies could also have interesting resources. Hawkins particles?

Anyway, whoever finds these first better share some pictures!

[Haxus]

Decayed systems will not regenerate with these new objects, unless their entire sector decays.

[Vectorus]

The halo makes more of a difference than I expected.

[Ikkir Isth]

Hrmm, speaking of life support for passengers, could potentially make it for certain cargo types as well: life support meaning also preservation on perishable, or unstable goods (at some rate where each life support required item has some required rating-per-transport unit, and then get in shipping whole lifeforms enmasse).

Could make more life support as less of a 'make the minimum of it' system and more of a thing. Could also use it for protection rating for the crew in fights too, I suppose (protection from radiation, fires, etc).

Any neutron star pics?

[Haxus]

http://hazeron.com/splash/NeutronStar.png

[Ikkir Isth]

Mmm delicious neutrino candy ball

[Mr. Mortius]

First one:


Moving into a close orbit with the aim to try and land on it:


Pretty close, but landing is of course instant death:

[Vectorus]

Can we have the outer shell of the neutron star, or something similar, as an animated texture for spacecraft design? It would look awesome around a warp core.