We saw a hockey game and our team beat the hated rivals 5-2 and Biscuit got an autograph on her jersey from the awesome star goalie!

So. Our last update was well before the New Year, and since then I regret that circumstances have kept me away from this project. We’ve slowly started to get a first iteration going using XNA, consisting of a simple 2D grid. From there we’ll begin glomming on additional features until we have a sufficient model for a fun and interesting simulation.

It may be slow going for a while yet — but early April is the beginning of a new quarter and a new time schedule. In the meantime I’ll try to provide regular updates on our (albeit slow) progress. I appreciate everyone’s interest in, and encouragement of, the project.

Lunar dust is nasty, sharp and arid. Apollo astronauts had their equipment quickly covered in electrostatically-charged dust and it irritated their lungs. A whole suite of solutions will have to be implemented to keep the dust under control, lest colonists be cut down early in life with cases of lung silicosis. Indeed, the player may consider any surface covered in fines to be extremely hazardous to their colony’s machinery and people.

Early game play will have to solve this problem, whether through paving, spraying, cooking, tumbling, glassing, or any other means.

Earth-side solutions for dust control on unpaved roads have used fixatives as simple as water. Black crude oil was a popular spray until it was banned for contamination issues. One modern solution uses a soybean by-product to penetrate the dirt and adhere dust particles together. Any solution to be used on the Moon will have to be economical enough to be dispersed in quantity across vast expanses of land.

Preparing a suitable fixative will have to conquer several tough conditions. Surface temperatures vary between -100C to 200C. Solar energy beating down causes the ground to become electrostatically charged, and the tiny fines levitate as much as six inches off the ground. The lack of atmosphere has left the particles unweathered and sharp-edged, capable of shredding flesh and machine alike. The fines are also bone dry, and may react violently with water.

These challenges absolutely must be met, though, if a colony is to be successful on the Moon and similar environments in the Universe. Synthetic liquids capable of withstanding against bare solar radiation and the severely anhydrous soil will bond the sharp silicate crystal fragments together, anchoring them to the ground and preventing billowing clouds from covering delicate equipment and personnel. Perhaps some sort of grounding grid can be laid across a plain of dust, dissipating the electrostatic field and keeping the dust uncharged.

The top few meters of regolith will be processed by Dozers: enormous roving industrial plants, cooking various gasses and volatiles out of the soil as well as extracting metal ores like iron, aluminum and magnesium. The remaining slag could be artificially weathered in a large-scale rock tumbler, yielding gravel, sand and powder. The basaltic powder can be sintered into useful bricks for construction, microwaved and baked at 1100C for 30 minutes. Exposed dust plains could be covered in a protective layer of this safer material to further reduce dust.

A great deal of that processing can be automated, and eventually the entire Moon could be “polished” as part of a greater terraforming effort. For aestetics the Dozers will likely be programmed to mimic the albedo of the original surface being processed, lest the Earthlings grumble about the Moon being a boring smooth gray.

The Moon has long lost any atmosphere it had to the solar wind, but it could hold onto an Earth-like atmosphere for thousands of years before losing any significant mass. Breathable air is a great step, but massive weather controls will have to be built to manage the huge temperature swings between day and night. The temperature differential between the two hemispheres could drive powerful howling winds. What sort of megastructures could be built to manage these problems? Perhaps a Moon-wide network of superconducting radiators, maintaining a constant air temperature on both day and night side, or at least keeping winds to a dull roar.

Breathable air is swell, but unlike Earth the Moon lacks the kind of internal dynamo driving a powerful magnatic field. The Moon actually gets a few days a month inside the Earth’s magnetic “shadow” where the solar wind is swept aside.The rest of the time, nasty ionizing radiation showers down from the Sun, Earth-shine and the cosmos at large. Biological and technological assets have to be protected if any colony is to survive.

Early colonists will rely on very simple, primitive shielding — metal sheeting, concrete, masonry blocks and even plain regolith. As much as 6 meters of soil is required to protect from cosmic radiation and solar flares. An extremely economical option is to ship up fabric bags from Earth and fill them with regolith beanbag style. The bags can then be packed around the colony modules like an igloo. Bags could soon be manufactured locally utilizing the metals and glasses in the soil.

Another method would use massive magnetic coils to generate an artifical magnetosphere of some arbitrary size. Capsule-sized affairs have already been envisioned for spacecraft like the manned Mars mission. With enough energy, larger areas could be protected. One tasty side effect  of these fields are the beautiful blue and green aurorae, and I fully intend to see them brought to life in the game. Solar flares will catch your colonists out on EVA and exposed, and it’ll cook their organs but good. However, very soon into the tech tree and with enough available energy you may be treated to a very pretty light show indeed as exotic particles interact in your own artifical Northern Lights.

Lunar gravity may not be powerful enough for long-term habitation, requiring that colonists be rotated out on year-long tours. Spacefairing craft are often given spinning centripetal contraptions of some sort to simulate gravity. A planet-side megastructure could be some kind of massive “spinning top” — kilometers across, housing an entire colony, rotating fast enough to bump the gravity up to suitable levels. My magical futuretech “gravimetric generators” later in the game allow compact efficient gravity simulation.

Medical technology will continue to offer new answers to these problems as well. Gene therapy may repair the increased cell damage from radiation exposure. Gene splicing will allow custom lifeforms to be built for the tough conditions, subsisting off little more than rock and meager sunlight. Human biology may be improved to allow the lungs to function in sparse or exotic atmospheres, or even photosynthethize sunlight into bloodsugars.

Any colony on the Moon (outside the rare “mountains of eternal light” on the poles) will have to address the long 14-day lunar night. In addition, the lack of an atmosphere means that temperatures swing widely from a bubbling 200C in the glare of the Sun to a -100C deep-freeze at night. Temperature management will rank high on a colony’s list of essential services.

Solar energy must be stockpiled to last through the dark period. Liquid sodium is much less of a hazard in the vacuum non-atmosphere on the Moon, so great quantities of thermal energy could be stored in insulated reservoirs buried below the regolith to minimize radiative heat loss. Stirling and other thermal engines could tap the molten reserves as necessary to generate power. The system could also function as part of the colony’s heat management system, absorbing excess heat during the 200C days and maintaining livable quarters in the -100C black.

Energy may also be stored in massive flywheel systems. Advances in materials science may yield substances capable of withstanding tremendous kinetic energies, allowing great quantities of power to be stored in spinning disks.

Fuel cell technology has already made great strides from its Apollo days. This last summer I interned for a local firm whose small cartridges — as large as an LP record and an inch thick — could each output a few hundred watts. Provided a reliable source of hydrogen can be established, it’s an attractive technology since the only byproducts are heat and pure water. This April the latest NASA orbiter around the Moon will reveal whether the permanently-dark acreage near the poles contains water ice crystals.

Longer-term, uranium ore may be extracted from the rich maria regions on the Moon’s near side. Future fusion reactors may run on Helium-3, which exists in small quantities embedded in the top few meters of regolith. This may ultimately eclipse any other available resources in terms of value.

Geothermal energy could be tapped if an adequately deep hole could be bored down into the warm mantle.

Ultimately I want to explore all of these technologies in the game. Each advance will come with its own price, however. Rare-but-hilarious disasters will remind the player that science is a double-edged sword. Nanotech gray goo might gobble your left arm off while some engineered genetic bacteriophage soups up your guts.

3+ feet on the ground and counting, next storm on Sunday…

There is a fantastic set of tutorials I’ve been fiddling around with for the last week or two, available at http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.php

Last night I started more intensive testing and so far I’ve managed to shoehorn some Mars content into the tutorial program. This week we begin work on the first rudimentary ColonyKit and GUI.

Above is a 720×360 heightmap and jpg texture of Mars, with exagerated elevations. Olympus Mons is on the lower right, her sister volcanoes nearby and Valles Marineris in the center. I don’t think the texture and heightmap are perfectly aligned or even rotated on the same orentation, but as a proof-of-concept it’s exciting to see the results of a few hours of research and tinkering.

Today I’ve been watching a documentary mini-series all about humanity’s first mission to Mars, called Mars Rising. It’s narrated by William Shatner, and has decent production values and explores a lot of different facets in six 1-hour episodes.

Shielding humans from radiation in space is one of our greatest challenges, and long-term habitation off-world will depend on the development of reliable systems capable of reducing exposure to radiation. It’s interesting to hear astronauts talk about experiencing cosmic radiation showers in LEO. They saw tiny contrails in the air, as in a cloud chamber. When they closed their eyes to sleep, their retinas actually saw the tiny flashes of light as ionizing radiation would collide with the atoms inside their eyeballs.

Current aluminum structures not only fail to protect against radiation, the metal actually reacts with cosmic radiation to spit out even worse particles and rays into the crew cabin. Hydrogen atoms are a fantastic barrier, allowing already-valuable water to serve as shielding. Polyethylene is another material already being utilized on the shuttle and ISS. Long chains of carbon atoms covered in hydrogen form the molecular structure of the material. Future craft may be made from carbon composites incorporating the protective properties of polyethylene, providing a material that is lighter, stronger and more effective than aluminum.

Lunar probes in the last decade have revealed a great deal of new information about the Moon’s polar regions, and what might be found inside the deeper craters where sunlight hasn’t shone for millions of years. Ice crystals left behind by cometary impacts may have accumulated inside these pitch-black polar deep freezers. Enough ice to sustain colonization and exploitation of the Moon as a space exploration staging point.

Peary Crater is a prime candidate for permanent settlement, as it has a rare set of environmental resources that can be tapped by colonists.

• The north-west rim of the crater (seen above along the 30 degrees-west meridian) is high enough and close enough to the pole to be bathed in sunlight every hour of the Moon’s 27 day, 7 hour and 43.2 minute day. Nearly every other site on the Moon must contend with at least a portion of the Moon’s two-week darkness.
• Constant sunlight can be counted upon as a reliable energy source, as well as maintaining a constant temperature on the surface at the colony site.
• The south-east region of the crater, and some of the smaller craters inside, are permanently dark and -173 degrees C. Billions of cubic meters of water ice crystals are lying just under the regolith in thousands of square kilometers around the polar region.
• Rover harvesters can process the first few meters of the crater’s soil, extracting water ice crystals and other volatiles. The chemical makeup of this material will provide invaluable clues to the early history of our solar system.
• Water ice can be processed into potable water, converted to oxygen and hydrogen gas through electrolysis, and for reaction mass in rocket boosters. It cannot be overstated how valuable a local source of water is to a colony.
• Unoccupied dark craters provide an excellent platform for astronomical observation, thanks to low temperatures and low solar interference.

http://www.spudislunarresources.com/moon101/moon_101_polar.pdf

In the next few days we’ll be putting together the first primitive model of one of these colonies, stay tuned!

I’ve been investigating some of the tools available through the Virtual Terrain Project and they have a lot of valuable tutorials and information. Here’s 15 minutes with one of their utilities, it’s the Tharis region of Mars using a 4096×2048 TIFF of global elevation data. I had to do an eyeball scaling of the elevations, but it’s close enough as a proof-of-concept:

Hockey night in Spokane! Chiefs are already up 1 goal and it’s Teddy Bear Night so the fans threw enough bears on the ice to fill 3 trucks

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