blueshifted from microwaves into visible light
Solarwind
A world set in the real Milky Way.
Solarwind is the idea of a shared universe built on the actual galaxy: real stars at their real distances, where players explore, build an economy, form alliances, wage wars, or simply travel as tourists.
What you can play today is its first piece: one ship among about 25,000 real stars within 326 light-years. Collect solarwind from the star you orbit, burn it to fly to the next, and see what the sky really looks like near the speed of light. From every star you reach, check: is our Sun still visible from here? How far can you go before it disappears?
Every position, colour and brightness comes from a star catalogue. Tell us which part of the bigger idea you would want next.
- Collect. In orbit your ship collects solarwind (SLW). Bright stars refuel fast, dim red dwarfs slowly. The tank holds 8,000 SLW and keeps filling while you are away.
- Pick a star within 8 light-years: on the map, in the proximity scan, by search, or by clicking it in the sky. Too far? Plan route finds a chain of jumps.
- Burn and launch. The more solarwind you burn, the faster you arrive. Nothing is collected in flight; you can burn more mid-flight to speed up.
- Missions in the mission log: leave the Solar System, reach Sirius, Vega and Arcturus, and fly far enough that the Sun disappears.
Drag the sky to orbit the star · Look ahead in flight · Hide star for a clear sky · collapse the map with hide · colours: Enhanced or Realistic.
Real: star positions, distances, brightness and colours (HYG Database v4.1, from the Hipparcos, Yale and Gliese catalogues).
Estimated: temperature, luminosity, radius and mass, calculated from each star's colour, brightness and spectral type. Marked with *.
Physics in flight: your travel time is ship time. The ship accelerates to within a hair of light speed, so a one-minute trip of five light-years is real relativity: about five years pass on Earth. The sky shows aberration (stars crowd ahead), Doppler shift and beaming, and the cosmic background radiation blueshifted into a bright point at the bow.
Game rules, not physics: solarwind as fuel, its collection rate, and the accelerations involved (millions of g) belong to the game.
Solarwind is experiment #1 at ship&test, a public product lab. The bigger idea: a shared world set in the real Milky Way, where players explore, build an economy, make alliances and wage wars between real stars, or simply travel as tourists. What you are playing is its smallest piece: one ship, exploring on your own.
The experiment runs for about three weeks. We count anonymously how many players start, fly and come back on later days. If enough people do, Solarwind gets built further. Your reaction and feedback count: use the emojis and "Is this worth building?" at the top.
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