So, let’s take a tour. Currently you start your career as aspiring prospector, trader, fed ex driver and eventually also bounty hunter in the Werteizin System, on spaceport Kepler.
[url=http://gedankenweber.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/spaceport_kepler.jpg]
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(You can click the images for larger versions …)
The goods exchange allows to buy and sell the usual commodities, at least those which the government has allowed. The bulletin board allows you to take fed-ex quests, and occasionally find an offer or request for illegal goods. In the equipment shop you can get passenger cabins, new ship drives, fuel tanks, resource gathering drones and the like.
The prospectors office is not functional yet. There you will be able to sell information about freshly explored planets to companies, claim the planets as yours and sign mining contracts. Of course unexplored planets aren’t found anywhere near the inhabited zone, so you need a good ship and stock up on resources before you go exploring.
Let’s take a look at the Werteizin system:
[url=http://gedankenweber.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/werteizin_system_info.jpg]
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It’s a dual star system, made of two white dwarfs, and a single gas giant and it’s moons, which survived the supposed nova when the white dwarfs were born (Edit: Werteizin Beta is actually a neutron star, sorry for that). Funnily enough two of the moons are quite earthlike, in size and conditions, so the terraneans colonized one of them.
The Werteizin system is otherwise a quite unremarkable system somewhat near the Sol system, home of the terraneans in the inhabited zone (which is in sector 0,0, sorry I forgot to scroll …):
[url=http://gedankenweber.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/galactic_map.jpg]
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The blue circle is your current hyper jump range. The more freight and equipment you have boarded, the smaller it will be. Drives work against the ships mass.
Before you start, you might want to take a look at the system map, to see the orbits of the space bodies nearby:
[url=http://gedankenweber.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/werteizin_system_map.jpg]
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You can also set destinations for the auto pilot on this map.
Then, let’s launch, and watch Tunto from space:
[url=http://gedankenweber.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/planet_tunto_view.jpg]
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Since the Werteizin system is fully explored, the planet info is in the ships database already:
[url=https://gedankenweber.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/tunto_planet_info.jpg]
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Atmosphere, minerals, metals, lifeforms etc. are just the info that you will be able to sell through the prospectors office. But you’ll need the right sensors and probes to explore a planet this thoroughly.
Next step is to fire up the jump drive and brings goods, parcels and passengers to a system nearby, to make at least a little money for living, until you can afford a better ship (… and until I have finished the shipyard panel).
Beware, Solarex old code base still had bugs, and the OpenGL 3D space flight extension I’m currently adding surely has it’s own bugs. I’ve labeled the project “alpha” stage, so you can start it and take a look, try functions, but most things are neither complete nor particularly error free. I’ve successfully transported goods to another system, so that much works. I believe though, that the fed-ex quests are broken in the current release, but I haven’t actually tested it.