Reaching Apoapsis - Visiting the local Observatory [Plus some extra notes!]

 Sherwood Observatory-

The other day I took a trip to Sherwood Observatory again to go see one of their newest planetarium shows. I absolutely love visiting the observatory, its so interesting to not only see their exhibit, but get up close with real astronomical equipment. Granted, I haven't been on the full tour yet [though i intend to when it gets to the darker months!] but regardless I got to see a lot of really cool stuff that definitely has given me some ideas for Apoapsis.

For example, I definitely want to do a drawing of the communications base on Gliese 65's exoplanet, i imagine it would be quite small like Sherwood observatory as it would all need to be packed into a little space shuttle that travels from the Apoapsis to the base on Gliese. It would definitely mean me dipping back into 3D modelling again - which now that I think about it my Maya license may have expired... so it may well be time for me to try out Blender which I have been meaning to do for a while.

I sadly am not a  squillionaire and so cannot get Maya without my student license. Side note! I finally graduated! Yay me!!

Here's some pics from the Observatory's exhibit, a couple things that really stood out to me were:

- The cross section of the shuttle, visually looks super cool! I might have a go at designing a similar thing for the Reaching Apoapsis or the Tempest, however I think I would focus more on the inhabitable areas of the ship. Alas I am not an aerospace engineer and thus havent got the slightest clue on how the engineering side behind it works, it probably wouldn't matter that much anyways as pretty much everything in this game is just random twaddle that sounds vaguely believable [i hope] but regardless, don't want to expose my lack of knowledge any further lol.

- Snoopy! I had no idea he was a kind of mascot for NASA, that's so cute! I would LOVE to make a little mascot for the Apoapsis crew :)

- The posters, this specific style of poster is so interesting to me, I might try to replicate a similar look for some splash pages within the book.

Of course this isn't everything I found interesting. I thought it was all great! Especially the planetarium show which I couldn't get any photos of due to copyright, but was about NASA's goal to get to mars, and further details about the Artemis missions and the lunar base. Myself and Francis stayed up to watch the Artemis 2 launch when it happened earlier this year, I was very emotional about it and I'm so excited to be alive to see humans get back to the moon! With the planetarium show, it went into specifics about the plans to get to mars, and also colonise it's surface. This was extremely helpful in giving me information on how to make Reaching Apoapsis more believable, especially when it comes to travelling to Gliese, setting up camp, and the sort of vehicles the crew would need for their journey.

Gliese 65 is just a tad farther away than mars, you know... only an extra 2.6294281 Parsecs away!.... Yeah... a lot of suspending disbelief is needed for Reaching Apoapsis, but I mean its not exactly like we make realistic games for Hearthvalley. I don't remember walking down the street and seeing a 20ft pseudogod going to fetch some groceries, or driving along and seeing a giant spaceship full of aliens and robots on the M1, or even going on holiday and staying at an air bnb ran by a genuine real life Neanderthal. Or maybe I'm just not visiting the right places????

Here's some other pics from the exhibit, it's a super cool location even without the space stuff, being in an old water tower. Fun fact, stuff to do with water, irrigation and dams are one of my big interests! So this place is EXTRA cool to me :)

Oooh, almost forgot to mention, look at these mission patches! Definitely want to design some more patches for Apoapsis, I took inspiration from the Apollo mission patch when I was designing the main Apoapsis mission patch :).

Now that the Gliese Exoplanet actually has a name, I could maybe make some more interesting patch designs using the astrological figures i used to name Gliese 65 and her moons? I'll certainly have a think over it!

Apoapsis Worldbuilding Notes:

Its been super nice weather lately so I decided to take my book down to the lakeside and do some worldbuilding writing, and also looking like a complete lunatic in the process!!!

Some topics I covered was finally giving the exoplanet a name, Lyra. I'm not sure why Lyra, i think the constellation and name is cool, and the story behind Lyra the harp's constellation also sounded really cool. Most of my reasonings behind doing stuff in games is "because it's cool".

I did do some thinking about the conditions on Lyra, having liquid H2O on its surface, slightly lower gravity to earth, and a cold- but not uninhabitable- climate. In a lot of ways, Lyra is very similar to Earth, however is certainly more challenging to establish a base upon which allows for more interesting gameplay. I wanted to hit that sweet spot of "Player has challenges to overcome but not so many that it's actually implausible that people would be able to live here". This is where The Martian influence comes in, Without the proper equipment and setups, living on Mars would be absolutely impossible. There were big challenges that Mark Watney had to overcome and "science the shit" out of to be able to survive, that's exactly the kind of vibe I want with this project.

Also, Lyra's environment also poses questions to how the Angeoforms would survive on its surface, that's a question for future me, I think I best get the human side of things solidly down before I go thinking about the lanky space deer anatomy and how it would fare to this sort of environment.

Don't worry! I'll cover the Angeoforms in more detail in a future blog post, there's a couple things I want to change about their designs before I go rambling about them on here. [You're spared from my insane ramblings for now... >:) ]

I also went into some details about Lyra's moons, Cygnus and Sirius, and how they would play a part in getting from Earth to Lyra. It kind of uses the same method the Artemis used to get to the moon, and the hypothetical journey from the moon to mars. Basically using the moons as a launch point to travel between the two. For Lyra, Cygnus is used to slow the deceleration of the Reaching Apoapsis to be able to deploy the GAV [No, not Gavin, the Gliese Ascent Vehicle]. Again, I have no idea if that's actually how this kind of thing works, I'm just pulling bits out of true stuff I've heard and ramming it all together with duct tape and a dream.

And here's a little info on the landing site, In gameplay, the player will be the one to develop the shire, so it probably won't look like this. But this is a little layout of what it could look like using the modular building. Also, The Shire is absolutely called that as a reference to the Hobbit. 

Why? Funny.

Talking of modular building, heres some notes on that! This isn't a solid mechanic to be included yet because i need to confer with Francis about how to best implement it, but its definitely something I'd like to add. I love designing maps for all my games, so it would be nice if players could draw out their own colony base maps suited to their teams. I feel like it just makes the game feel more personal, like you're actually slowly building and improving your setup over time.

Project Update notes! :

So, what have I been up to? I have a bit to share!

1- All of the premade crew mates have been designed, their backstories written, and the page fully formatted!

2- I'm almost done formatting the first chunk of rules! Commander creation, crew selection, temperaments and relationships have all been written. There's a few bits and bobs to transfer over but for the most part that bit of writing is pretty much done :) I also need to add in some art, but that won't take forever

3- Little jump away from Apoapsis talk, but Hotel Bunga has had an update for its rules! Really happy with the changes thanks to my wonderful play testers. On top of that, I also now have a wonderful editor who has offered to help me improve the rulebook! I'm extremely grateful for the support I've had for my board game, and even though I'm working on Reaching Apoapsis, rest assured Bunga is still being worked on! I'm heading to another playtesting event in August to re-check the rules again, and I might look at giving some cards a bit of an update as well as the general layouts of cards. I don't have an exact date for Bunga to be finished, but I'll certainly make a blog post for any big changes that get made!