I see this month's update is bringing fellow lurkers out of the woodwork!
Mining looks way more fun right now than it probably should be. Too bad I just missed the Kickstarter.
I think my favourite visual today was when the red thruster glow lit up the space station. Speaking of space stations, last month's was nice looking too. Some of the previous placeholder ships looked pretty cool. That box from the combat prototype, not so much.
Speaking of visuals, I suspect the transfer-unit beam would look even more cool if it had sparkling particles like most of the beams in the HD version of Star Trek TNG. It could have more sparkers for denser deposits perhaps. Or it might look daft. Not really sure.
XergesXSX wrote:
HUD intentional glitches: I like them. Perhaps some natural phenomena could aggravate this.
Scanner: looks great. This is much more intuitive and less obtrusive than the radial version. There is potential for some interesting mechanics with this.
These two things! One of those glitches happened when Josh was playing with pointing the scanner at the star and for a few seconds I thought the star caused the glitch. Then he started talking about how the star saturated the scanner within its band because the signal was so strong.
It got me thinking that it would be cool to have different types of stars with different types and levels of radiation. Maybe if you have a little ship with cheaper electronics and less shielding then mining in a system with a pulsar could be somewhere between frustrating and dangerous because radiation from the star would scramble your sensors or even flip bits in your computers and scramble inputs or data.
There could potentially be a lot of variety just from stars: radiation levels, luminance levels (need to rely more on scanners in dark systems), solar storms, etc. Maybe even systems with black holes. Have those be ultra-dark (ie. no light other than from glowing planets spaceships or the galaxy) and be full of heavier metals ejected when the star went nova.
Maybe I just like things too complex!
Anyway, I was blown away this month. I could go on, but I'd just be repeating half the comments already here.