Author notes

220 - Welcome to Nova Dagon

El Cid

on May 29, 2018

This page brought to you by Happy Tugs. May all your tug jobs have a happy ending!

Apologies if this page looks excessively dark on your monitor. If it's any consolation, there isn't much to see; just two spaceships having intercourse.

It may not be super clear from the panels what's going on, but the Diablo has the ability to retract those massive radiators and its tethered habitats in order to help it fit into spaceports. Here's a helpful animation to demonstrate:



If you notice an improvement in the space environs on this and some future pages, it's because I'm using Space Engine to render them. Space Engine is a free software that generates a full 3d simulation of the known universe, populated with mostly known but some hypothetical astronomical objects, to a stunning level of procedurally generated detail. It is the creation of lone Russian programmer Vladimir Romanyuk, who pretty much devotes all of his time to the project. So if you take any interest, be sure to swing by spaceengine.org and give it a download, and consider giving a donation to support his work.

It's amazing how much technology has progressed. I remember when 'The Universe' was one of my favorite shows on The History Channel (back before it was taken over by low-cost reality TV shows and conspiracy theory programming). Back then, its computer-generated visuals were considered cutting edge. Looking back at it now, the graphics look severely dated. It's wild how we now can produce better visuals at home for free than what major TV networks paid millions of dollars for not too long ago. That probably says something about something, but I just thought it was an interesting observation.



Sorry for the rather boring (and again, poorly lit) page, but the next update should make up for it. There's, like, colors and stuff.





It seems like something's going on with the site today. I don't know enough about the intricacies of web hosting to say anything definitively, but I think maybe something's going on with their image host? I noticed when I uploaded this page, the colors looked even worse than they do in the original version, so I reloaded the page as a JPEG instead of PNG and now it looks fine. That's the first time that's ever happened. Hopefully, I don't need to go back and reupload all of my pages as JPEGs now!