Qi system (Time's End starting system Space Engine visualisaton)

[Stormtrooper (OP)]

Hello everybody,

Just had an idea to recreate the system in which Groaxians have evolved in Space Engine. Below are the results. Enjoy!

Qi and the Milky Way



Genesis high orbit



Genesis and Qi



Genesian mountain ranges



Thoania rift



Qiset on biosphere hibernating in the ice fields



Purple haze in Genesian atmosphere



Wild hets fields



Genesian wegetation awakening from hibernation above partially-thawed ice sheet



Monolith perimeter fields



Vrath high orbit



Hellish Vrath surface



Leftovers from Phased Surface Gravitational Destabilisators testing site



Yatune high orbit



Yatune and Qi



Yatune praires



Toxic and scorching, but beautiful



Qiset on Yatune, Vrath and Genesis visible above Qi



If anyone is interested in trying the system out themselves, I attached the zip file with it. WARNING: forum didn't allow me to attach the .pak file, so I had to upload zip. Either unpack it and place its contents in space engine addons folder or change the extension from zip to pak and place the archive directly and you'll be able to explore Qi on your own  . Brought to you by Achernar Qi coordinates broadcast.

Notes/trivia:

• version 0.990 of Space Engine and still no city lights, sadly
• despite NN 4079 being a real star (Qi is a system from my previous AAR with real stars, after all), Space Engine did not have it, I had to place my own. There was a similar M-class star at exactly same distance from Earth, but it was of a different class (M9V vs NN 4079 being of M3V) and had slightly different parameters. I dunno what's going on.
• I always imagined Genesis as a rather dark blue planet engulfed in bright yellow atmosphere (think no Man's sky frozen planet with blue ice and yellow/orange sky), but it seems its atmosphere makes the blue ice fields appear as pale green or yellow from space...
• Yatune in aurora is a tidally locked planet, but in Space Engine I did not recreate this and instead made its rotation and orbital period some random values for the sake of it being an earthlike planet
• I'm not quite happy with Genesis terrain generation (not really the "Rift Valleys" I hoped for), but Space Engine config options for this are poorly documented and the terrain generation is still of a poor quality I'd say (imagine half the planet being mountains and half being flat, for example, instead of mixed types of terrain like IRL)
• aurora temperatures didn't match the ones Space Engine generated, so to get them to be equal I had to manually edit greenhouse effects. I guess it has something to do with albedo, which seems to be something totally different in aurora and Space Engine given the temperatures I got for various values of it
• Vrath, despite being a Venuslike, got much cooler sky IMO when I used "Neptune" atmosphere model and adjusted colors instead of "Venus"

[Black]

I think that some data about the stars in Aurora C# might not be up to date and are based on older observations and so on. I encountered this as well when I was checking on some real stars that Aurora generated in my game. I even got one that should be binary or even trinary and it is single star in Aurora.

[Stormtrooper (OP)]

Well, I remember the shock when it turned out Kappa Tucanae is a ternary system, but for NN 4079 I managed to find it online with same data as in aurora...

[nuclearslurpee]

Very neat visualizations! Genesis is not what I expected, in my head it was much more blue and white because of the cold temperature, but of course it is not like Earth so I should not be surprised by the big difference. Water after all is clear, so can take on the color of the atmosphere and we are just used to the idea of blue lakes and oceans. I guess the terrain is not perfect for what is desired but it certainly looks striking.

Regarding the differences in stars there are many cases I think which are as Black describes, the data in the DB is probably two decades old in most cases (dating back to the SA days I would bet, otherwise VB6 days). Plus in many cases what is astrographically a binary or ternary star may be singular in Aurora because the stellar orbits are too large to be feasibly shown in Aurora on the tactical map, I think this is actually a common case...often the additional components are included as separate stars in the DB but not always.

NN 4079 in particular is a star that seems difficult to find information about online...really not sure where Steve found it, honestly. So it's not surprising to me if something like Space Engine doesn't have it, there's a lot more stars in the galaxy than any program "for fun" can document and stars with names like "NN" are likely not high on the priority list.

[Stormtrooper (OP)]

In my head it was also blue lol, but certainly shades of purple, pink and yellow were bound to have their place instead of white. Just because there's snow doesn't really mean it's white as its all covered with alien lifeforms, just like a brown ground on Earth isn't really brown from the distance, but green thanks to the grass that grows on it. But I made sure to add enough blue textures, it's just that from space it's not blue at all because of the atmosphere covering it. Also realised that the No Man's Sky images stick with me way more than I expected, namely their blue or white ice planets, even though depending on the sky's color they should not look like this at all from space.

And what a nasty system that NN 4079 is... Although from space engine I'd expect it'd have it all, it's likely a matter of just downloading data from some catalogs available online... But maybe NN 4079 is no longer NN 4079, but something different and updated indeed as I found a star that was similar to it.