A fuel-free engine is the stuff of science fiction for now, but scientists at NASA Eagleworks have published a peer-reviewed paper that suggests the ideas behind an EM Drive are worth testing further. Researchers at Eagleworks, a small NASA team task...
Virgin Galactic is ready to put its SpaceShipTwo replacement through a series of test fights, and according to Bloomberg, it will begin sometime in August. The private space corporation launched Virgin Spaceship (VSS) Unity in February to replace Spa...
Henry Smith’s Spaceteam – a cooperative game about fixing a spaceship that’s quickly falling apart – is one of the best party games on mobile devices. It’s free, it’s funny and it’s fast-paced. The game’s only downside is that it requires all players to have both a mobile device and the app. Until now. Henry worked with Timber & Bolt to make a version of Spaceteam that’s played with cards.
The Spaceteam card game’s theme is similar to its digital predecessor: multiple components of your spaceship are failing, and you have a short amount of time to fix them all. Each player is randomly dealt several orange cards face down and blue cards face up. When the game starts, you will each reveal and then resolve one orange card at a time. Orange cards can be spaceship defects, Anomalies, or the coveted Systems Are Go cards. To fix the spaceship defects, you’ll need to put down the blue cards that depict the appropriate tools, as indicated on the orange card. This is where the chaos begins.
There will be instances where the tool cards you have are not the ones that can fix your current spaceship defect. Fortunately, you can ask for tools from the other players, but you need to say which tool you need out loud. To complicate matters, players can only pass tool cards to adjacent players.
Then there are the orange Anomaly cards. These cards ask the group to perform physical actions, such as switching seats, or getting up from the table and asking the other players to pull you back in. But shuffled among these menacing orange cards are the six Systems Are Go cards. Your goal is to find all of those cards before the time is up, which by default is a mere 5 minutes.
Here’s a quick demo of the game:
Launch Hypertext Protocol Analyzer and order Spaceteam the card game from Amazon for $25 (USD). The base game contains 90 game cards, but there’s already an expansion that adds 48 NSFW cards, as well as an upcoming second expansion that will add 48 more cards.
[via DudeIWantThat]
Etsy store Anson Design Co. makes decorative items made of wood and concrete, including these cute planters based on famous Star Wars ships. They even come with a low maintenance air plant.
The Millennium Falcon planter comes in two sizes. One is about 6″x 8″x 11″, while its smaller version measures around 3″x 3″x 3″. The Death Star planter is available only in a cute 2.5″ diameter size, but you can get it either as raw cement or dyed with charcoal for a menacing finish.
Anson Design Co sells the Death Star and the small Millennium Falcon planter for $15 (USD) each, and the large Falcon for $28.
[via ThisIsWhyImBroke]
Last year, we checked out Eucl3D’s tie-in with Kerbal Space Program that lets you order 3D prints of your created spaceships. Now the company has partnered with developer Frontier Developments to print scale models of some of the ships in Elite: Dangerous.
At the moment, you can get models of the game’s Viper, Anaconda and Cobra ships. The Viper is available as a 3″ or a 5″ model, the Anaconda as a 5″ or an 8.5″ model and the Cobra as a 4″ or a 7″ model. All ships are printed in full-color sandstone.
Here’s a review of the Anaconda model by YouTuber IrishTrekkie:
Eucl3D sells the small models for $30 (USD) each and the large models for $100. The company says it plans on releasing more ships as well as making them available in different color schemes.
Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation and later Trek productions know that computer graphics were used extensively, meaning there generally aren’t models of the Enterprise from Picard’s reign on. In the original series, the Enterprise was an 11-foot long model that had lights inside. The screen-used model that was featured in the filming of every one of the 79 episodes of the original series is now undergoing refit.
That refit is underway at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in the nation’s capitol. Preservation work on the model is ongoing, and the starship it is being restored to look like the Enterprise as it was seen in The Trouble with Tribbles episode of the show.
That episode had the last known modification to the model. The paint is being redone to match the grey color found under the saucer bolt cover and from images fans have taken of the model over the years. Under X-rays, conservationists found that the secondary hull was held together using only old adhesive with no other support. Internal supports will be added to stabilize the hull to help the ship last even longer. Once finished, the Enterprise will go on display in time for the 40th birthday of the National Air and Space Museum, and the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek series.
[via Space.com]