New User's First Impressions

[HylaCee]

I bought US² a few days ago and have wasted much of my weekend entertaining myself with it. A few early impressions that I'd like to share:

Pros:

• Amazing Graphics! Really top notch.
• Great soundtrack, though a little variety would be nice. Low priority though.
• Great physics engine as far as the gravity goes. Finally a gravity simulator that doesn't break all your carefully implemented orbits.
• Really impressive effects with collisions and fragments.
• Nice to see some variety of materials and their behaviours.

Cons:

• Objects exceeding light speed breaks the realism. I shouldn't be able to drop a black hole into the solar system and have Saturn come zipping out at 6.7c. A simple relativity correction would fix this and shouldn't be too much of a processor burden if only implemented on very high velocity objects.
• Most bodies still behave pretty much like marbles. That's OK for rocky planets under most conditions but works poorly for systems with extreme binaries and such. Colliding Ceres with the moon should crack it like a egg. Colliding two gas giants should result in gas flow/merger. Orbitting Vega around Betelgeuse should strip the outer layers from the latter and accrete them onto the former. Orbitting anything close to a black hole should be devastating and I'm glad to hear that this is slated for alpha 19.
• At low speed and timestep it is possible to pass two gas giants or low-mass stars through one another. It's even possible to set up a binary system where two stars yo-yo back and forth through one another rather than colliding. Some form of fluid interaction and merger is necessary.
• The rocky planet-gas giant-brown dawrf-star transitions are too abrupt. Gas giants heat instantly at 13 Jovian masses then do little until they immediately jump to full-fledged stars at 0.10 solar masses. Some nuanced intermediates would greatly improve realism. There's also an odd glitch where if you get a planet to exactly 13 Jovian masses you end up with something that looks very oddly like a rocky giant.
• Planets follow the same evolution curves regardless of the type of matter you add. Dumping a lot of iron onto a rocky moon should not eventually give me a gas giant followed by a brown dwarf. It should remain a lump of iron before collapsing to a white dwarf.
• Brown dwarfs lack radiant effects. I can orbit a moonlet just above the surface of one and the retched thing never warms above -271 C.
• Nova and Supernova effects need work. The nebula presently expands at much faster than c. The blast often fails to even scuff nearby bodies. I just dropped Vega into Aldebarran and the later was unaffected by the detonation. Remnants retain the characteristic of their parents. The black hole remaining when Eta Carinae blows needs a new radius, density, etc...
• Materials need to include helium (second most abundant element) and neutronium or some form of degenerate matter (silly to make neutron stars out of "hydrogen").

All in all it's a really great sandbox game and I look forward to future releases.