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Star Dust: Planetary Systems with Nebula

Filename: Stardust.zip
Author: Eugene Harm
Type: Scenery
Size: 10M
Review: March 2005

File Description:
This package contains the Star Dust add-on which is a compilation of four seperate planetary systems. The package includes new nebulas, planets, moons, and bases. Three of the systems have a nebula in place of the system star. The fourth system has a double star. In each case they are strickly eye candy and in no way represent a true 3D universe. Although the nebula images are from actual Hubble pics the celestial bodies and everything else about this addon is fictional. Neither are the nebula render in 3D they are only simple images. However I believe you will find them all to be quite beautiful.

Included in the package:
Great Orion Nebula
Cat's Eye Nebula
Helix Nebula
Double Star System

Review:
With Orbiter 2005 you can not point your ship towards a star other then the sun and fly through space until you reach that star. But you can load another planetary system into Orbiter and fly around that system instead of our home system. This opens the door for many new and alien systems to explore. This add-on brings four new fictional system two fly through with the main star being something other then "sunlike".

It accurred to me that Orbiter could have a double star system if you just simple change the image of the defualt sun to a double. Boo...cheat..cheat, yes I'm sorry, it's all fake. No real physics is applied to these system bodies. But think about it, a planetary nebula is nothing more then a star that has exploded. So why not replace the system star with the "exploded" one. So I went from putting an image of a double star there to an image of a nebula. Boy was pleased with the results. I hope you are too.

One main issue in using an add-on like this is it changes the defualt star, our sun, in Orbiter. Unfortunately you can not call up a star image through a config file or a scenario file. Therefore the defualt star image must be overwritten to see something other then the sun . Because of this I highly recommend you use another add-on along side this one. The add-on is Msss MFD v2.0 which adds multiple solar system suport to Orbiter. It will automatically overwrite the star/nebula files when used to move from one solar system to another. The catch is you must return to our home solar system if you want to once again end up with the sun as the defualt star.

Tip! To get the best views of these nebula you must uncheck Sun glare effect under the Visual effects Tab in Orbiter Launchpad.

Installation:
Unpack to the ORBITER folder. Make sure that you use the "Use folder names" in WinZip so all files will be extracted to the proper folder. IF you prefer all the planetary systems can be visited without changing the "sun". Simple use any of the scenarios found under the Star Dust folder.

If you don't use the Msss MFD you can still see the nebula by replacing the star.dds with one of the following.

- M42.dds      Great Orion Nebula
- Starcat.dds  Cat's Eye Nebula
- Helix.dds      Helix Nebula
- StarMc.dds   Double Star System

Of course make sure you keep a backup of star.dds because you will have to rename one of the above four to star.dds to be used. As you can see this can get to be quite confusing and be to much of a bother to make it worthwile. I hope in the future Orbiter can find a more fexible way to call the default star through the sytems config file.

Install Msss MFD prior to this add-on. If you by chance installed this add-on prior to Msss MFD, then simple choose not to overwrite galaxy or element files.

Unzipping this add-on will automatically replace two of the Msss MFD files, the galaxy.txt and the element.txt. That's alright unless you have customized them previously to your own specifications. In which case you will need to unzip the galaxy and element files to a seperate folder and manually edit your custom files to include this add-ons four systems.

If you have my Jump Pack add-on you should still choose to replace because these files inlcude the same solar system support as Jump Pack does and more.

To begin using this add-on in Orbiter select the DG to nebula scenario found in the Star Dust folder. Shift W will bring up the Msss MFD and shift T a list of avialble systems. Select the system by shift and the number of rows it is down the list. Be warned the Msss MFD will close out to desk top and reload Orbiter in the new planetary system.

Related Links:

You can download the MSSS MFD
Blue Mars
Terra System
 

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