ehh seems dead at the moment, but maybe, like I said, ships could be added later, what we need to do is figure out what all we want to incorporate in the engine and how to make it adaptable so we can add on instead of re-writing the whole thing...
it's project of mine, not sure when it will really go into motion, there's allot I need to learn to pull it off, eventially I want it to be so comprehensive as to cover things like shield and weapons frequency, advanced power distribution (ie rerouting power from say the engines to weapons, shields ect.), advanced sensor options, particle simulation, manipulating universal constants and annomlies, pretty much anything that could affect the operation of a starship or anything it does...
but I don't see any reason why you couldn't do mission scripts or campagin scripts putting you into certain situations with specific goals, like a game, with immense simulating power,
you could even add ships from other universes say like from Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, but you'd have to make a guidline for comparing them, the good thing is, being open source, people could easily make their own mods and ships to import, in fact, I don't see why it shouldn't be made to incourage this, strength in numbers you know? if you have a community of users who help make the ships,missions, add whatever content they want, then all you really have to to do to get it up and going is the core program with some content, and focus on the core, which will give us time to work on and create a powerfull simulation engine, allow community invovlement, promote creativity, provide virtually endless possibilities and allow for a system of management that should be not only very productive but also, flexible with the ability to continue to mature into something more complex...
especially if, instead of just ships and mission scripts, we allow creation of new weapon and technology files as well as moduales what allow you to change or automatically associate universal variables and constants based on certain inputs, so when say you hit a warp factor, using forumlaes calculating universal contants, and the design and all of your ship, would calculate stress levels....energy comsumption ect. based on preset values, , and modules that allow the actions you make to affect them...
for example....
U = preset values for our universe, speed of light, density of certain materials, whatever....
M = modual that applies certain changes, say a certain amount of gravity on a planet of a certain density and size as calculated by U, and the anti-gravity on another obect where M, takes the change, or setting of Anti-gravity and changes that obects weight in U in relation to the new gravity value of the obect so..
if U = engine and M=module
U caclulates planet gravity, user sets level of anti-grav on another obect with a set gravity
so
M clculates anti-grav (resistence value, modifier ect.)
so the moduals would modify the results by affecting base values (hope i'm not overly repeating myself here) based on what the technology would do, so the M would take your inputs for say all the values needed for warp drive, run the warp theory formulas and then temperarly apply the chanes needed to the engine to get the variables you'd need to make it work...
so as you can tell, huge proect, the hard part is working on the engine, and hiring people to help doesn't work well if you can't afford it and if you call it Star Trek Ship Simulator, or include any copyrighted ship designs,ect.,you cant charge for it to cover that so...
it would have to either be a volunteer project or
called something different and include no ships or anything copyrighted, and then the users would have to make those files and upload them...
and, its something I really want to do, but in all honesty, the sheer amount of work and technical nohow may be a bit much, at least at this point, untill I get for familiar with programming languages with this kind of capability...
but heres something neat....
say the engine stores its default values in a file or DB or whatever but you can select which one to load...
then you can simulate say our universe, fluidic space, anything you can really imagine, and have your ship even travel betwenn them....
