Lunar Boom Town

Lunar Boom Town is a set of strategic engineering simulations intended to help interested parties and organizations with research and self education efforts. It is hoped that participants will eventually be involved with implementation of engineering technologies, business ventures, and research endeavors sufficient and necessary to establish successful space settlements.

At this time various free electronic games and other free online data resources are used by participants to further refine and investigate issues involved with settling in space. Team role playing or charades are used with heterogeneous teams to exchange knowledge and practical experience related to the challenge of prospering in space related activities. Actual physical processes and systems are designed, built, tested, and documented within some asynchronous activities.

A long term goal, among others, is to create a virtual environment suitable for neophytes to safely explore all known factors and ramifications of a personal commitment to settle in space while they assist experts with reducing the unknowns and hazards actual pioneers and settlers will face.

Why play around with concepts involving space technology? Consider that this course Technical writing specification alleges that effective technical projects spend up to one third of their time figuring out what precisely they wish to accomplish. How is this to be done with no preexisting markets and little preexisting directly applicable art or off-the-shelf components? Within Lunar Boom Town game scenarios and technical proposals we use free engineering techniques to pool and share our collective judgment regarding how, what, and why specific activities and technologies might be useful in space settlements.

Open entrepreneurial ideas
What business could be start up or run in a Lunar Boom Town? Laundry, waterless

Potential triggers for lunar boom towns



 * Space Tourism;
 * A commitment to extensively explore or settle Mars.  This implies Aldrin Cyclers;
 * A decision to build a space elevator;
 * Global warming: A shift to solar power satellites as part of carbon reduction efforts. Manufacturing centers at L5;
 * Advances in Nuclear Fusion using He3 in Fuel Cycle;
 * Asteroid mining - asteroide mining;
 * The detection of habitable extrasolar planets.

This project focuses on business plans, evaluation of business models, technical approaches, and risk factors.

There is a budding business plan course – The Business Plan – that may be a bit too technical for our purposes. Wikibooks has some detailed information (Wikibooks:Writing a Business Plan) on standard business plans. Keep in mind we do not need excessive detail to get started and we can all collaborate on our lunar business models and plans. A business plan is merely a communications tool to help tell others how we plan to conduct our business.

Participants will also find marketing concepts and skills helpful in identifying and analyzing target market segments.

In the meantime we need some icons for one of our local freight company simulators.
 * CisLunarFreighter Java guys requested some .jpegs or .pngs for graphics! Post samples here or there or somewhere you think appropriate.
 * /links to technical papers/
 * /sites with information/

The current theme song is by Sharam. We are considering remixing it with some drums to represent discrete large missions abruptly impacting the markets. We use this theme song to represent the complex interplay of businesses and customers in free markets. If you have a better theme song for Lunar Boom Town, please leave a link here or on discussion page so others may evaluate it as a replacement.

Evolving game concepts

 * /Draft Game Concepts/
 * /Creating data/
 * /Task Requests/
 * Ideas from #wikiversity-en IRC
 * /Team Building/

Public service bulletin
There has been some simulated vandal activity (edit wars, personal attacks, faked data citations, misquotes, incorrect hacked engineering software tools, etc.) within these projects and Wikiversity custodians are considering declaring parts of Lunar Boom Town a designated vandal haven until this malicious behavior has been reigned in effectively. Vested interests please share thoughts below:
 * I think Cargo Imports is bordering on problematical in that there are dangerous physical processes being shared prior to adequate preparation of safety recommendations. Mirwin 06:37, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

It may be expensive to live on the moon
What kinds of businesses, factories, and exports would it take to pay for the necessary imports? What kinds of skills would be needed? We need to figure all this stuff out before our boomtown will prosper, whether in a virtual simulation or actually on the moon.

Help us budding business tycoons find out and figure it out by gathering and using appropriately sources of information. Remember to report back creatively to assist the entire community. Use of open/free design methodologies is encouraged to enhance probability of success and shorten development timelines. Primarily, we are interested in living and working on the moon, not licensing technologies for others to do so. Public collaboration and publishing of results is intended to help create future space settlements with dynamic successful economies.

Design task challenges and activities
Using online lunar data find a prime location for our boomtown. Remember, it should be close to resources and future customers. The following online resources can be used for finding a prime location for our boomtown.
 * Lunar Global GIS (most comprehensive dataset collection so far)
 * NASA Moon trek (includes custom VR tours)
 * Direct evidence of surface exposed water ice in the lunar polar regions - includes map of surface ice deposits
 * Best Time to See Moon Mountains in May Is Now



Feasibility Study Automated Cargo Flow - Terran Spaceport Warehouse to Designated Lunar Delivery Zone

Help prove to the polished senior professional engineers whose assistance we need occasionally that our engineering students, combat artists, and synergistic hunter/gather scouts are second to no other chaotic strategic mobocracy anywhere in the world while we play at getting to the moon with enough profits leftover to be influential investors in the Mars Society's pathetic attempt to get to Mars and back alive with the Chinese junk components that the NATO/Nipponese empire embarrasses their "defense forces" with ..... all I can say really is that it was a nice life for me as one of the few privileged Americans never discriminated against while it lasted. Mirwin 06:08, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Should the initial automated cargo carrier use methane or LH2 or some other fuel mix combination for the delivery crashlander and software stages?
 * http://groups.google.com/group/sci.space.policy/browse_thread/thread/70cd1001dac867ee#8dfe8a3c87ad123d


 * advanced engineering text stub on design considerations for naval ships offers clues about how to go about looking for issues to address and/or ignore based upon known analytical and/or empirical relationships. I have not found a book on specifically vertical launched spacecraft and staged boosters but I think this stub gives us clues about how to get started.  Look for an insight or meaningful question and express it somewhere for agreement (grows confidence to proceed) concerns(someone else has insight about easily overlooked constraint which is documented as simplifying constraint and then automatic checks can be be implement such as:  If design mass exceed 1000kgs, (M>1000kg) reanalyze structural elements such and such to verify expect peak stress are still below the elastic yield point Introduction_to_Elasticity of materials specified.
 * If M > 1000Kg Then initiate analysis tasks with tags (xxx,stress, ...)


 * /GLOP Processor patterns, templates, details/ Discuss humor and deadly perils associated with dumpster diving and compare contrast switching route initialization and management for household GLOP process interfaced to larger and smaller grid transceiving stations by variety of methods ranging from voluntary, ignored, tracked, enforced etc. at a profit or at least reduction of localized expenses. Mirwin 00:05, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
 * /Humorous scenarios/
 * /bubbler air particle reducer/

Other concepts

 * /Lunar base light cycles/
 * Lunar eclipses

Potentially collaborating organizations

 * /Current Participant List/

Commons

 * Category:Lunar surface