Frontier Developments Throw NASA Data Into Elite Dangerous To Replicate TRAPPIST-1 Solar System

Elite Dangerous fans may still be riling at the thought of hackers ruining their search and pillage game, but Frontier Developments are still actively working on the title. In fact, they've just decided to quickly incorporate NASA's recent findings into their space simulator. Over the last week, NASA identified a new solar system that conveniently houses 7 planets that could potentially inhibit or/or sustain human life.

But don't get too excited just yet. We're taking about video games here for a reason. While the planets themselves have the potential of gifting us well-being once Earth itself decides to kick the bucket - whether through our own volition, the sun's decision to call time or an unfortunate meteor clouding access to the great gaseous ball in the sky - those new rocks are still 40 light years away from us.

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All is not lost, however, as through the miracles of number crunching and code, Frontier Developments have been able to throw NASA's data into their own universe creation engine and spit out a replica of this new solar system - called TRAPPIST-1 - into Elite Dangerous; a virtual landscape in which players can travel those distances before dying of old age. Oddly enough, Frontier's engine had already crafted a section fairly similar to TRAPPIST-1 through its Stellar Forge engine already. So it only took a few tweaks to bring the real thing into the not-so-real thing. Expect to explore it during the second phase of Update 2.3's beta test.