Even in the future, there's legacy…

From the awesome game "Endless Sky", which IMO is a must-play for anyone who enjoyed the "Escape Velocity" games back in the day.

#IPv4 #Legacy #OpenSource #OpenSourceGame #Game #EndlessSky #EscapeVelocity

Many, many years ago, I played Escape Velocity on a friend's Mac. It was fun: a top-down 2D game with Elite-like mechanics.

When I got my own Mac (still in the distant past, but about 8 years later), I looked it up and saw that the latest instalment in the series was EV Nova, which improved the graphics and had more story.

A year or two ago, I decided to see if it worked on a new Mac and discovered that there was no x86 version (PowerPC only), so no chance of getting it to work on Apple's Arm cores. Apparently you can run the Windows version under WINE under Rosetta2 but that seemed like way too much effort.

So I was incredibly happy to discover Endless Sky, an open-source game inspired by (but not directly copying) the Escape Velocity series. It has everything I remember enjoying in Escape Velocity. It has wasted quite a lot of hours of my evenings / weekends over the last couple of weeks (but in a good way). And they're constantly adding new bits to the universe, new story lines, and so on. I thought I'd finished it, only to discover that the part of the galaxy I'd explored was only 50% of the whole thing.

#EscapeVelocity #EndlessSky #Games #GamesNostalgia #OpenSource

Escape Velocity (video game) - Wikipedia

Shoutout to @bobbens ' side project to port the original Escape Velocity universe to Naev: https://codeberg.org/bobbens/YAEV_classic

besides being cool, it seems to be prompting many quite neat flexibility improvements to Naev's engine!

#naev #escapevelocity #gamedev

YAEV_classic

A port of the original Escape Velocity game to the Naev engine as a plugin.

Codeberg.org

#KnowledgeByte: #Longevity #EscapeVelocity (LEV) is a hypothetical future point where scientific advancements can extend a person's life expectancy by more than one year for every calendar year that passes.

https://knowledgezone.co.in/posts/Longevity-Escape-Velocity-6926863d9b5471e0a2e04da5

"Scale immediately or fail slowly. There is no middle ground."- Futurist Jim Carroll

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Futurist Jim Carroll is writing his end-of-2025 / introduction-to-2026 series, 26 Principles for 2026. You can follow along at 2026.jimcarroll.com. He welcomes your comments.
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We are on Day 15!

You’ve listened to the edge (Day 13) and filtered out the hype to find a real structural signal (Day 14).
You have identified a real trend!

Now, you face the moment where most legacy organizations fail.

People often talk about something called "pilot purgatory," and the fact that people and organizations get stuck there. It's the tendency to test or trial a new idea - and then get stuck there, never moving beyond the testing or 'pilot' phase. Yup, it's a form of purgatory!

Let's put the challenge in context. For years, I have advised leaders to follow a simple, powerful mantra for innovation in a fast world: Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast.

Most organizations are pretty good at the first two. They "think big" in strategy sessions. They "start small" with innovation labs and proofs-of-concept.

But they completely fail at the third and most critical step: scale fast. They end in a state of perpetual experimentation where they run dozens of small, safe tests that generate interesting things - but never make it out of the starting gate. And in doing so, they mistake motion for progress - they believe that the mere fact that they are testing a bunch of things means they are making progress.

They aren't.

Here's the problem - in a linear world, you could slowly roll out a new initiative over two or three years. You had the luxury of all the time in the world.

But in an exponential world, that doesn't work. You are surrounded by the problem of legacy - existing processes, IT systems, organizational sclerosis, and bureaucratic inertia designed to keep doing things the same way. That means to move fast, you need more effort than ever before - because in this new fast world, you need to move instantly from a "safe experiment" to "massive deployment."

The discipline to do that? Let's call it! Escape Velocity.

I have been covering the issue of velocity and scale for years. When I look back through my own archive of blog posts, keynotes, and Daily Inspirations, I see a clear pattern of organizations that understood how to achieve this momentum. But some did.

Learn what they did differently!

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**#EscapeVelocity** **#Scale** **#Innovation** **#Momentum** **#Exponential** **#Leadership** **#Legacy** **#Disruption** **#Speed** **#Deployment**

Futurist Jim Carroll has seen way too many organizations stuck in a state of perpetual pilot purgatory.

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2025/12/decoding-tomorrow-mastering-2026-15-scale-immediately-or-fail-slowly-there-is-no-middle-ground/

#Longevity #EscapeVelocity (LEV) is a hypothetical future point where scientific advancements can extend a person's life expectancy by more than one year for every calendar year that passes.

https://knowledgezone.co.in/posts/Longevity-Escape-Velocity-6926863d9b5471e0a2e04da5

This article illustrates a classic problem with the common use of #velocity as a metric.

https://betterteams.fm/articles/2019/06/Velocity-Escape-this-Pitfall/

#noestimates #escapevelocity

This article illustrates a classic problem with the common use of #velocity as a metric.

https://betterteams.fm/articles/2019/06/Velocity-Escape-this-Pitfall/

#noestimates #escapevelocity

The Chemical Brothers - Escape Velocity (Official Music Video)

YouTube

i am a giant idiot and forgot how much tech strengths and weaknesses differing across the galaxy can be exploited, and assigned my captured Voinian frigates to the escort fleet instead of taking one for myself. Voinian shields aren't worth shit, but their armor can soak up Crescent phase cannons all day and all night, far more than the disappointingly underpowered freight-courier and its human-civilian-typical mix of OK shields and mostly ceremonial armor. the average Crescent renegade fleet can peel that off me like a banana and i've probably died 40 or 50 times today. but my two frigate escorts have barely been scratched in Crescent space so far. pretty sure i saw them take out a whole Crescent Warship without my help.

so now it's back to Voinian space to see if i can catch a third frigate. when i can get in deep enough, their supply ships have huge capacity (250 tons) and are easy to capture, but sadly hard to keep alive, since the escort AI only knows:

  • "stay in formation" (default for captured freighters)
  • "attack whatever attacks me" (default for captured warships)
  • "return to formation" (for as long as they feel like it)
  • "hold position" (which leaves them exactly where you were and impedes their own self-defense)

what it really needs is:

  • "you are a freighter. go hide in a corner"
  • "better yet, go park in a different star system until i need you"

but afaik the EV series proper never had any more escort commands (except the two for carried fighters, the most expensive and most short-lived consumable in the game ime) so that's what i got.

should have bought a damn Arada instead of buying human lol but really i'm just gonna have to keep trying to snag another frigate. the upside is that, aside from fuel and hunter missiles, it'll be free…

p.s.: one hilarious thing that this game does is that most emergency defense and planned offensive missions are not time-sensitive, so you can literally fuck off for three months and do some trading or raiding and try to come back with a better ship that lets you survive the mission. similar to Mass Effect's general lack of urgency in the future. yeah there's a war on, but i got side quests 🥺

#EscapeVelocity #EscapeVelocityOverride #VyrPlaysEscapeVelocityOverride