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★ Sci-Fi Culture

Star Citizen: The Genesis of a Universe and of Cloud Imperium Games

In October 2012, Chris Roberts asked for 2 million dollars to bring the space sim back to life on PC. Fourteen years later, Star Citizen has passed one billion dollars in funding, its studio employs more than a thousand people, and the game is still in alpha. This is the story of how an outsized project came to be, and of the company built to make it: Cloud Imperium Games. No video game has ever raised this much money from its own players. None has taken this long not to come out, either. To understand how a crowdfunding campaign turned into a global studio, you have to go back well before 2012, to a teenager in Manchester writing code on a BBC Micro.

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Comment une fusée quitte-t-elle la Terre ?

Aerospace

How does a rocket leave the Earth?

Thrust, insane speeds, stages dropped in mid-flight… Leaving Earth has less to do with magic than with physics, and an unreasonable amount of fuel. Explained without equations, promise. Sending an object into space is a bit like throwing a pebble hard enough that it never comes back down. On paper, it's simple. In practice, you need a machine as tall as a building, filled to the brim with stuff that would love nothing more than to explode, and steered with millimeter precision. Here's how it works, in four ideas.

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