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Originally posted by Dark Angel:
**Here a plug-in idea that I started for EVO but stopped working on it when I heard EVN was coming out. But here is the beginning of the webpage athttp://gundamwing.iwarp.com/main.html.
No, I didn't on purpose use the word nova in the game name. The reason why it is called Nova is because warring goverments have to bond together to stop a super nova wave from a sun exploding a a few galaxies away from destroying the sol galaxy.
What I need for the game now, since the plug is about 60 percent complete, is graphics. Besides that, the galaxy and missions needed to be completed. Oh yeah, this galaxy is different because its many systems but it ranges from the Sun to Pluto and not many different systems with different planet and stuff. Does anyone understand what I'm saying? But if an graphic designers want to join, email me or respond to the post.
**
A few galaxies away, eh? Oh, they'd better work fast, then. They'll have only a few billion years to stop it.
Type I supernova occur roughly once per 36 years in a galaxy similar to our Milky Way. Type II's are a little less frequent, about every 44 years. As a typical example, the Vela supernova remnant, also called the Gum Nebula, is 1300 light-years away and in 9,000 BC it would have shone like a second moon over the settlers of the Nile Valley. The expanding gases have been moving at supersonic speed and at present are only 330 light-years away. Get out your umbrella. 
Incidently, the last supernova observed in our galaxy was in 1604. Andromedae had a good one in 1885, and the Large Magellanic Cloud produced the well-observed 1987A. There have been some interesting thoughts about pressure waves triggering new star formation, but if it were possible for a supernova to set off other stars in a chain reaction we would have been gone a long time ago.
A supernova in our immediate stellar neighborhood could be interesting, however. Charles Sheffield has some thoughts on that in his "Dancing with Myself" (Baen Books 1993). If for some reason Alpha Centauri, a mere 4.3 light-years away, were to forget that it has too small a mass and no companion star and went supernova anyway, insolation of our solar system would increase by a third for a few weeks. Expect massive die-offs of vegetation, skin cancer, lots of fires. 75 years later the high-energy particle storm arrives, killing anything not under tens of meters of solid rock. Protecting the L5-type habitats of the Gundam world would be a chore indeed, and take much working together.
I seem to recall a pair of science fiction novels recently on more-or-less this scenario. Can't come up with the title and author at the moment, though.
Anyhow, an interesting idea. Just get hold of an introductory text or two (such as one of Isaac Azimov's immensely readably popularizations) and get a idea of the time/distance/energy scale you are dealing with.
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You see a Grue.
