A world set in the real Milky Way.

Solarwind is the idea of a shared universe built on the actual galaxy: real stars at their real distances, where players explore, build an economy, form alliances, wage wars, or simply travel as tourists.

What you can play today is its first piece: your ship among some 300,000 real stars within 326 light-years. Collect solarwind from the star you orbit, grow your ship, mine real asteroids and moons, burn solarwind to fly to the next star, and see what the sky really looks like near the speed of light. From every star you reach, check: is our Sun still visible from here? How far can you go before it disappears?

Every position, colour and brightness comes from a star catalogue.

1. Collect. In orbit your ship collects solarwind (SLW) from the stellar wind at its orbit. Stars differ widely, and some barely blow at all. The tank keeps filling while you are away.
2. Pick a star within your drive's range (the map's header shows it): on the map, in the proximity scan, by search, or by clicking it in the sky. Too far? Plan route finds a chain of jumps.
3. Burn and launch. The more solarwind you burn, the faster you arrive. Nothing is collected in flight; you can burn more mid-flight to speed up.
4. Missions in the mission log: leave the Solar System, reach Sirius, Vega and Arcturus, and fly far enough that the Sun disappears.

Drag the sky to orbit the star · Look ahead in flight · Hide star for a clear sky · collapse the map with hide.

Real: star positions, distances, brightness and colours: ESA's Gaia mission (the Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars) for some 300,000 stars within 326 light-years, and the HYG Database v4.1 (Hipparcos, Yale and Gliese catalogues) for names, spectral types and the bright stars. For stars known only to Gaia, the spectral type and colour are estimated from Gaia's colours.

Estimated: temperature, luminosity, radius and mass, calculated from each star's colour, brightness and spectral type. Marked with *.

Physics in flight: your travel time is ship time. The ship accelerates to within a hair of light speed, so a one-minute trip of five light-years is real relativity: about five years pass on Earth. The sky shows aberration (stars crowd ahead), Doppler shift and beaming, and the cosmic background radiation blueshifted into a bright point at the bow.

Star appearance, illustrated: each star's look follows its type. Red dwarfs are spotted and flare, giants have huge convection cells and a soft, pulsing atmosphere, hot stars spin fast, flatten and blow strong winds, and white dwarfs are tiny and intense. The effects are exaggerated so types stand apart. Star colours are also stronger than an eye would see, so types read at a glance.

Game rules, not physics: solarwind as fuel, its collection rate, and the accelerations involved (millions of g) belong to the game.