ow, I've been away for 49 days! crazy.
Anyway, since the last message implying I was converting this to C++, I've decided to abandon that conversion and stick with the current Dev Environment. Firstly, the conversion was a pain. It was taking me weeks and weeks to convert the 1000s of lines of basic in C++ and at the same time I was really learning C++ so I was making all sorts of basic errors and it would take be ages just to get the splash screen to work. This on top of still developing the game eventually took its toll so I've stuck with what I know.
Since that moment, I've re-made the orbital mechanics so that it is 100% more stable and much more fun. The future orbit propagation is now 100% accurate with respect to your eventual path. Previously is was just an estimate and so would change as you got closer and became more accurate. This made travelling between planets annoying as the orbit you thought you'd set up would ultimately be a lie and so you just ended up just firing the thrusters all the time. Now you can see all the gravity swings meaning you can save a ton of fuel by lining up a sequence of fly-bys to get to where you want to go.
You can also see the orbit capture of your target planet and the orbit propagation - as you can see in the screenie below.
I've also moved the crew onto the main screen and i've got a few ideas how they will interact with you as the play-through progresses.
This screenie also shows how the new missions are presented. I'm currently working on the scripts for the new missions so we have a variety of types of mission, not just take item a to planet b.