smirf smirf smirf Smirf

Tucked away in a lonely corner of the galaxy lies a tiny planet known only as "nurf". Nurf orbits two stars, alpha and beta. Nobody can precisely predict the orbit of nurf - not even the mythical Imps of smirf. This is because a planetary orbit around a binary star is inherently unstable, and the smoke efflux from the two stars affects the planet's orbit to a small degree.

Life on nurf is happy and peaceful, if a bit strange. Each time nurf passes by the magic stars alpha and beta it absorbs some smoke that the two stars emit. Magic smoke is what keeps the nurfian economy running. But there is only one problem - nurf's orbit is bringing it further and further from alpha and beta every year.

Nurf's only moon, blerf, also absorbs some of the magic smoke, but the poor nurfians can't even make the short interplanetary hop to get at it. Poor poor nurfians. They have been spoiled for so long by their plentiful smoke mines that they never really developed any other way of doing things. Won't you help them?

Won't you Help the residents of nurf?

Some hastily scribbled notes: smirf was born out of the gaping hole in open source cad software. it's not automated design. however, there was supposed to be a sort of "realtime" FEA and physics simulation, so you could play with the design, instead of having a dead static drawing. and the design would do stuff in the world, slowly replacing dungeons and dragons style "points" systems with procedural simulations. at's what all the alpha/beta star chaotic orbit is about: so you can look up in the sky and see "magic is loose in the world!" to borrow a quote from heinlein :)