This seems like a wonderful project with a lot of love. Keep going :)
One thing that's always struck me as weirdly difficult with the spaceship-bridge genre, but wholeheartedly embraced by generic flight-sims, is custom control surfaces! Everyone wants pedals and knobs and sliders and a big red button in the middle of the console. Kerbal players are notorious for hooking up the most bizarre junk they can find as in-game controls, and the game is richer for it. I saw mention of DMX lighting, but nothing about mapping random HID controls...
Another thing we did playing Artemis, was put the "engineering" station in another room, with walkie-talkies so you had to actually "call down to engineering" to ask them to do things. That should be Teamspeak or something now, I suppose, but having the various parts of the ship in physically separate places (perhaps across the internet?) really adds something, IMHO.
DMX and other show-control features will come much later, after the main gameplay features are completed. But they're my favorite part, so I'll definitely get to them eventually.
Odysseus LARP paired that functionality with a bunch of RPi Zero W-powered hardware puzzles to represent ship systems,[1] so Engineers had to physically tinker with things in order to get systems back up and running after they broke. That included things like going through crawlspaces and ladders to access certain components, digging through a printed manual when computer systems were "down".
I love this idea for realism (and, tbh, to minimise the 'talking-over-each-other' factor... but for me I'd prefer to be in the same room as my friends. I want to see the smiles and hear the laughter. Without that, engineering would just feel like a job well done.
One time we played Artemis in the two mission control rooms at SpaceX. It was nice having professional headsets. My team was winning, until someone on the other team used the IT system to shut down our computers!
If you want to help guide what's included and how they fit together, I'm happy to entertain proposals in the Github discussions or Discord.
I should add that Thorium Nova will include a lot more inter-ship controls. Things like security officers, system maintenance, medical teams, cargo transfer, power grid distribution - that kind of thing. Adding all of that will effectively double the max-crew size of the typical 6 you see in other bridge sims.
Fortunately, the scope of this is significantly less than Star Citizen, since all of the first-person content of the game is supposed to happen in real-life, LARP-style.
It might be easy enough to do this sort of thing on the user side anyway, in Artemis Spaceship at least you can of course just use multiple stations if you want. So you just need a ship without too much going on, I think.
We once did an away mission where the crew was stranded on a remote planet and running out of water. We split the crew, where one half we going to find a viable water source and the other needed to track down a local scientist who had the parts we needed to repair the ship.
After dressing them up in our weirdest costumes, we trekked them outside. The water group were sent to a local convenience store with a couple of dollar bills and told to "act natural" as they picked up some bottled water. I was happy to find that they absolutely did not act normal.
The other group went to a local staff member's house, which had been decorated to look like the scientists laboratory.
Needless to say, the whole experience was quite memorable, and highlights how the computer controls are only part of what makes the simulation fun.
Thorium Classic has been in development since 2016 and is primarily intended to be used in brick-and-mortar space centers out in Utah, like the Space Place[1] and CMSC[2]. As such, there isn't a lot of content and documentation to get newcomers up-and-running with it.
Thorium Nova is currently under development and is intended to be used by a broader audience. It will include much more content, pre-built missions, and more integrated tutorials.
The project is open-source, so anyone is welcome to contribute[3] and follow along with the progress of each alpha.
1: https://www.thespaceplace.org
2: https://spacecenter.alpineschools.org
3: https://thoriumsim.com/blog/contributing-to-thorium-nova