Free Stars is being made by the original creators of the series, Paul Reiche and Fred Ford. They had nothing to do with SC3 or Origins.

The reason why it’s not using the Star Control name is because the IP ownership around the whole thing is messy. The short version is that Paul and Fred owned the rights to the universe, but Atari owned the rights to the Star Control name.

When Atari went bankrupt, Stardock bought the name. They thought they’d bough the universe. This resulted in Stardock spending the next couple of years trying trying to use the courts to bully Paul and Fred into turning over the rights to them and generally being dickheads.

This finally ended in a settlement and work on Free Stars has been happening quietly for the last couple of years.

It’s a shame that the game systems are so polarizing because it legitimately has some of the best written characters I’ve seen in any game ever.

You can also just spend $10 on a domain name with a registrar that offers dynamic DNS. Offhand, both Namecheap and Cloudflare do. I have no idea what my public IP address is because my router just updates it automatically for me. Plenty of DDNS desktop clients around if your router can’t for whatever reason.

One thing this overlooks is that the rigid mounted bed of the V2 causes thermal expansion issues. There’s a lot of really bad lore that gets repeated in the community re: bed heater power because the V2 tends to want to taco the bed if it’s heated too quickly.

The WhoppingOrchard kinematic mounts are a solid option for addressing the issue.

The Trident is the overall better design with a higher performance ceiling.

Flying gantries are a solution forever in search of a problem. They can work okay and they’re fine at the speeds that were common when the V2 was first designed, but there’s a reason why the community has converged on fixed gantry designs. They’re neat to watch operate but they don’t offer any practical advantage. The V2 tends to be relatively slow by modern standards, especially in terms of accel.

The Trident isn’t without flaws but it’s a perfectly fine starting point and the huge community does mean that most of the bigger design issues either already have a usermod or somebody working on cooking something up.