Breakthrough

Faster-than-light travel is the key to humanity’s dreams of inter-galactic space travel. Your challenge is to create an app, tool, game, or other interactive application that showcases both existing, as well as next generation/theoretical, breakthrough spacecraft propulsion in an engaging way.

Propulsive Asteroid Blaster

Summary

We developed a game that focuses on explaining how rocket propellers work. Our project clearly visualizes and demonstrates how some propellants produce thrust for the rocket. For the players' gaming experience, we made a simple "asteroid-demolishing" game, where the player has 1 life. We even created the background music from scratch.

How We Addressed This Challenge


We developed a way to visualize the inner workings and the mechanisms inside rocket propellers. We developed a game that shows how rocket propellers work. We also created a casual object-demolishing game, or in our context, "asteroid-demolishing". We also recreated the weird, but fun-to-solve 3 body problem of the Alpha Centauri 3-star system.


We believe this game is important as it could explain the complex science behind rocket propellers to people, in a simpler manner. This would satisfy the curiosity of primary and secondary school students who haven't learned high-level physics, but have always wondered about the science behind rockets.


We designed 3 existing rocket propulsion systems (solid, ionic, liquid) and 2 theoretical rocket propulsion system (antimatter and black hole). For solid propulsion system, we showed how the propellant were burnt to eventually produce thrust. For liquid propulsion system, we clearly showed how liquid oxygen (LOX) mix with liquid hydrogen to create thrust for the probe. For ionic propulsion system, we showed clearly how Xenon, an element that was known to be stable, became Xenon ion, and were used to produce thrust. For antimatter propulsion system, we showed the colliding of matter and its respective antimatter to create thrust and for black hole propulsion system, we showed how micro black hole produces Hawking Radiation and how they were used to provide thrust. That was how we visualize the inner workings of each propulsion systems.

How We Developed This Project

We were inspired by Voyager 1's long interstellar journey. Another inspiration is the Viking mission to Mars. Both mission succeeded in helping humans understand more about the Solar System and for Viking, it helped us to understand more about Mars' gas content, surface condition and others. We were also inspired by the 3-star system of Alpha Centauri and its 3-body problem.


We used Unity3d to build our game. The coding language that we use is C#. We used Tinkercad to 3d design the rocket and all its 5 types of propellers and both the probes. The probes were designed to be similar to Voyager 1 and Viking 2.


The background music during the stage where players can select their respective propeller and probe was purely created by us. We used Audio Recording in GarageBand to record the audio. The audio was actually one of our team members playing "Harp" on his electone. He played the D major chord, the C major chord, and the A major chord. Then we looped the audio.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used the nearest star information, Alpha Centauri, and implemented its distance from Earth , in our game.

Tags
#ionicpropulsion, #viking, #voyager, #alphacentauri, #space, #nasa
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.