PropulsionCraft| Breakthrough

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.

Propulsion Craft

Summary

Interactive web application based on three mini-games that try to teach the player how propulsion systems work from scratch.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed a game that drives a player across the creation of a Spacecraft using a specific Propulsion System, the knowledge of these propulsion systems is very important because it shows the possibilities of Intergalactic Travel, we pretend to teach what are the principal components for each Propulsion System to understand which are the advantages and what are the theoretical velocities, travelled distances, prices, etc. This game have three levels following this order:

  1. You have to sketch the main parts of each Propulsion System.
  2. You need to assemble all this parts and build your own Spacecraft.
  3. Test your Space Craft in a race against asteroids and planets.

The propose of this game is to give a start point to the players, where they can use it to begin a deep investigation of these Propulsion Systems and create new things.

How We Developed This Project

After a very broad brainstorming, we decided we wanted to know more about space travelling. We decided the minigame approach because we wanted something that people can play without a big time or effort commitment. We made all our discussions via extensive Meet reunions and used React components to build the game in a web application. We had some minor communication issues as we could not talk in person and we had to learn things about the technologies we were using (mostly React) mainly to manipulate images and canvas from there.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used NASA data mostly as a resource of information to learn how each propulsion system works. We had no prior knowledge about them nor its physics, so all the time invested in reading about them helped us to think how to include that knowledge into the minigames and how to teach it while the user is playing. See the list of Resources for more information.

Project Demo

Slides:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xCOnsN4vdgE1DLl1QgttRDiufYAZjyDL?usp=sharing


Live Demo:

https://main.dqn0xxgboyn8u.amplifyapp.com/

Project Code
Data & Resources

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20140000851

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20100010965

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/fs21grc.html

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/dawn/technology/ion-propulsion/

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140000851.pdf

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/rocket.html

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/airplane/rocket.html

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19700023580

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20150016484

Tags
#mini games, #software, #web application, #web game, #videogame, #spacecraft, #react, #javascript, #draw, #sketch, #assemble, #propulsion system
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.