Scientists - Space Apps Challenge

Scientists| 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.

Space Run - The Fun Propulsion Simulator

Summary

Our project aims at making a game where you unlock different propulsion types as you get to higher levels. You start with a simple solid propulsion which make sure you are avoiding the asteroids when you launch, then you can control directions using a liquid propulsion trying to head to your destination planet.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We wanted our project to be fun as well as educational. So we ended up with a rocket which starts off with a solid propulsion which you have to time it when you launch so that you do not hit the asteroids circling the planet. Then we want to upgrade to liquid propulsion as we move further along the path to the destination planet. Eventually you can upgrade to nuclear propulsion which would be more long lasting but as the technology is still under development would cause the rocket to explode. This is to promote some thinking to the player and a hope that a sudden end to the game would encourage the player to investigate why the technology is unstable and in turn create an interest in knowing more. Given more time, we would love to include all types of propulsion systems into the game play.

How We Developed This Project

We started off with some initial sketches and discussions. We finalized how we wanted the game to look. Chloe who is our in house artist provided few amazing renderings of the asteroids and the rocket. Sri looked into the physics of how each propulsion system works and how it should function. Yashas who is the coding genius worked on unity to create the game play.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

The NASA resource although not directly used, provided us great insight into how we wanted our gameplay to be. The NASA's Eyes provided interesting perspective on how we want to model the rocket movement and the physics we want to implement. There is a rocket modeler from the NASA website that we downloaded also to learn more about the problem.