Team Unbounded - Space Apps Challenge

Team Unbounded| 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 Technologies Exploration Game

Summary

Our game allows the user to pick between existing propulsion systems and theoretical propulsion systems and explore the first half of our solar system using those propulsion systems. Our theoretical propulsion systems include the nuclear pulse drive, internal confinement fusion engine, warp drive, and more. Our game provides the user with information about these systems including how they work and how fast they go. And using unity's 3D engine we have created a realistic model of half of our solar system to allow users to explore our universe by harnessing different propulsion technologies firsthand.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed a game in Unity using C# that contains a model of half of our solar system and allows the user to use aerospace vehicles with different propulsion technologies to explore it. The user can use keyboard input to explore our solar systems. Demonstrations are always more entertaining and educative than facts and details, so by allowing the user to try different theoretical propulsion systems first hand we can motivate people to explore, research, and even develop the theoretical technologies in our game.

How We Developed This Project

We decided to create a 3D game because we like games and aerospace technologies, so we wanted to put those together and challenge ourselves to make something cool. We brainstormed different propulsion methods and game dynamics. We thought about making the game 2 dimensional, we thought about having missions or not having a simulation, we discussed many aspects of the project and created a general overview of the project. Next we assigned tasks to our members, 3 people would make the 3D designs, 1 person would make the code, 1 person would make the sounds and scientific explanations, and 1 person would make the menu and the UI. We harnessed the power of Unity, C#, and the internet in our project. We created a 3D environment and using a sky box we made the environment look like the universe. Next we created a sphere in the middle of the environment and locked it's position. We then created other spheres to represent Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars and we set their rotations around the sphere representing the Sun

then created multiple 3D vehicles in Blender and put them in our 3D world. We created a 2D menu to allow the user to select vehicles and navigate the menu. Using the rigid body feature in unity and by altering the velocity based on keyboard input we created a game that allows the user to explore our solar system. We had many issues including the buttons not working, the rocket not moving, the 3D models losing quality, and the sky not looking like the universe. By using the power of the internet we solved the buttons, we simplified the rocket mechanics, we fixed our 3D models, and we used different methods of making the environment to have stars and look like our universe. Just getting a capsule to move or making a planet orbit the sun was a great achievement. Overall it took a lot of effort and we are proud of what we have put forward.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used data from NASA and other space agencies to predict what the different engines would look like, how fast they would go, and what type of a color would their engine leave behind. We also looked at NASA data for sizes and the places of the planets and the moons to shape our solar system. We took inspiration from many NASA projects while designing our game.