SimpleRockets News

We have recently started (secretly) beta testing SimpleRockets 2 for PC and Mac. We started with a very small group of people, just to ease into this and make sure nothing exploded, including our brains. So far we've had about 165 bug reports submitted and only Nathan's brain has exploded, so it's going well.

We'd like to add a few more beta testers. If you are interested, please see our post here. You will need an account on SimpleRockets.com if you want to participate.

We can't take everyone, but I will randomly select 25 people. If you are selected, you will receive a notification on SimpleRockets.com by 10/5/2018 at 9pm CST.

Also, I've been keeping an eye on how much we have left to do and the likelihood of finishing SR2 in October will be rather difficult. It is starting to look more likely that we will release in early November at this point. I have a stash of black licorice on standby. It smells gross.

As a bonus, here are some recent screenshots from some of the beta testers.

With rising fuel prices, we'd hate for you to waste your precious RP-1 guessing how to burn your engines to get where you want to go. In SimpleRockets 2, you can plan your burns by clicking on your current orbit and adding a Planned Burn. From there you can easily drag gizmos around to manipulate that burn and Map View will show the new, predicted orbit. It will also tell you exactly how long you need to burn (and the direction) to achieve that orbit.

Here's a GIF where I planned a collision course with the moon.



Notice how it updates the orbit in realtime and immediately lets me know that it found an encounter in the future. We considered calling them Burn Soothsayers, but then we realized that was a dumb name.

Once you plan a burn you can either try and execute that burn yourself or you can just click the Auto Burn button and SR2 will try its best to accomplish that burn on its own. If you're impatient, you can click the Warp to Next Burn button and it will automatically time-warp you right up to the burn.



Results can vary and it depends a lot on the craft, but Auto Burn easily outperforms me. In my defense, I get nervous and my palms get sweaty. I didn't say it was a great defense.

Also, if you have set a target in Map View, it will display Closest Approach information to help hone in on getting an encounter. It will give you the distance to your target at that point, the relative speed, and time at which that approach will happen.

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If one Planned Burn doesn't take you where you want to go, don't worry. You can plan multiple burns in sequence with each burn working off the orbit from its predecessor burn. This has been an extremely tricky feature to implement and thanks goes to Philip for making all of this happen. Hopefully, this will help keep you from getting burned out as you navigate your way around the solar system.

The tyrannical Tsiolkovsky rocket equation cannot be avoided. The only way for rockets to accelerate in space is by expelling some of their mass. Most engines do this with combustion, which expels huge amounts of fuel mass at a respectable velocity. This gives great acceleration (and an impressive fireball), but very poor specific impulse. Specific impulse is like gas mileage for rocket engines.

Ion engines, on the other hand, take a different approach.



They shoot out a minuscule amount of fuel mass, but they do it at insane velocities. Around 40 kilometers per second (90,000mph). This results in a force that is about the equivalent of lifting a piece of paper into the air. That's not very impressive, but they make up for it by taking their time with their fuel. Ion engines can "burn" for weeks, so this small force can add up to an extremely impressive delta-V.

This little satellite I made has a delta-V of 14,533 m/s and a burn time of about 72 hours.



Here are the details:

• Thrust: 0.050 kN (Yep, that's right, just fifty Newtons)
  
• Mass: 50 kg
• Price: $100,000
• Specific Impulse: 11,515 s
• Fuel Type: Xenon
• Electrical Consumption: 100kW
• Height: 0.25 m
• Diameter: 0.6 m
• Max Gimbal Angle: 0 degrees

Given the extremely long burn times, these engines aren't very useful when playing the game at normal speed. This weekend I've been prototyping how to use these engines while playing the game at up to 1,000x fast-forward mode. It makes playing with these engines far more enjoyable.

The cargo bay will open the door to many possibilities. The most obvious being the space shuttle. There are many more possibilities, but it really hinges on your creativity. I know the creativity of our players is far greater than my own and I can't wait to see what you do with them.



The cargo bay is our most complicated procedural part. It can be resized just like the fuel tank, so it can take on an infinite number of shapes. You can also change the angle the doors open as well as their speed.



My son just pointed out to me that the green one looks like a coffin. That wasn't the intention, but just add that to the list of things you can make with the cargo bay part. You could also use it to house custom-made, retractable landing gear. Or you could make a bomb bay (we don't have bombs, but you can pretty much make anything with the fuel tank part). Or set the open angle to zero and use it as a hollow fuselage.

Here are the part details:

• Mass: Your
• Price: Heart's
• Size: Desire
• Max Open Angle: 0 to 150 degrees
• Opening Speed: 10% to 250%

Also, in case you missed it, here are some screenshots of a Space Shuttle that Kevin made a few weeks ago. (The cargo bay has changed a lot since then).

Now that I have you, I should mention a little something about our launch date. Today we looked over the remaining tasks and the long list of bugs and we came to the conclusion that we are extremely unlikely to launch by end of summer (Sept 22nd). We are now putting our launch date in October. I am confident this will be the last slippage of schedule. If I'm wrong, I will eat black licorice. I hate black licorice.

We demoed SimpleRockets 2 at the Pixel Pop Festival in St Louis this weekend. Since many of you couldn't make it, we decided to make this video so you could have a virtual experience of our demo. Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/F6yg7Yi24pE

Also, here are some pictures we took at the event.