Later, using a save file provided by the developer, I land a rover on the game’s equivalent of Mars, but within 20 seconds I flip it and get stuck upside down.Īfter half a day with this game (and a couple of weeks with the original, years ago), I have pretty much become a moon-landing denier, because it now seems even more unfathomable that mere humans could possibly have got a real craft into space and back again without everything going tits-up. As in real life space flight, a tiny miscalculation can throw the whole mission, and adjusting even the smallest thing on the fly requires a flurry of high-speed calculations (though, unlike in real life, here you can pause time to sort things out). My experience of the game is not atypical, and boils down to building a rocket, adding some cool wings to it on a whim, crashing, tinkering, making minor adjustments, crashing again, removing the wings and adding more thrusters, crashing once more, and eventually feeling such elation when I make it out of the planet’s atmosphere for the first time that I forget to adjust my trajectory correctly and plummet back to Earth instead of achieving a stable orbit. “As a sci-fi nerd, being able to see what people really have to think about was intriguing.” “The reality of space travel is sometimes stranger than fiction,” says lead designer Shana Markham, who joined Intercept Games in 2019. One member of the Intercept Games development team is a former engineer who worked with the Canadian space agency on ground missions another came to the studio after running an educational podcast series on space exploration. To simulate this, the team has worked with experts from everywhere, from the ESA to fusion scientists working on near-future fuel technology. Made by a new team, it feels pretty early and unstable to play, but over the next couple of years it hopes to offer players the chance to go even further than the Kerbal solar system and its celestial bodies, travelling between stars. I am here to play Kerbal Space Program 2, which recently launched in early access on PC games storefront Steam. It is beloved by space and astrophysics enthusiasts, who have posted thousands of hours of gameplay video showing off their unlikely crafts and ambitious missions in this simulated solar system. To do this, though – and leave the launchpad without exploding – you have to develop a pretty good understanding of the physics of space travel, calculating orbit trajectories and figuring out how much fuel you need, and whether you can carry it without messing up your thrust-to-weight ratio. He asked some of his engineering undergraduates whether they had heard of a game called Kerbal Space Program, only to discover that half the class were there because of the game.įirst playable in 2011, Kerbal Space Program is an idiosyncratic and extremely difficult video game that involves getting little green aliens off the surface of their planet using rockets that you must cobble together from a library of parts. A professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, he was a busy individual, and not exactly an avid gamer. W hen Dr Uri Shumlak was contacted by a video game developer who wanted to discuss his work on interstellar propulsion, for a game about spaceflight, he was wary.
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