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The makers of the popular spaceflight simulation video game Kerbal Space Program (KSP) have teamed up with real-life rocket company United Launch Alliance (ULA) and its CEO Tory Bruno for an online challenge to recreate ULA's new Vulcan Centaur rocket in the world of Kerbal.
Both companies recently completed their respective significant launches. An early access version of Kerbal Space Program 2 was released in 2023, and in December, the company sent out a major update called “For Science,” which beefed up the game's physics and added the objective-oriented ability to collect different types of science throughout the countless environments. Located in the solar system Kerbal.
Meanwhile, ULA recently launched just after the new year, when the company's next generation was launched Vulcan Centaur The rocket was launched for the first time on January 8, 2024. In anticipation of this important event, KSP game director Nate Simpson said He visited ULA headquarters In Colorado to build a Vulcan rocket inside KSP with the help of some actual rocket scientists at ULA. After his visit, KSP posted on social media Share on X, formerly known as Twitter, invited users to submit copies of their Vulcan KSP fun games, enticing the possibility of “winning some goodies.” in Share follow“Recreate the #VulcanRocket in KSP 2 and see what types of missions you can accomplish. The more ambitious, the better,” KSP wrote, adding at the end of the post that Torre Bruno would announce his favorite at the end of the contest. Now the results are in!
Related: ULA's Vulcan rocket makes its first flight
Recreate #VulcanRocket in KSP 2 and see what types of missions you can accomplish. The more ambitious the better. Post your videos/photos, tag @ulalaunch and @KerbalSpaceP as well as #KSPVulcanRocket, and @torybruno will pick his favorites. You have until January 5!December 20, 2023
The winner of the KSP/ULA Vulcan Rocket Entertainment Challenge goes to X User The Space Peacock, (@Space_Peacock) with a near-perfect recreation of Vulcan, seen inside the KSP Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in its first appearance string of posts. Space Peacock recreated Vulcan's Cert-1 mission from January, then proceeded with a flight simulation of the Sierra Spacecraft. Dream catcher A spaceplane, and even included a reusable version of Vulcan's future SMART engine, bringing back the back of the first stage booster engine for ocean landing and recovery.
@KerbalSpaceP @ulalaunch @torybruno #KSPVulcanRocket I'm a bit late, but here is my recap of Vulcan Centaur in KSP2! string; pic.twitter.com/9BCx7064QzJanuary 6, 2024
Two runners-up were also selected, namely user X Albert Hajek (@albert_hajek) and YouTube channel PicoSpace Industries (@picospace). Hajek also published in string Outlines and demonstration of the launch of their version of Vulcan, which sent a lander to “Moon”, the KSP version of the moon. PicoSpace published a Vulcan rescue mission Video on YouTube, launching the rocket with a crew capsule into Kirbyn's orbit to rescue a stranded Kirbyn astronaut.
Hey @ulalaunch and @KerbalSpaceP I tried the #KSPVulcanRocket challenge. I tried to recreate Vulcan and took it for a ride with the lander and rover toward Moon. Hope you like it @torybruno! Sneak a peek at the photos here and the full gallery/story below -> pic.twitter.com/iK8pffAoJsJanuary 4, 2024
“I thought all three were great,” Tori Bruno said in an interview. ULA's CEO, along with KSP's Nate Simpson, sat down with Space.com to discuss the competition and the unique harmony Kerbal has created at the intersection of STEM education and entertainment.
“I don't like to play favorites,” Simpson said. “It's like you're asking me to choose between my kids. We're always very impressed and like to see a variety of solutions to the same problem.”
KSP2 is the long-awaited sequel to the popular KSP1 game, where players have the freedom to explore the entire game Solar System Planets and moons by designing, building, and launching their own rockets and payloads. The game gives players the ability to build everything from the simple Satellites The connection carries over to endlessly complex planetary exploration vehicles, but it comes with a bit of a learning curve.
Novice KSP1 players, especially those without some familiarity with physics or orbital mechanics, often find it difficult to get off the ground – let alone land a vehicle on Mun. Simpson says they've tried to remove that barrier, making KSP2 accessible and fun for players of any skill level. Having your rocket or spacecraft crash repeatedly is not uncommon, but it's also part of the point.
How do you find this balance?
Simpson: “We put a lot of energy into re-teaching the game, making it funny, making it delicious, and giving people information in small chunks so they can progress in a way that doesn't feel like it's wasting their time.” time. The most important thing was to teach a lesson that all rocket scientists already know, which is that the only way you learn is by failing.
Most video games punish failure and make the player feel bad. They make them feel like they did a bad job when they fail. A big part of changing that for us is learning how to celebrate failure; For something to be funny, make it something visually impressive and sonically impressive. I think at this point now, people show more about their failures than their successes. It's the thing they love to show off to each other online. So teaching this is really important. They need to understand that the experts – the people who do it for real, like the Tories – are not about being perfect on the first try. “It's about learning as much as you can from what's going on.”
Bruno, who admits to being an avid Kerbal player, says there is a “purity” in playing the game, and “if it blows up – all the better.”
One of the things that brought the KSP and ULA team together was a shared passion for advancing STEM education and initiatives. Many people in the aviation industry came to KSP Play because of their existing interest in the field, but almost as many found their interest in the field because of KSP.
“It's hard for me to find one of my engineers who doesn't play KSP. They just love it. It's a really good game. It's really cool,” Bruno said. ULA employs approximately 2,700 people, according to her website. On the other side of Kirpal's inspiration, Bruno said: “We have a very strong internship program where we bring in college students and new employees, and when I do a meeting with a group like this, I often hear how excited they are, how much they love KSP and how amazed they are that we, the professionals, are here.” [at ULA] Play it already. A lot of them will say, “You know, KSP really appealed to me, and I didn't think about that.” space until that time.'”
Simpson loves being part of a team creating such an impactful game, but he's weary of some of the assumptions newcomers might have when they hear about KSP's tendency to be “educational.”
“We sometimes get nervous when people call us tutorials, because that makes it sound like we eat vegetables,” he said. “What we've learned is that if you simulate the universe with a high enough level of fidelity and then give people interesting goals to achieve within that universe… just trying to win the game, is trying to get somewhere new — and you're competing with what are the real physical forces.” “And gravity, and aerodynamic drag, and all those things – you learn about accidental rocket science in a meaningful way.”
Regarding ULA and KSP's recent launches of the Vulcan rocket and the For Science update, respectively, both Bruno and Simpson spoke with resounding positivity and rosy expectations for the year ahead.
With KSP 2 still in Early Access, Simpson and his team are relying on players to help them overcome the game's sometimes difficult aspects. “This is definitely the biggest year for KSP 2, because we're kind of moving into future technology. That was a big part of the promise of the game. So it's going to be fun to see what people do with nuclear pulse fusion, inertial confinement and all the fancy toys that are coming,” he said. .
“Our players are now helping us focus on potential areas of improvement. With the start of this year, we have our first access to exciting new features that we haven't seen in KSP1. First, we will [settlements]. And [settlements] “We'll be enabling construction in orbit, and that's kind of a necessary precursor for us to move into the future of space technology, where we'll begin interstellar travel, introducing a new star system,” Simpson said.
At Vulcan, Bruno says the rocket's first flight went “perfectly.”
“Your first new rocket launch usually does one of two things: Either it explodes, or you have some multiple major anomalies during the flight — even if the flight is completed — that didn't go as planned. Then you always have this kind of event that It's a year-long design course where you sort it all out. This is very typical. I probably made thirty first flights in the vehicle. So you know, I'm speaking from experience. “This trip was different…we just had the perfect mission.”
“I was sitting there at the console a few hours after launch, and at some point, I was convinced my headset was broken. Because there's always chatter, and there's things happening, and there's ice falling on the cord, or 'There's a thermocouple down and people are working. Through it all. And there is nothing. It's completely silent for about 25 minutes and I'm like, “Oh, hey, I think my headset is broken. I need some support here,” and they're like, “No, no, literally nothing happened, Tori. It's okay.” So we counted down and literally went in the first second of the window, and he was nominally dead the whole time… I've never done a count that way before.”
Torre Bruno
Instead of a year to analyze data from the Vulcan flight in January, Bruno says ULA teams will likely complete their assessment within another week. On launch day, Bruno described things as going very smoothly, and attributed the silence on the mission control communications channel during pre-launch preparations to a systems glitch.
Vulcan is scheduled for a total of six flights in 2024, which Bruno says ULA is on track to launch, but he stressed that the launch vehicle is only the last leg in the process of getting a spacecraft into orbit.
“The rocket is at the end of that long journey of designing, building, delivering the spacecraft and everything you know, all but one [the spacecraft launching on that manifest] It's still under construction or testing, so if there are delays, we wait for them, or reorder the manifest. But so far, so good. “It's still early in the year,” Bruno said.
The early access version of Kerbal Space Program 2 is available Now on the company's website.
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