An aerospace engineering sandbox where you can design and fly rockets, ballistic missiles, jet-powered aircraft, hybrid jet-rocket spacecraft and aircraft, landers, rovers, cars, tanks, and many other vehicular contraptions using a wide variety of customizable pieces and parts in any way you want. It uses a fairly realistic physics simulation with Classical Mechanics (Newtonian Physics) implemented quite accurately. It is also available via Steam for PC on Windows, and as an Android smartphone app available on the Google Play Store. It's a fantastic game and I highly recommend it if you're into engineering sandboxes with pilotable/controllable vehicles. :)
Yes! Great idea! I was going to suggest this as well. Additionally, it would be cool if the sonic boom occurred at different speeds at different altitudes and or different atmospheric compositions (on planets other than Droo/Earth). :)
PositivePlanes, thanks for taking the time and making the effort to write these SR2O's, it's like a Simple Rockets 2 online magazine or brief newspaper. I love to read them, and they enliven the SR2 forums. Keep up, the great work! :)
I really want to see this suggestion implemented, it's not small feat, but it could theoretically be done at some point! Perhaps it could be a toggled option in the gameplay settings menu or designer menu: "advanced procedural engines", off by default so new players don't get overwhelmed. :)
@DPSAircraftManufacturer Well, there are actually many cases of rockets being launched from under the water, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(missile)
I think we should turn this into a suggestion/request, I've been pondering the same question for a while now. I'd love to have a more in-depth (pun-intended) water simulation in-game! The Sea Dragon was an incredible rocket design. :)
I agree, Alta2809! I'd love to be able to add a high-explosive (or even nuclear) warhead to my missiles! It would be even more amazing to have customizable radars you could install in a nosecone or anywhere else in a craft, then I could make ABMs! You could select the wavelength of the radar, whether it's manual/mechanical sweep or AESA. I doubt that would ever be added, but it would enable players to build things like ICBM's with separating MIRV warheads, and also create ABM's to intercept the warheads at some point in their ballistic trajectory. But, that's all lofty stuff with the radar simulation and would probably require too much CPU/GPU performance to simulate properly. If the devs just added procedurally-generated/custom explosive warheads of different types (selectable explosive compound type, selectable fuze type, selectable mass/volume of explosive compound, etc...) I would be extremely excited and would make great use of it for crafting many different types of missiles and rockets! :)
This is a great piece of constructive advice for newcomers! It's much better to help advise and train newcomers than to bash them for being confused or lost when they first start playing this new, more complex game after coming from SP or SR1. :)
Simple things I can think of off the top of my head include:
1. Make sure you have RCS fuel (monopropellant) in a fuel tank attached to the RCS thrusters.
2. Make sure (in the part settings) of each RCS thruster nozzle that it is set to consume enough fuel when it fires to be of sufficient thrust to move your craft.
3. Make sure the RCS nozzles are near the top of your craft (higher than center-of-mass) to give them more lever-arm force (torque) thus making them more effective.
4. Make sure your RCS nozzles are evenly spaced around the body of your craft, an easy way to do this is use part-mirroring on one of the RCS nozzles to make it repeat so each side of your craft's fuselage/body has an RCS nozzle on it so thrust applied is even.
5. Make sure the RCS nozzles are in an activation group that is activated when you want to use them, to edit activation groups, open the part settings of your command pod or command chip in the designer/editor.
rincorvia, thanks for teaching science! I highly recommend Universe Sandbox 2 as well, it's a really powerful astronomy and physics educational "game", you'll need Steam for that as well though. Good luck!
This is amazing! I'd love to see more charts/diagrams like this, they'd come in very handy for certain scenarios and crafts. Also, I agree with @JohnnyBoythePilot as I too think there should be more spaceports and launch complexes with long runways on Droo in Simple Rockets 2. It would make space-plane type crafts more fun to fly since you could launch from one complex on Droo, go into orbit, travel a long distance around Droo, then re-enter the atmosphere and land the space-plane at a different runway at a distant air/space port. Keep up the awesome work! :)
If living characters are added to SR2, it would be cool if they were humanoid/bipedal creatures approximately resembling humans but concealed by the space suits they are wearing all the time. It would be really cool if the "pilots" also had basic pathfinding AI, inverse-kinematics for walking, and were able to be controlled by mouse + keyboard from first or third person with some basic arm/hand functions for pushing buttons, grabbing small objects, etc... Then they'd actually be useful when they exit a lander craft on a distant planet like Cylero. :)
@Kell Thanks for the clarification! I humbly suggest you put the Delta-V units on your .PNG chart to help others who might have the same question in the future. Thanks and keep up the awesome work! :D
I second this, it would be nice to have S-pen support in the mobile version of SR2, it would really really help with user-input accuracy and efficiency!
@diegoavion84 Cool, I enjoy reading "hard-sci-fi", have you visited the AtomicRockets website? It's incredibly useful for writing more realistic, real physics-based science fiction. Check it out here: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php
@Bmcclory Haha, thanks, didn't know that. I upvoted all of you because I'm relatively new to the forum and the replies to the O.P.'s questions were helpful to my understanding of how the rank system works here. :)
@diegoavion84 Cool, so this is a new, original, lore-rich, fictional universe that has something to do with rocket science or rocket engineering? Is it science-fiction? I've never heard of this before, from your post it seems kind of like Ace Combat's Strangereal fictional universe but more in space. Is that the type of genre of this work of yours? Thanks!
@diegoavion84 Yeah, will you be making any sort of comics, photos, videos, or any other media using Simple Rockets 2 (its game engine/the game) as part of this project?
I have it ported and partially running on my PDP-1 Mini-computer! Check out this gameplay footage I recorded on my 8mm phone camera: https://youtu.be/eePWlLKm_Bg?t=4
@Mostly I completely agree. I'm building a multi-stage rocket right now that has a final upper stage with a nose-cone fairing-enclosed lander vehicle, the lander is quite large, and the main rocket is about 4x larger than the lander. The lander has a lot of fuel tanks stacked vertically and it doesn't fit into the maximum-sized nose-cone fairing the game has. I wish the upper-size limit/restriction on all of the parts was from 2-4x larger in volume, but especially the fairings, so I can enclose a larger lander vehicle as the upper-most stage, which helps tremendously with overall aerodynamics and reduces drag. Great suggestion! :)
Thanks so much Aerojet Mariodyne corporation! I would wear an AJMD hat to my rocket launches if I could get one... and my rockets existed in the real world. ;)
@Ehelium2 Yes, I agree completely with Ehelium2, next we need more options and sizes for rocket landing legs. I'd love to see a much wider range of size scaling for landing legs, since the current legs don't scale large enough to reach the ground before my engine nozzles (especially aerospikes) touch the ground. Also, it would be great if there was an option in lander leg part's config menu in the builder/designer that allow the rocket's first stage to start with the legs open and extended on the launchpad. :)
@pedro16797 Pedro, thanks I'll link two multi-stage rocket designs of mine, one that functions properly, and one that explodes on the launchpad every time (it's slightly larger and has more stages/engines). I'll post the link here when I get a chance. :)
@pedro16797 Thanks for the information, pedro! So, I've tested out adding an interstage at the very bottom of my rockets to cover the first stage's engines, I've also tested out various pre-launch rocket-holding clamps made of struts, smaller fuel tanks, and detachers. Yet, my multi-stage rockets with large fuel tanks for each stage (from 4-to-6 stages total) with each fuel tank carrying 6 or more engines under it (attached with fuel adapters), continue to explode. It's always the fuel tanks themselves that explode and always the first stage, followed by the collapse and explosion of the rest of the rocket from bottom-to-top. To me, this at first seemed like some parts were accidentally detached in the designer, but I tested this idea by painstakingly re-attaching every single part of my rocket and verifying the proper staging sequence 100%. I left no stone unturned, and again the first stages just can't stop exploding. I've even scrapped all of my former designs and built entirely new rockets in the latest public game version 0.7.x, starting simple and working my way up to larger multi-stage rockets. There is some "magic" threshold of fuel-tank size, number of stages, and number of attached rocket engines (any type), where any design larger/more-complex and its first stages are guaranteed to explode. This has all led me to form the hypothesis that the game somehow simulates structural integrity already, and that too much fuel-mass for a given size (area and volume) of fuel tank, with more than one-stage, results in the fuel tanks collapsing and then exploding, and since it's always the first stage that collapses followed by the upper-stages, there seem to be hard limits on the mass-size ratio of fuel tanks in this game. It's either that or there's some bug causing engines to fall off or some sort of part clipping when rockets reach a certain size and number of stages. Because all of my large rocket designs used to work prior to version 0.7 without any support structures, struts, ground-level interstage. So, do you think that the fuel tanks are collapsing due to structural integrity limits? Or, do you think the fuel adapters are breaking due to their load-bearing limits (I like to use multiple, very large engines connected to fuel tanks with adapters)? I've even tried "cheating" by reducing the total mass of the fully-fueled tanks, engines, etc.. as well as increasing stability values in the tweaking options per-part. Thanks! Just trying to get to the bottom of this issue, your help is appreciated. :)
@pedro16797 Oh that's interesting, I was under the impression that the game already included structural integrity simulation. I've noticed that making a rocket's fuel tank too large and filling it with 100% fuel, making its ratio of mass : volume ratio too high, will cause the first/lower stage structures to break and explode first on the launchpad, followed by the upper stages falling to the ground and also exploding. So, I discovered the only way to avoid structural collapse of my very heavy rockets was to build my rocket using a greater number of smaller-volume fuel tanks for each stage. So, my suggestion was based on this in-game observation, since I thought that a good solution to large fuel tanks collapsing and exploding under too much load-bearing stress would be to give players the option to make their fuel tanks out of stronger/lighter materials (e.g. metal composites or carbon fiber). As it would reduce total rocket mass and allow for carrying more fuel, extending range, and require fewer parts, which would decrease complexity while speeding up simulation frame-rate. If the game doesn't, or never will, include structural integrity simulation then there is no point in having stronger materials since the standard fuel tanks we have now would be infinitely strong. But, that's not been my experience so far with the game, thanks.
An aerospace engineering sandbox where you can design and fly rockets, ballistic missiles, jet-powered aircraft, hybrid jet-rocket spacecraft and aircraft, landers, rovers, cars, tanks, and many other vehicular contraptions using a wide variety of customizable pieces and parts in any way you want. It uses a fairly realistic physics simulation with Classical Mechanics (Newtonian Physics) implemented quite accurately. It is also available via Steam for PC on Windows, and as an Android smartphone app available on the Google Play Store. It's a fantastic game and I highly recommend it if you're into engineering sandboxes with pilotable/controllable vehicles. :)
4.6 years agoYes! Great idea! I was going to suggest this as well. Additionally, it would be cool if the sonic boom occurred at different speeds at different altitudes and or different atmospheric compositions (on planets other than Droo/Earth). :)
+1 4.6 years agoPositivePlanes, thanks for taking the time and making the effort to write these SR2O's, it's like a Simple Rockets 2 online magazine or brief newspaper. I love to read them, and they enliven the SR2 forums. Keep up, the great work! :)
+1 4.6 years agoI really want to see this suggestion implemented, it's not small feat, but it could theoretically be done at some point! Perhaps it could be a toggled option in the gameplay settings menu or designer menu: "advanced procedural engines", off by default so new players don't get overwhelmed. :)
+1 4.6 years ago@DPSAircraftManufacturer Well, there are actually many cases of rockets being launched from under the water, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(missile)
+1 4.6 years agoI think we should turn this into a suggestion/request, I've been pondering the same question for a while now. I'd love to have a more in-depth (pun-intended) water simulation in-game! The Sea Dragon was an incredible rocket design. :)
+1 4.6 years agoI agree, Alta2809! I'd love to be able to add a high-explosive (or even nuclear) warhead to my missiles! It would be even more amazing to have customizable radars you could install in a nosecone or anywhere else in a craft, then I could make ABMs! You could select the wavelength of the radar, whether it's manual/mechanical sweep or AESA. I doubt that would ever be added, but it would enable players to build things like ICBM's with separating MIRV warheads, and also create ABM's to intercept the warheads at some point in their ballistic trajectory. But, that's all lofty stuff with the radar simulation and would probably require too much CPU/GPU performance to simulate properly. If the devs just added procedurally-generated/custom explosive warheads of different types (selectable explosive compound type, selectable fuze type, selectable mass/volume of explosive compound, etc...) I would be extremely excited and would make great use of it for crafting many different types of missiles and rockets! :)
+2 4.6 years agoNice!
4.6 years ago@Ammconn You're very welcome, feel free to ask away if you have any more issues. Take care! :)
+1 4.6 years ago@Planefun I'm not new to this game, but I still run into issues with building large crafts, thanks so much for the offer of help! Take care. :)
4.6 years agoThis is a great piece of constructive advice for newcomers! It's much better to help advise and train newcomers than to bash them for being confused or lost when they first start playing this new, more complex game after coming from SP or SR1. :)
+1 4.6 years agoSimple things I can think of off the top of my head include:
1. Make sure you have RCS fuel (monopropellant) in a fuel tank attached to the RCS thrusters.
2. Make sure (in the part settings) of each RCS thruster nozzle that it is set to consume enough fuel when it fires to be of sufficient thrust to move your craft.
3. Make sure the RCS nozzles are near the top of your craft (higher than center-of-mass) to give them more lever-arm force (torque) thus making them more effective.
4. Make sure your RCS nozzles are evenly spaced around the body of your craft, an easy way to do this is use part-mirroring on one of the RCS nozzles to make it repeat so each side of your craft's fuselage/body has an RCS nozzle on it so thrust applied is even.
5. Make sure the RCS nozzles are in an activation group that is activated when you want to use them, to edit activation groups, open the part settings of your command pod or command chip in the designer/editor.
Hope that helps!
+3 4.6 years agoWell, great job anyway, it's a cool picture! :)
+1 4.7 years agoNice work! Very helpful chart you've made here. It's cool to see the difference in sizes between the game's planets. :)
+1 4.7 years ago@DPSAircraftManufacturer I'll try and upload my super-heavy rockets online so you can download them from a link, thanks!
+1 4.7 years agorincorvia, thanks for teaching science! I highly recommend Universe Sandbox 2 as well, it's a really powerful astronomy and physics educational "game", you'll need Steam for that as well though. Good luck!
4.7 years agoWow, thanks for working on this and releasing it! I can't wait to land on some moons of Tydos! :)
+1 4.7 years agoAtlas V!
+1 4.7 years agoYes, you should buy Simple Rockets 2, if you enjoy engineering sandboxes!
4.7 years agoThis is amazing! I'd love to see more charts/diagrams like this, they'd come in very handy for certain scenarios and crafts. Also, I agree with @JohnnyBoythePilot as I too think there should be more spaceports and launch complexes with long runways on Droo in Simple Rockets 2. It would make space-plane type crafts more fun to fly since you could launch from one complex on Droo, go into orbit, travel a long distance around Droo, then re-enter the atmosphere and land the space-plane at a different runway at a distant air/space port. Keep up the awesome work! :)
+3 4.7 years agoIf living characters are added to SR2, it would be cool if they were humanoid/bipedal creatures approximately resembling humans but concealed by the space suits they are wearing all the time. It would be really cool if the "pilots" also had basic pathfinding AI, inverse-kinematics for walking, and were able to be controlled by mouse + keyboard from first or third person with some basic arm/hand functions for pushing buttons, grabbing small objects, etc... Then they'd actually be useful when they exit a lander craft on a distant planet like Cylero. :)
4.7 years ago@Kell Great, thanks for your continuing hard work! :)
4.7 years ago@Kell Thanks for the clarification! I humbly suggest you put the Delta-V units on your .PNG chart to help others who might have the same question in the future. Thanks and keep up the awesome work! :D
4.7 years agoAre the "Required Delta-V" units in meters-per-second or kilometers? Thanks!
4.7 years agoI second this, it would be nice to have S-pen support in the mobile version of SR2, it would really really help with user-input accuracy and efficiency!
+2 4.7 years ago@Kell That was fast! Watching it now! :D
+1 4.7 years agoI can't wait to see it, Kell!
4.7 years agoYes please! :)
4.8 years agoWOW! Very impressive craft you've built! :)
4.8 years agoAlso, see this resource on projectrho: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sfbackground.php
+1 4.8 years ago@diegoavion84 Cool, I enjoy reading "hard-sci-fi", have you visited the AtomicRockets website? It's incredibly useful for writing more realistic, real physics-based science fiction. Check it out here: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php
+1 4.8 years ago@Bmcclory Haha, thanks, didn't know that. I upvoted all of you because I'm relatively new to the forum and the replies to the O.P.'s questions were helpful to my understanding of how the rank system works here. :)
+2 4.8 years ago@diegoavion84 Cool, so this is a new, original, lore-rich, fictional universe that has something to do with rocket science or rocket engineering? Is it science-fiction? I've never heard of this before, from your post it seems kind of like Ace Combat's Strangereal fictional universe but more in space. Is that the type of genre of this work of yours? Thanks!
+1 4.8 years agoI read this post in John F. Kennedy's voice.
+2 4.8 years agoI just gave all of you some free points. ;)
+3 4.8 years ago@diegoavion84 Yeah, will you be making any sort of comics, photos, videos, or any other media using Simple Rockets 2 (its game engine/the game) as part of this project?
4.8 years agoCool, are you going to make machinimas using the engine?
+1 4.8 years agoI have it ported and partially running on my PDP-1 Mini-computer! Check out this gameplay footage I recorded on my 8mm phone camera: https://youtu.be/eePWlLKm_Bg?t=4
4.8 years agoVery creative, are you creating a custom lore/universe based in SR2 and SP?
+1 4.8 years agoWonderful screenshots and a beautiful message, I too thank the developers for this amazing game! :)
+2 4.8 years ago@Mostly I completely agree. I'm building a multi-stage rocket right now that has a final upper stage with a nose-cone fairing-enclosed lander vehicle, the lander is quite large, and the main rocket is about 4x larger than the lander. The lander has a lot of fuel tanks stacked vertically and it doesn't fit into the maximum-sized nose-cone fairing the game has. I wish the upper-size limit/restriction on all of the parts was from 2-4x larger in volume, but especially the fairings, so I can enclose a larger lander vehicle as the upper-most stage, which helps tremendously with overall aerodynamics and reduces drag. Great suggestion! :)
+2 4.8 years agoAwesome!
4.8 years agoThanks so much Aerojet Mariodyne corporation! I would wear an AJMD hat to my rocket launches if I could get one... and my rockets existed in the real world. ;)
+1 4.8 years agoWOW! This is a very comprehensive tutorial, and was very helpful to me, thanks for making this! :)
4.8 years ago@MarioG I agree MarioG!
4.9 years ago@Ehelium2 Yes, I agree completely with Ehelium2, next we need more options and sizes for rocket landing legs. I'd love to see a much wider range of size scaling for landing legs, since the current legs don't scale large enough to reach the ground before my engine nozzles (especially aerospikes) touch the ground. Also, it would be great if there was an option in lander leg part's config menu in the builder/designer that allow the rocket's first stage to start with the legs open and extended on the launchpad. :)
+3 4.9 years agoI agree with the O.P.' suggestion, I think we'd all enjoy having more basic structural shapes to build with. :)
5.0 years ago@pedro16797 Pedro, thanks I'll link two multi-stage rocket designs of mine, one that functions properly, and one that explodes on the launchpad every time (it's slightly larger and has more stages/engines). I'll post the link here when I get a chance. :)
5.0 years ago@pedro16797 Thanks for the information, pedro! So, I've tested out adding an interstage at the very bottom of my rockets to cover the first stage's engines, I've also tested out various pre-launch rocket-holding clamps made of struts, smaller fuel tanks, and detachers. Yet, my multi-stage rockets with large fuel tanks for each stage (from 4-to-6 stages total) with each fuel tank carrying 6 or more engines under it (attached with fuel adapters), continue to explode. It's always the fuel tanks themselves that explode and always the first stage, followed by the collapse and explosion of the rest of the rocket from bottom-to-top. To me, this at first seemed like some parts were accidentally detached in the designer, but I tested this idea by painstakingly re-attaching every single part of my rocket and verifying the proper staging sequence 100%. I left no stone unturned, and again the first stages just can't stop exploding. I've even scrapped all of my former designs and built entirely new rockets in the latest public game version 0.7.x, starting simple and working my way up to larger multi-stage rockets. There is some "magic" threshold of fuel-tank size, number of stages, and number of attached rocket engines (any type), where any design larger/more-complex and its first stages are guaranteed to explode. This has all led me to form the hypothesis that the game somehow simulates structural integrity already, and that too much fuel-mass for a given size (area and volume) of fuel tank, with more than one-stage, results in the fuel tanks collapsing and then exploding, and since it's always the first stage that collapses followed by the upper-stages, there seem to be hard limits on the mass-size ratio of fuel tanks in this game. It's either that or there's some bug causing engines to fall off or some sort of part clipping when rockets reach a certain size and number of stages. Because all of my large rocket designs used to work prior to version 0.7 without any support structures, struts, ground-level interstage. So, do you think that the fuel tanks are collapsing due to structural integrity limits? Or, do you think the fuel adapters are breaking due to their load-bearing limits (I like to use multiple, very large engines connected to fuel tanks with adapters)? I've even tried "cheating" by reducing the total mass of the fully-fueled tanks, engines, etc.. as well as increasing stability values in the tweaking options per-part. Thanks! Just trying to get to the bottom of this issue, your help is appreciated. :)
5.1 years ago@pedro16797 Oh that's interesting, I was under the impression that the game already included structural integrity simulation. I've noticed that making a rocket's fuel tank too large and filling it with 100% fuel, making its ratio of mass : volume ratio too high, will cause the first/lower stage structures to break and explode first on the launchpad, followed by the upper stages falling to the ground and also exploding. So, I discovered the only way to avoid structural collapse of my very heavy rockets was to build my rocket using a greater number of smaller-volume fuel tanks for each stage. So, my suggestion was based on this in-game observation, since I thought that a good solution to large fuel tanks collapsing and exploding under too much load-bearing stress would be to give players the option to make their fuel tanks out of stronger/lighter materials (e.g. metal composites or carbon fiber). As it would reduce total rocket mass and allow for carrying more fuel, extending range, and require fewer parts, which would decrease complexity while speeding up simulation frame-rate. If the game doesn't, or never will, include structural integrity simulation then there is no point in having stronger materials since the standard fuel tanks we have now would be infinitely strong. But, that's not been my experience so far with the game, thanks.
5.1 years ago