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More than anything else
I’m the most excited to depict
what the near future of
spaceflight may look like.
How do we get to actually
freighting things back and forth
between planets and making commuter
trips to all this planets.
What does that look
like in reaching that point?
We are proposing in Kerbal Space Program 2
technologies that would facilitate that.
There was a program called Project Orion
that was, in the 50s and 60s,
specifically intended to
develop this technology
that involved spitting out tiny nuclear bombs
end exploding them against a pusher plate
that was attached to a vehicle
by giant shock absorbers
and they got as far as conducting experiments with
pusher plates and explosives in the real world.
And it was the partial nuclear test ban
treaty that put the kibosh on Project Orion.
Had that not occurred, we would probably be hauling stuff
around the solar system with nuclear pulse rockets today.
With KSP2 we are expanding the tech tree to
accommodate colonization and interstellar travel.
We have a lot of different kinds of
engines and vehicles that you can build.
We started digging into the research and
we discovered that there is in fact,
a speculative possible fuel
type called metallic hydrogen.
Metaestable metallic hydrogen,
in a very broader sense
can be about twice as powerful as any known
chemical propellent that’s used today.
We went to our subject matter expert at the
University of Washington, Dr. Uri Shumlak,
and we said, “we want to make some metallic
hydrogen rockets and here’s some doodles,
and I´m like,
"could you put radiator fins on it?”
He talked us through the heat management
issues that we would be dealing with.
Every architectural decision that we made
around the shapes of these engines
is about optimizing
their ability to stay cool.
We talked about different ways
of doping metallic hydrogen,
we have atmosphere rated metallic
hydrogen engines, with water,
and then for the later generations of metallic
hydrogen you’re using magnetic nozzles and deep space
to channel the combustion products of
metallic hydrogen mixed with cesium.
What the cesium will do is it will allow your exhaustion,
your metallic hydrogen, to be affected by magnets.
Your exhaust is no longer actually touching
large parts of your rocket assembly,
so it is not transferring the majority of its
ridiculous 6000 Kelvin heat to the rest of your rocket,
so it can safely fly through the vacuum
of space with absurd amounts of force.
However,
this does not function in atmosphere.
You have to get creative about “alright, at what
point do I break off from my metallic hydrogen engine
because I don’t want to try to land
on it and use my more standard lander,
and how do I relink to
that later if I want to?”
Metallic hydrogen engines are fantastic upgrades
from the standard KSP1 Methalox engines.
They just expand what
you are able to do in general.
There will be metallic hydrogen
fuel factories in our game,
it’s one of the many things that you do at a colony,
which is part of the reason you need colonies.
You need to be able to synthesize
some of these more exotic fuels.
And synthesizing it is an
unsolved engineering problem.
If we are able to create a quantity of
this stuff and, more importantly
figure out a material to build
an engine and a rocket out of,
that can actually withstand the
extreme heat of burning this stuff,
it completely changes
the nature of space travel.
It’s really exciting to be able to depict
that and what that might look like
and give you the chance to play with it
in Kerbal Space Program 2.
I was sitting down with Aaron,
our VFX artist, and trying to figure out
what the exhaust for this
engine is supposed to look like,
and I have a notion of what a rocket looks like
in a vacuum, so we kind of started from there,
and put it in front of Uri Shumlak, and he wrote back
one of the coolest emails I’ve ever read in my life.
Blackbody radiation,
chemical properties of metallic hydrogen…
he went way, way deep on this thing,
all to tell us that it would be…
pink.
No! Really?
So we were like “alright, the science is there, let’s
figure out what this pink exhaust would look like”,
and we built it up and the result is like
nothing you’ve ever seen before.
Before, every part exploded the same, whether it was
landing gear, a radar dish, a fuel tank… It didn’t matter.
We wanted to expand on the launch and explosions and really
on the exhaust to make it a little more toward real life.
We had to come up with a system that would know what
type of fuel it is, how much fuel it has, where is it,
in an atmosphere or in a vacuum, and then create
a system that would present the proper explosion.
We built in some randomness, just to make sure that no
matter what you would get a different looking explosion.
There's so many different things that can
happen, it’s just really cool to see that
depending on what you create it’s going to have a
different reaction to the world and where you are.
You know, for me, one of the fun things about
Kerbal Space Program is actually crashing.
Sometimes to figure out some of the reactions, I do
some experiments at home. You learn a lot from that.
It’s a fun thing to do and sometimes,
I build stuff just to watch it blow up.
After you have fully explored the Kerbolar System, there’s
a whole new category of engines that you move into.
They’re capable of burning for months or years.
Brachistochrone trajectories, interstellar engines...
Their potential top speed is very,
very high.
There is a fourth category of engine that
becomes accessible very late in the game
which I would describe
as a torch-ship engine.
This is sort of the Holy Grail, it is a
torch that you ride screaming white death.
We just keep finding really cool things
about what these technologies actually do.
We have the task and the privilege here of
depicting the near future of space travel
and how we are going to get from a single
planet civilization to a multiplanet species.
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