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A personal project to explain how the spaceships of future might work.

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Space journey

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Backstory

Since ancient times, mankind has dreamed of knowing what is there in the sky. There were always people who looked beyond their time. Many of them were looking for different ways to conquer an unknown and boundless cosmos. And it happened: April 12, 1961 the first man went into space. The length of the route was 40,868 km. For those times it was a huge distance. Nowadays, sending a person space is not something impossible or unattainable. But that first flight marked the beginning of the space age - the era of space exploration.

Using modern spaceships, you can fly to the Moon in 2 days, to Mars in 7 months, to Jupiter in 25 months. But humanity does not stop there and plans to make the first manned flight in the history of the Earth to the nearest star (after the Sun) - Alpha Centauri. But there is one catch — flying to this star will take about 93,000 years, which is unacceptable under such harsh conditions. Even if you use the theory of a colony inhabited by a ship flying to the star, the chance of survival in this colony is very low. The first problem, of course, is the food problem. The second problem is the human factor - the entire mission may fail due to the error of one person. If the outcome of the mission is unsuccessful, the entire colony will die, and people on Earth will only find out about this a couple of years after tens of thousands of years of expectations when the signal of failure reaches Earth.

Many space odyssey fans know firsthand what a warp engine is. In a nutshell, this engine allows you to move at speeds greater than the speed of light, working on "exotic matter".

warp_drive

The theory of theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierra allows you to physically describe the existence of such an engine. The essence of Miguel’s theory is that it is possible to bend space-time so that it moves with speeds exceeding the speed of light and does not violate Einstein’s theory of relativity. Alcubierre suggested that it is possible to create a so-called “bubble” in which the ship will be stationary, it will only control the shape and speed of the bubble. This method has one big drawback - the energy problem. Scientists have calculated that to overcome the speed of light, a medium-sized ship will need a mass of matter that exceeds the mass of the Universe! A solution to this problem was found by NASA engineer Harold White. White believes that by changing the shape of the bubble to cigar-shaped and increasing the thickness of the walls of the bubble, it is possible to drastically reduce the requirements for the energy expended, making it equivalent to about one ton of substance, and for a 10-meter object, even 500 kg. What is extremely important, such a change in shape makes the influence of the Alcubierre bubble on the surrounding normal space-time during braking less energetic, otherwise at the end of the journey the hypothetical traveler will simply destroy everything that is there.

Using this information, I thought, the first thing that scientists need after creating such a bubble is a program for calculating the motion of a ship. That is why I created a program that allows, at an early stage, to help people understand the concept of this engine.

The application

menu

My program consists of 3 sections:

  • Editor - in this section you can create your own cosmic levels and edit existing ones. This section was created primarily to give freedom of choice to man. If he wants to place the ship in a scene in which, for example, there will be several terrestrial planets and a gas planet - easily.

editor

  • Play mode (Play mode) - in this mode you can run the levels created in the editor.

game

  • Gallery - in this section, you can view dozens of photos that correspond to the theme of the program. Here are some additional features of my program:
  • Quick change of spaceships, each of which has its own set of parameters and properties.
  • Changes in graphics settings for comfortable work on weak devices.
  • Surface mode (beta) for exploring planetary surfaces.

Additional features and information is outlined in the poster below:

poster

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A personal project to explain how the spaceships of future might work.

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