An Invitation to Players
As a kid I became fascinated by space travel. Watched every liftoff of NASA, watched every B-rated space film I could find and began reading science fiction. The more SCiFi I read the more my imagination began to grow, and it hasn’t stopped! Over their years of success and tragedy, NASA has become a household name and a singular authority of everything in space. The negative part was that many other nations across the world were often left in the hinterlands, so to speak. There is one group however, the European Space Administration (ESA), that I’d like to send a special shout out to and recognize as the inspiration for one of the newest space gadgets in our new game Rise Up! For those not wanting to know what it is, let me issue a spoiler alert. This is your official spoiler alert!
In our next iteration of Rise Up! We will be implementing a gadget inspired by the ESA. In 2013 the ESA tested the idea of enveloping a dead satellite with a net designed to knock the satellite out of its orbit and burn up in reentry. The video of the ESA satellite shooting it’s net and enveloping the dead satellite inspired me to speak with our 3D modeler and this is what we came up with – Net Gun.
As you can see in the image at the top, instead of being a satellite, our Net Gun fits conveniently on the front of The Drone like a really cool hood ornament. Our Net Gun is primed with three “loads”. A load is a single cartridge with a solid fuel propellant to move it’s cargo to the piece of space junk. A proximity switch creates an explosive charge to open the cartridge propelling our net forward to envelop the piece of space junk. A carbon fibre line, attached to the net, is loose with little to no friction. The Drone reels in the nicely wrapped piece of space junk and secures it to the underside of the Drone for the trip back home. Watching the net unfold heading straight for a piece of space junk is really sweet to see. I can’t wait for everyone to see this bit of game magic.
In building the story of Ian and his dreams, I came across a video created by the ESA team featuring their satellite “killer”. I’ve attached the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvgctXXzIYA for everyone to see the imagination and skill of the ESA. Their video was and remains amazing! Incredibly genius! It’s simple, clean, and efficient! I was so amazed to see the video. I watched it again and again and again and a bunch more times. I am still gobsmacked by what I saw.
What’s amazing is the following stats: there are 23,000 pieces of space junk at least the size of a softball, with 500,000 the size of a marble and millions the size of a centimeter. Ok so there’s a great deal of stuff out there. Here’s the cool stuff, each piece of space junk travels at 4.3 to 5 miles per second. The impact is equivalent to a bowling ball traveling at 300 mile per hour. The other interesting part is Dr. Donald Kesseler, NASA researcher in the 60s, first issued a warning about the potential danger of collisions in space. His work is referred to as the ‘Kessler Syndrome’. The Syndrome refers to colliding space junk creating a chain reaction of like and larger collisions eventually shutting down earth from space in all of its forms. Earth becomes a bit of a galactic problem! But others say that it’s not likely to be the scale as envisioned by Kessler and dramatised in Alfonso Cuarón’s film Gravity.
That’s the long story. The short story is, I’d really like to meet the ESA and find a way to use their technology in our games! They are amazing folks. We at FricknFrack Games are big fans. So, if anyone has any connections to the ESA, please have them contact me. This is a really serious request!
