Controls: W/S/click ends of throttle- throttle up/down X- Set throttle to zero Z- Floor it! Set throttle to maximum A/D pitch up/down B- Deploy speed brakes / wheel brakes R/Onscreen button- Toggle RCS (maneuvering thrusters) T/Onscreen button- Toggle ACS (auto-stabilization) Spacebar/Onscreen button- Toggle engines between airbreathing (jet engine) and closedcycle (rocket engine) mode. V - Toggle vertical thrust mode. This isn't remotely realistic or anything, but it's fun. Note that the vertical engines are rockets, not jets, so you must be in rocket mode to active them, they'll need both fuel and oxidizer, and they will use it very fast. 2- Show/hide debugging variables. If you like, you can show and hide the control panel by clicking at the top of the screen. If hidden, it will reappear when moused over. It is recommended that you turn on ACS when the flight starts, or your plane's nose will tend to drop. If you want to achieve a very high angle of attack (such as during your rocket burn), you may want to turn on RCS for more control. The blue indicator on the gray navigation wheel shows you which direction your plane is pointing, relative to the green indicator, which shows the direction you're moving. If you get high enough and fast enough (the top ends of both the speed indicators and the altitude indicators, the VAC and ORB lights will illuminate, indicating that you are in space and orbiting the planet, respectively. Landing back on the runway and coming to a stop will resupply you with fuel and oxidizer. Didn't make it to orbit on the first try? You can always try again!
This is a 2D sidescroller airplane simulator, inspired by a featured project by Naboosf. In this project, the plane is equipped with dual-mode engines which allow it to reach low Earth orbit. --FAQ-- "How do I reach orbit? I'm going into space but I just fall back to the ground!" You also have to go sideways very fast to orbit. Not only must you reach space and have the VAC light come on, but you must also max out the speed meter while flying level and have the ORB light come on. "There isn't enough fuel to reach orbit! It always runs out before I can get enough speed!" I carefully test the project every time I update it, and there is enough fuel to reach orbit if you fly the plane correctly. The whole point of this game is to figure out how to do that, so you can expect to have flights where you don't make it at all, and ones where you reach orbit but don't have enough fuel to come home. "What determines how much thrust the engine produces?" You probably noticed that the thrust gauge is all over the place during flight. The power of the rocket mode scales with atmosphere density (thinner+higher is better), while the airbreathing jet mode's thrust has optimum values for speed and altitude - above or below these, it will drop off. "I keep falling through the ground!" I have limited experience with this bug myself, but for a while, Windows machines had trouble with this project in Google Chrome, which resulted in weird physics errors. At the moment, I mainly use Scratch in Chromium on Linux, which works well. If you get weird glitches, try switching to another browser. "Help! The speed brake doesn't work and I can't slow down!" The speed brake is a marginal increase to your very low supersonic drag. Don't expect it to drop your speed immediately like a car brake. "If I fly really fast close to the ground, I start wobbling around and crash!" That's a limitation of Scratch, unfortunately - too much floating-point division makes it slow and prone to error. Just pretend it's turbulence close to the ground. "I don't think a specific feature of the physics behavior in this game is realistic!" You could easily be right. I don't pretend to know much about supersonic fluid mechanics, and if you do, you can probably see about a hundred things I did laughably wrong. Unfortunately, aerospace engineering is not my major, nor do I have time to research every last detail. This is a small two-dimensional browser game written in Scratch - perfection is just not within my scope. "This looks like Kerbal Space Program!" This was heavily inspired by KSP, but it is not KSP. Expect a 2D version of KSP and you will be disappointed. "Will you add a specific feature I suggest to this game?" I am not necessarily done adding things to this game. Bored afternoons often turn into new details and behaviors, but I also don't make any guarantees. In general, you are welcome to request things, but don't be too disappointed if I never get around to adding them. In addition, the following things will not be added and should not be suggested: -Weapons. I love making space war projects, but this is not one of them. -3D graphics. I'm no good at 3D. -Other planets, moons, FTL drives, or futuristic technology. Those would be a bit awkward to implement in a 2D sidescroller. -Buildings, hills, or other on-ground features. I tried this before, as you can see from the extra ground sprites. Unfortunately, there's no good way to make it run fast enough to be practical - the ground already lowers the framerate substantially when you're close to it. With that being said, I do have some planned features for next time I get bored: -Reentry heating - go too fast too low in the atmosphere and you will explode! -Deployable satellites -Docking with a space station -More sound effects -Improved visual aerodynamic effects to replace the kitschy ones in use now If you like this project, tell me what you think in the comments! If you want to remix it to add a features or change how it behaves and need help understanding how its code works, let me know in the comments, and we can open a forum thread to talk about it!
