Mod Showcase - The Model Rockets Mod

The model rockets mod was the first mod available for this game, and frankly I quite like it.

The model rockets mod was selected to be the first officially curated mod, but what does that mean? The mod will now be availible for download alongside the game itself and will be maintained by me so that it does not become outdated when the game or modding SDK are updated. The mod has also been scrutinized for security purposes and has proven to be as safe as the original game itself (which is to say I cannot find any possible problems with it).

Now with that lengthy and boring stuff out of the way, what is the Model Rockets Mod?

The Model Rockets Mod adds 5 new rockets, all based off of common model rocket kits. These rockets are:

• Generic Small Model Rocket
• Generic Medium Model Rocket
• Generic Large Model Rocket
• Estes SIDEKICK Model Rocket
• Estes COMANCHE-3 Model Rocket

Each of these rockets is simulated based off of the specifications from the datasheets that Estes makes publicly available. They are simulated in a 1000:1 scale, meaning 1 gram in real life is one kilogram in the simulation and 1 newton in real life is 1000 newtons in the simulation.

The first three rockets in the list are basic single stage rockets, but the sidekick and comanche-3 rockets are actually quite interesting. The comanche-3 is a three stage model rocket while the sidekick uses 2 engines simultaneously.

When I first started this project, I was building it as an entry into my school's hackathon, and the theme had been space potatoes. This theme is why the original payload was potatoes, but there is another piece to that story to. In the very first version, when you completed all of the objectives (this was before you could add new ones) it would send a signal to a contraption I built which would launch a model rocket with a potato duck taped to it. The rocket never launch because, as I learned with the new 10x speed option, completing the last objective takes just over twelve and a half hours at normal speed, which was the only option at the time. The rocket that would've been launched used as Estes A8-3 engine, which is the same engine simulated by the generic small model rocket, in fact, each engine in this mod provides a part number so that you can build the equivalent rocket in the real world if you wanted to.