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NASA Game Lets You Build Complex Space Networks
gregg writes "According to this article, a new game called NetworKing, developed at NASA's Ames Research Center, 'lets players build fast and efficient communication networks by first setting up command stations around the world and then linking them to orbiting satellites and space telescopes. Resources are earned throughout the game as players continue to acquire more clients.' The game is available for play through an internet browser, and also has downloadable versions for Windows and OS X."
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Don't click, that link is goatse.
Why am I out of mod points now?
Ran fine on windows 7, not that it was really entertaining just functional.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
it's the lame unity3d proprietary plugin
So, NASA. When's the next space shuttle rolling out the hangar door?
Do you guys even have anything to do with space anymore, or are you guys turning into a space gaming company?
Really, when I was a kid, I dreamed of going into space, and always thought it would be NASA that would pave the way forward. Instead, the US is spending their taxpayer's dollars on war, fake money on Wall Street, fake money in housing and more pork in Washington.
I really hope that the American spirit that the world admired rises up and quashes the plastique fantastique culture that is so pervasive in American culture today. And no, I'm not an American, I'm a European. Contrary to popular belief, we don't hate the American Spirit. We just hate the American perversion that's trying to kill it.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I just beat the game with minimal (read: no) effort in about 5 minutes. Yay!
Maybe I am a cynic, but do you think maybe they are looking for us to figure out effective deep space communications for them?
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Look ... I'm not terribly enthusiastic about the way the US is spending its efforts either. And I think part of the reason so much is wrong with our culture (I say "our" because I'm an American) is the complacency that almost naturally follows from perceived superiority of self, in the economic and political domains. My bet is that if Europe was in a similar position, it wouldn't be in too different a situation compared to the US - I really think it's part of human nature. So, while your point is legitimate, I don't think it's endemic to the US, but rather a property of the nation's current and historical societal position.
That said, I really don't think your criticisms of NASA are fair. Sure, we're not doing manned spaceflight at the moment. But that overlooks two points: first, that manned spaceflight is more romantic than scientific (granted, the romantic aspect is not a bad thing by any means, but in terms of knowledge it doesn't exactly give us the most "bang for the buck") and second, that we are temporarily sacrificing ability to orbit around the Earth (interesting, but not exactly visionary) so that we can develop the ability to do deep-space missions. That's a perfectly long-term, visionary goal. And by relegating LEO manned spaceflight to companies, we're making exactly the right long-term decision - space must be commercialized if we are to eventually make it a very familiar part of our lives the way the computer and the automobile have been.
Complain about the details of the implementation - the politics that corrupts and entangles everything - all you want. But I don't think anyone can legitimately argue that the US's current space vision is the wrong thing to do in the long term. In my view, it is important that we continue to work within this framework to further promote space exploration in all of its aspects and to lead the way into the future.
Cogito, ergo sum, fosho!
Is it a Goatse video, or just the standard picture. If it's a video I'm morbidly curious.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Well it was sufficient for about 10 minutes of distraction
Just download NS-3 (which does work under Linux), install NASA's Delay-Tolerant Protocol and use that to simulate networks of satellites and ground stations. For added fun, install the module that lets you use Network Simulator as a NIC under Linux and tunnel actual traffic across your simulated network to see how it would perform in practice.
Not only will this be more reliable than this Unity game, it'll be more accurate, more customizable and more productive (since you get network stats rather than a score). Further, since you can design your own protocols and circuits under NS-3, you can also factor in the effects of Turbo codes, various Reed-Solomon options, alternative communications protocols, etc.
Best of all, that kind of experience might actually give you some credibility amongst network engineers and protocol engineers. "Some" meaning "more than a high score on the game will ever do".
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I do agree with what you say, but add funding. Or better said, move some funding out of the wars into the space program. But of course you can't do that, because it's making certain few rich at the cost of the country.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
"But I don't think anyone can legitimately argue that the US's current space vision is the wrong thing to do in the long term."
I can.
Passing up the opportunity to develop a long-term, industrially-oriented moonbase is nothing short of dropping the ball. The moon gives you a weak gravity well -- but a gravity well -- in which to construct large projects and launch them. It is well enough to say that this might be done better in LEO, but that simply isn't true. We have decades of experience now showing that construction in microgravity is far, far too slow and expensive. You need appreciable gravity in order to do efficient construction. At least at our level of technology.
Being able to construct on the moon -- even if the materials are delivered as pre-assembled modules, as they now are to LEO -- would be a great deal more efficient. And there is a solid evidence that the moon might actually turn out to be feasible to mine. For example, as the Indian survey vehicle determined, there is a significant and possibly even commercially-viable concentration of fissile uranium, right on the surface of the moon.
Passing all this by, in order to launch gigantic vehicles intended for long-duration missions to deeper space, is just plain irresponsible. You are trading top-notch, long-term apples for short-term oranges that are already moldy.
When you have to install a lot of shit on the computer
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
My personal best is 26 rounds with the mathematician. I think the mathematician has an advantage since credits seems to be more of a bottleneck. I agree that building at Guam is unnecessary.
An interesting proposal. I was not aware that the technology required to build and operate moonbases was within our reach. The ability to do large-scale construction in space is most definitely a very important goal.
However, a couple of questions:
1) What advantages (and disadvantages) would using the proposed moonbase to build large projects (mainly for deep-space exploration at this project) offer compared to building these projects on Earth?
2) You propose that this moonbase be industrially-oriented. By the time we finish building your putative moonbase, will we have the technology (and the market, for that matter) for companies to begin taking advantage of it such that activities on the moonbase become commercially viable?
It has always intuitively seemed to me that a mission to an asteroid, and then to Mars would be a more readily achievable goal at this point in time. Maybe a moonbase would have come next after that. But it would be interesting if you could show me otherwise.
Cogito, ergo sum, fosho!
A lot of info in the "game," lots of text, very little gameplay. Felt too Super Paper Mario. It would be nice to see NASA open source this so it could play more like Civ 1, trickling out the education as you focus on the gameplay, rather than blasting you with endless text and doing a very poor job of clarifying why you need a Space Network and how much of it to get a given Research item. The win condition is pretty weak as well... you just research one more thing.
I am not saying that we have the technology today, but if we don't at least explore the idea further (and I am not aware of any such discussions going on in NASA or the rest of government today), then I think we're dropping the ball.
As for advantages, if any of the moon's resources (or even asteroidal or comet resources, for that matter) can be exploited for either construction material or fuel (there is lots of oxygen in moon rock, for example), then that mass would not have to be lifted from Earth. That could be a very big advantage. Another big advantage is the exponential relationship between rockets and gravity: the higher the gravity, the more thrust needed to lift a payload, which requires more fuel, which requires more structure to hold it, which requires more thrust, which requires more fuel... and so on. And to add to that, there is no appreciable atmosphere on the moon to add drag that has to be overcome.
As we saw in the Apollo moon missions, it only takes a very small rocket to escape the moon's gravity well, while it takes a huge rocket to escape Earth's, because of those very factors. And again the last factor is that you have gravity in which to construct things.
If there are any exploitable resources in space, whether that be water ice from comets or asteroids, or frozen oxygen, or free hydrogen, or whatever, it would probably be most efficient to take it to the moon to process, rather than trying to do it in microgravity, or -- far worse -- down at the bottom of Earth's gravity well. And solar energy is plentiful on the moon. Ice can be separated to hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. And -- I had almost forgotten -- it now appears that there is actually a great deal of water ice on the moon. Couple that with abundant solar energy and you have your rocket fuel!
By the time we are finished building a (small) moonbase, will it be commercially feasible to exploit resources? Probably not. I expect some research would have to be done to find efficient ways to exploit the available resources.
I don't have a problem with a mission to Mars, but a mission to an asteroid seems particularly pointless to me. We have done some pretty close fly-bys and we have a pretty good handle on their composition and behavior. Frankly I don't see any real purpose to it. But maybe I've missed something.
Same with Mars. Because of the distances involved even if not anything else, we will have the technology to have a permanent moonbase long before we have the technology to even be going to Mars very often.
NASA tries its hands on gaming. They should have done this, years ago. When they could have dominated the space-related and alien-related games.