KOSMONAUT

A Soyuz MS-16 Simulator

Who hasn't, at least once in his or her life, wandered about the empty vastness of space above our heads, dreaming to reach it with a hand's grasp? Well, we did. With this in mind, we decided to try to simulate the experience of being in space and piloting a real modern spacecraft. Nowadays, almost all the manned space missions involve travelling between the Earth and the International Space Station (in short ISS) aboard the russian spacecraft Soyuz.

Real astronauts undertake countless hours of training on simulators similar to ours in order to master their ability to adapt to the hostile emptiness of space and to the innatural absence of gravity - or rather the illusionary lack there of - during the last part of the flight, along many others.

The experience we intend to replicate is that of a training simulator for professionals and amateurs alike, interested in the mechanics of space berthing between two spacecrafts. The UI of the telemetry system features the real statistics that would be seen on a Soyuz's screen, along stunning visuals and directional audio.

The player is projected in the last phase of the Earth-to-ISS flight, phase 44, in which the Soyuz is finally approaching the ISS. However, the telemetry system has a failure, and automatic docking cannot be performed. It's up to you, as the Captain in charge of the Soyuz, to take manual controls and perform the docking maneuvers.

Controls

Use your mouse to look around and the scrol wheel to zoom. You can interact with green-highlighted objects. Some interactable objects automatically adjust your viewing position when you click on them, to return to free view simply click again with the mouse.

The Soyuz's movemets along the 6 degrees of freedom are performed with a Joystick Controller, either XBOX or PlayStation: be sure to check the right profile in the options from the main menu. The manual controls are:

• Roll: move the left joystick horizontally.
• Pitch: move the left joystick vertically.
• Yaw: press either the left or right bumper button.
• Horizontal Translation: move the right joystick horizontally.
• Vertical Translation: move the right joystick vertically.
• Forward Translation: press the right trigger.
• Backward Translation; press the left trigger.
• Stabilizer: keep pressed the two bumper buttons together.

The simulator features many possible failures occourring aboard the Soyuz, which can be solved according to these rules:

• Main Engine Failure: press the "Restart Engines" button.
• Camera Failure: it fixes by itself after 20 seconds.
• Computer failure (absence of UI): click twice on the UI button.
• Communications failure (no numbers on screen): press the "Reset Comms" button.
• Vital Support Failure: press the "Reset VS" button four times  within 30 seconds of the failure occourring, otherwise the simulation will end.

The other interactions include:

• More/Less power: increase or decrease the engine thrust power.
• TPV: switch to third person view.
• UI (while not during failure): switch on and off the main screen UI.
• LANG: switch the UI and buttons language from Engilsh to Russian and viceversa (fun fact: the real Soyuz is Russian only!)
• Secondary screen.
• Side window.
• ESC button: while in game, toggle the pause menu.

Your mission is to succesfully dock with the ISS, as shown during the tutorial and in real footage. Be sure to perform contact with an approach velocity lower than 0.05 m/s, otherwise the mission could fail.

Credits

This project has been developed by:

• Alessio Cacciatore (Modeling and Rigging)
• Gianluca Garganese (Scripting and Testing)
• Marzio Vallero (Scripting and Resource Gathering)

 as part of the Masters' Virtual Reality course at the Polythecnic of Turin, academic year 2020/2021.

The full source code of this project can be found at this GitHub repository.

This application has been made possible thanks to:

• Unity Game Engine - Application Development
• Blender - Rigging and model management
• Rhinoceros 3D - Modeling and texturing
• Topaz's Gigapixel AI - Texture upscaling
• Adobe's Substance Painter - Texture enhancing
• XInputDotNet - Vibration management for the joystick
• Audacity - Audio mixing and mastering
• Futura Mission docking - Background audio
• All Sounds Youtube channel - Buttons' SFX
• NASA's Visible Earth - Topography and other Earth high resolution maps, Milky Way's Skybox map
• NASA's website - 3D models for the Sun, Moon and ISS
• CSA's website - Informations on the Soyuz program
• ESA's YouTube channel - Documentaries on the Docking procedure
• NASA's YouTube channel - Original Soyuz footage
• NASA's Spaceflight Forum - Information for the screens and controls management
• Information Display Systems for Russian Spacecraft - Additional information
• Soyuz - User's Manual - Additional information
• NASA Johnson - This page's background image, under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0