On April 23rd Space Age Asteroid Belt will start in Forge of Empires. We checked what it would mean to travel to the Asteroid Belt compared to the current technological possibilities.
The objects in the Asteroid Belt rotate around the sun in a corridor between Mars and Jupiter.
As a representative for the huge number of rocks out there, we added the dwarf planet Ceres to the planets of our solar system.
Let us assume that we wanted to travel to Ceres then we cannot start under the impulse of the moment.
Instead, we have to wait for the best moment. Sometimes Ceres is on the same side of the sun as our planet Earth and sometimes on the exact opposite side.
It would be bad to start when the distance is at its maximum. A start would be best when the flight path is the shortest. This only happens every 15 or 16 months.
But using the best moment only solves one of many problems.
The flight duration would be the next challenge. Using chemical engines of today’s technology, the transfer to Ceres would last more than 2 years.
For the return, we must wait again for the best constellation of Ceres to Earth, up to 16 months. Then the travel back would last another 2 years.
Fortunately, InnoGames did not implement this very realistically. Otherwise, the game would have become extremely long. In the game, a single click is enough and you are there.
Scientists would wish to able to do the same. At least scientists work on an improvement of the ion drive, a sort of magnetic plasma engine.
It receives thrust from ionized gas which gets heater up further by magnetic fields.
Using this it is already possible to send out little spacecraft with ten times the speed, which means several hundred thousand miles per hour.
For a manned spaceship, the current research isn’t advanced enough. But it might become possible to use normal rockets to send all parts to the ISS, construct a spaceship with the ionic engine there and use it to travel to Ceres.
The required energy could then be generated by a nuclear power plant on board.
The spacecraft Dawn already traveled to the Asteroid Belt. This was a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) under the management of the US space agency NASA.
JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The University of California in Los Angeles was responsible for the scientific part of this mission.
The camera system used onboard was developed and built under the leadership of the Max-Planck-Institut for researching the solar system in Katlenburg-Lindau together with the institute of planet research of the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) in Berlin and the institute for data technology and communication networks in Braunschweig.
This delivered great pictures from the Asteroid Belt giving us an impression of how it really looks like.
After 4 years flight duration the spacecraft arrived at the asteroid Vesta.
With a diameter of 525 km, it is one of the biggest objects in the Asteroid Belt.
After Dawn followed Vesta for a while, it moved forward to Ceres. With a diameter of 940 km, this is the biggest single object in the Asteroid Belt. This is why it usually isn’t called an asteroid, but a dwarf planet.
If someone would really start a settlement out there, the decision would be made for one of the biggest objects, eg Ceres. 2018 all energy was used up and we never again heard of Dawn. But we still have these great photos giving us an idea of how it really looks like out there.
Guide courtesy of FOE Hints.
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Hi, I’m Lucas – a passionate and experienced Forge of Empires player and the editor here at ForgeofEmpiresTips.com. If I am not playing the game, I am learning more about the game’s new and upcoming features or writing strategy guides here.