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- "When you launch a rocket, you're not really flying that rocket. You're just sort of hanging on."
– Michael P. Anderson
- "Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty."
– John Carmack
Rockets are the future. For civilian scientists, they are the way to the stars, for the military - the way to victory. It took a good time to develop rocketry, but once they were perfected, around WW2, they revealed a whole new horizon for mankind. It turned out rockets have both civilian and military use. The second one is pretty straightforward - relatively small rockets are the next generation, 'smart' weapon to substitute the 'dumb' bombs that, once launched from the tube (or released from the hold of the bomber), will fly according to the laws of ballistics. Now, the rocket can change direction mid-flight...
The first use of rockets is to conquer earth's gravity pool. And for this, you will need a whole knew District in your cities - the Spaceport. A second, more sinister rocket-launching platform, the Missile Silo, takes care of rockets which kill.
All of this is so complex that you can only boost it through Espionage, or through the insight of certain Great Scientists.
Oh, and now you can start your conquest of space by lunching your first satellite.
Historical Context
No one is quite sure who fired off the first rocket. Some historians state that rockets were first used in a battle in 1232 AD by the Chinese against the Mongols, with explosions being heard some 15 miles away. Others claim the first rockets were exemplified by the “ground-rat,” a type of firework, used by the Emperor Lizong on the occasion of his mother Kung Sheng’s birthday in 1264. It is certain that the first written mention of rockets was in the Huolongjing, by the Chinese artillery officer Jiao Yu in the mid-14th Century; it even describes the first multi-stage rocket, seemingly used by the Chinese navy.
Until the Second World War, rockets remained relatively short-range, inaccurate, clumsy weapons … or were used for making pretty fireworks (not that military rockets don’t make pretty explosions). In 1792, iron-cased rockets were used by Tipu Sultan defending Mysore against the avaricious British East India Company. The British, sensing a good thing, developed the solid-fuel Congreve Rocket for use against the French, Americans and other unpleasant sorts. In 1914, Robert Goddard – inspired by the fanciful tales of H.G. Wells – patented several concepts that proved pivotal in the history of rocketry: a combustion chamber, multiple stages, and a nozzle to increase exhaust speed.
Meanwhile, German scientists were also refining their own designs for rockets – for bombing the enemy, of course. Where the V-1 was a crude, simplistic flying bomb, the V-2 was a marvel, with turbopumps, inertial guidance systems and many other innovations still used by rocket scientists. The end of the war set off a “space race” when the two superpowers “assimilated” many of Germany’s top rocket scientists from Peenemunde, notably America’s acquisition of Wernher von Braun. Although it was the Soviet Union that launched the first satellite and the first man into orbit. But it was America that built the first nuclear-tipped ICBM.
| Civilization VI Science Victory steps [edit] | |||
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1. Launch a satellite
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2. Land a human on the Moon
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| Vanilla Civilization VI and Rise and Fall | Gathering Storm | ||
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3. Establish a Martian Colony
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3. Establish a Martian Colony
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4. Launch an Exoplanet Expedition
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5. Help the Exoplanet Expedition travel 50 light years
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