2026-09-25
Meco Mission Log: the review that named my problem
A Steam review from 7 September describes, from the player's side, the problem my new palette tooltips are for. Here it is.
He is not an engineering student, and his first line says so. What follows is that the missions led him through an engine build in single steps, and that seeing a subject this complicated made approachable by a simulator was a beautiful thing. He recommends it.
"you will certanly google a lot of things"
Lune, 2026-09-07, thumbs up.
The tooltips have been on my list since July, and his review is the best case for them I have read: a component in my own palette should say what it is without sending you to a search tab. That is where much of my September went.
Everything below is what comes next. 0.6 is what you have now, and it is listed at the end.
Every component in the palette explains itself (coming in the next update)
Hover any component in the palette and it tells you what it is and what it expects.
My first version of the boundary entries named a liquid discharge boundary the palette has never had, and it claimed outright that more back pressure means less feed flow. That is true of a subsonic line. Choke the nozzle and the mass flow is decided by the throat area and the conditions in the chamber upstream, with back pressure no longer part of the answer. Mission 3 exists partly to teach that.
No player ever saw that one. I caught it while writing its replacement.
Every chart axis shows its unit, if it has one (coming in the next update)
The second of the three is not my idea. A player asked for it in January:
"i would love to have the units displayed on each graph, as I do not know if mass flow for example is in kg/s or g/s"
Timmsons, 2026-01-15, thumbs up.
That is a thousandfold difference on a number the whole sim asks you to reason about. The sim knew the unit all along. It just never printed it on the axis. Dimensionless axes such as Mach stay bare, because "no unit" is also information.
What I am building right now: the injector head (in progress)
The Injector Head becomes a real assembly, the way the Thrust Chamber and the Turbopump already are. It gets a body of its own in 3D, built from the element pattern you author, and the geometry rebuilds as you type, each time a field holds a number it can build from, with nothing to press afterwards.
The Early Access section of the Steam store page lists the Injector Head assembly under what is not in yet. That is where it stays until it is finished, and I am not putting a date on it.
What is already in your hands
Everything above is ahead of you. For the record, 0.6 is what you have today: the Thrust Chamber and Turbopump assemblies, the Rao thrust-optimized bell, thrust integrated from the method-of-characteristics flow field, a start you author as a schedule with every valve staged in time, Mission 13, a recreation of the Merlin 1D that flies Falcon 9, and undo and redo. The chamber you build in Mission 13 carries roughly four hundred regenerative cooling channels.
That is the log.
-- Dannie