Documentation
The sketch format
The Napkin Works turns a drawing into a vehicle by reading its silhouette — the outline your rocket cuts against the paper. Follow four rules and almost anything traces cleanly: pencil on paper photographed with your phone, a whiteboard marker, an iPad doodle, or an exported SVG.
- 1
Side profile, nose up
Draw the rocket standing vertically, viewed from the side — the way it sits on the pad. The tracer assumes up is up: the top of your drawing becomes the nose, the bottom becomes the engine plane.
- 2
Dark ink, light paper
Strong contrast is everything. Black/blue ink or pencil on white paper is perfect. (Drawing light-on-dark? Also fine — the tracer detects and inverts.) Avoid faint pencil and lined/grid paper.
- 3
One closed silhouette
One rocket, one connected outline (filled-in is even better). No labels, arrows, dimension notes or doodles on the same page — the tracer reads everything dark as rocket.
- 4
Stage cuts = tick lines through the body
Where one stage ends and the next begins, draw a single horizontal line across the body that sticks out past BOTH sides. Those ticks become stage separations (and you can add, move or delete them afterwards in the studio).
Worked examples
What happens to your drawing
1 · Trace. The image is thresholded (Otsu) into ink vs paper; each row's outermost ink span becomes the hull's local width. A median filter smooths hand wobble — your shaky line comes out fair.
2 · Blueprint. The half-width profile is mirrored into a symmetric hull, dimensioned (you set the real height; diameter follows your proportions), and drawn as an engineering blueprint with separation callouts.
3 · Revolve. The same profile is revolved into a 3D hull — your sketch, machined. Stage volumes seed sensible propellant masses.
4 · Physics. You pick engines (Raptor to RL10) and masses; the Rust engine computes staged Δv and solves the max payload your design can carry to LEO, GTO, GEO, the Moon and Mars. Save it and it joins your hangar — usable in the VAB, the Flight Deck, and shareable like any vehicle.