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From: Thorsten R. <tho...@sc...> - 2021-04-22 17:13:54
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We're happy to announce the arrival of the Shuttle milestone 13 while at the same time welcoming GinGin as new collaborator in the team (who has done most of the work for this milestone). Given the state of the spacecraft before, you might reasonably ask - is there anything substantial that can still be added? You'll be the judge of that, but I think there is. * thanks to new aero data, we now have a better description of the hypersonic flight phase from Mach 27 down to about Mach 5 * GinGin has been patiently digging into NASA documents and replaced my home-written guidance for the launch and entry trajectories by something that is much more shaped like the real thing, for instance the launch trajectory is now somewhat flatter and reaches a later arctop * also, thanks to GinGin's patient work, we now have pretty much all the display pages very close to the original appearance (they've been moved to the original font, items blink where they should, and the limit sensing overlay which indicates when a value is off-nominal has been added) * a lot of time has gone into testing and fixing issues with launch aborts. They're generally a wide field in that they probe a huge kinematical region in terms of what can happen, but are interesting because they actually showcase what the Shuttle can do with a rocket engine and as a hypersonic vehicle, and they provide a high-workload and challening environment for the crew. We now have voice callouts for the abort boundaries (what maneuver should be flown when), as well as literally dozens of different cases tested and the guidance parameters adjusted to resolve small issues * also, I've added the helium system (providing a purge for the engines during launch) including full failure and leakage capability, which was one of the last remaining systems that were not simulated in gory detail * to make use of all that failure modeling, a new failure training mode throws a random scenario at selectable difficulty level at the user as a challenge - so you don't know up-front what will happen * a new view to simulate the RMS arm camera simplifies grabbing objects in space * a virtual notepad to record voice calls from mission control or display payload attachment points All in all, with three people flying tests for more than a month, this is probably the best-tested milestone we ever had, and it's been verified to run all the way back to 2018.3. I'm currently in the last stages of updating the manual, which will be available within a few days. Enjoy! * Thorsten |