[Flightgear-devel] Space Shuttle milestone 13

[Thorsten R. <tho...@sc...>]

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