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TransX is not very sophisticated or accurate compared with what a normal laptop can run these days (you can install GMAT if you like, that's NASA's mission planning software). A spacecraft can be equipped with much better tools than that.

Not sure whether this is an option for you or not, but I usually try to avoid 3d rotation matrices as I manage to confuse myself about the sign convention at least three times whenever I code them - rather I try to use pointing vectors and align vessel body axes with the pointing vectors. For...

It really depends on what you want to simulate. Assuming you're 'just' a spacecraft entering Earth system, you'd have only sensor information available - so there'd have to be a simulation of radar, which could track objects only for a while and would give imprecise information, from that you...

Actually, I don't think it is unless you have a good visual on the renderzvous target. If you know what you want, the computer will give it to you exactly, the number pad thruster will not. And if you do not know what you want, the Shuttle is the wrong craft - then you need to sit down and...

May I shamelessly advertize and suggest giving LEO targeting a try for your mission design needs? It's intended as a lightweight tool to provide MCC-like computation capabilities. It's a multi-platform commandline tool. I'd be interested in getting some feedback from the Orbiter side as well -...

I forgot to say: If there's some format/option/... I can add to make this more useful with Orbiter, please let me know. So far most active users of this are on the FG side, so naturally the feedback is a bit biased.

Thanks to Face, we're providing a Windows executable. I've not tried it under Windows, but I guess you put it into a directory, put the config file into the same directory, open a command prompt, change into the directory and type something leo_targeting <configfile>.cfg all output is either...

It's a stand-alone C++ program - you can use it for whatever purpose you like (I suppose someone could even wrap it into an Orbiter MFD if so desired). I have benchmarked it against JSBSim, but I have no reason to suspect it would not capture the Orbiter numerics with decent precision as well.

Okay, the regression seems fairly minor, so I won't make a special bugfix release and just fix it in the next version. Thanks for everyone's patience!

Thanks... The plot is the same I get, but unfortunately it shows that I've put a regression into the fit strategy (the last burn doesn't come out as precise as it could...). I'll have to delve into this and decide whether a bugfix is needed or whether this can wait till the next version.:(

... and I'm happy to present the 0.4 release of the code (source code available from the usual place ). This version now includes the ability to define a rendezvous target, do relative motion plots and obtain numerical solutions for the Lambert problem (transfer to the target for specified...

I have a hunch you could in principle make the graphics card render mesh proximity information relative to a number of contact points into a texture and query that texture to check for a collision. Compared to the gazillions of vertices e.g. a forest on the ground requires, Orbiter is very light...

You wouldn't need to do this for all vessels - there's something like a 'proximity cache' (forgot the technical name) which the renderer would use for all geometry closer than 50 m or so - so most of the time you would not have to do any checks. Still ISS would be complicated, especially if...

Can you elaborate? I had the impression docking collars are made to dampen out any relative motion quickly, so I don't know how bad an approximation 'hard docking' is (I assume you don't mean momentum and angular momentum conservation in the process with 'impart motion')? Assuming you have...

For everyone who finds piloting a spacecraft too demanding after New Year celebrations and just wants to sit down and relax, we have a New Year surprise - a 15 Minute 'Behind the Scenes' feature where we explain and demonstrate what kind of stuff we do before a movie gets online - all told with...

Seems I now have a numerical Lambert solver running... For specified ignition times TIG 1 and TIG 2 , this computes a 2-burn transfer solution via a numerical fit (i.e. J3 gravity, nth body perturbations and finite burn duration optionally taken into account). Here's a range of trajectories in...

I honestly don't know what Orbiter internally does and whether it would allow any SSU code to run threaded or not. What is doable if you have the current frame spacing is estimating the discretization error in the code running at that framerate and using higher terms of e.g. a Taylor series to...

Quite so. The standard response to the issue in simulator environments seems to be to remove flight dynamics from the main loop and run it at fixed timing (JSBSim runs at 120 Hz regardless of what the graphical framerate happens to be) - this generally works because usually rendering is the...

This may be a dumb question - but is there reason to assume one can hear the APU at all? According to SCOM, the rear RCS firing can't be heard - though the FRCS sounds like gunfire (i.e. the jets seem to be fairly noisy devices), only the OMS firing is audible. I imagine a turbine to be fairly...

Merry Christmas from the far (and frozen) North!