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It's been a while, but the next flight-tested milestone of the Shuttle is on the server in time for the next stable FG release (to appear soon). To accompany the milestone, the Shuttle Flight Manual has been updated and extended to reflect the new options and capabilities (the full version of...

On what level are you interested in different orbiters - do you want to fly a 3-string GPS rather than 3-string TACAN vehicle, or do you want to read a different name on the fuselage?

I've started the testing phase prior to the next milestone release - as usual, this tends to produce nice screenshots. Beautiful early morning light over the Provence - the Shuttle landing at LeTube airbase (grass is still wet from dew...)

The opacity of the dust layer is a parameter, so you can 'bulk-clean' the screens easily (I don't have the procedure implemented yet, but it is no conceptual problem). If you want to see single wipes of the NASA-approved piece of cloth, that'd require some extra coding (basically there needs to...

The ubiquitous velcro strips are something that has been bugging us for a while - it's pretty hard to get the visuals right. Today I realized that I already have the effect I need at my fingertips - it just needs to be adapted to the interior lighting model. Here's a first experiment: Nice...

Isn't that somehow what Celestia has been doing for a while? I remember a decade ago saturating our computer memory with a friend by installing half a million stars for Celestia and trying to represent our Galaxy by them rather than diffuse fog.

The advantage of having time, but no serious budget - we can wait till there's real fog and the light is like we need it. This morning in the swamp - terrific footage for the 4th part of the series.

And - here it is. Full house on the premiere showing with the local press interviewing us. About five times the cast of the first episode, more experience in cutting and post-processing, some 38 minutes in length - a better movie altogether. Enjoy! Cliodhna 2 "Truth from Beyond"

Inverse kinematics = direct translation/attitude control of the end effector with all the joints adjusting accordingly. Lots of nasty trigonometry... So yeah, translation covers the first half of it.

It's been a while, but we're still working towards a better Shuttle. * working circuit breakers for several subsystems are being installed, with the plan to improve the handling of electric failures (and of course to get closer to 100% checklist doability) * another immersive (but otherwise...

As a flight sim weather engine programmer, METAR and other weather data coverage is enough to inspire weather scenarios for a sim, the rest is made up. Especially close to the ground and away from the reporting station,ground effects can change the low altitude winds to almost anything, cloud...

Post-processing for the second episode is done, DVD cover artwork is done, all that remains is DVD menu structure and subtitle translations. Thus... we have a release date!

There we were, driving to a set I had scouted out a while ago - a beautiful patch of really old forest with a decent road to enable the camera operator to move backwards at decent speed... Then, actually arriving there, it looked like this: Can't have been older than a few days... and...

Today I've made some headway automatically steering Atlantis to a plane about 10 miles displaced from the 'natural' plane you launch into by fixing inclination only. It's a surprisingly nasty problem, because the turn onto the actual launch azimuth needs to happen relatively early for...

Thanks for the list! Especially the Mercury transit would be cool to see - though November weather here tends to be awful. Astronomy conditions here tend to be peculiar - it's a lopsided season to begin with, pretty much nothing at all during the bright summers, but crystal-clear winter nights...

Too low in the sky in central Finland (it's too bright at night to see anything but the Moon, but even the Moon was behind the trees) :-( Well, one more month, and I can think of getting the telescope out again...

The interesting part is not so much in how you parametrize the target plane (I've settled on the orbital elements, but the normal is admittedly more clever), it's in the fact that for pretty much most of the ascent you can't really compute a usable error to it, because due to the non-zero...

Heh, this is actually an interesting guidance problem - I'm currently sitting down and devising a scheme to target offsets to the longitude of the ascending node in the final orbit (which is kind of similar in targeting a plane that does not intersect the launch site).

Inclination can't be smaller than launch site latitude (unless you have huge propellant reserves to burn and fly a rather curved launch path). It isn't possible for a Shuttle launching from KSC to achieve a 3.9 degree inclination- so you can give up trying.

Yeah, we did... In my (admittedly short) career in movie-making, I've seen nothing like today. Before getting to it, we talked 'well, it'd be nice if the horse would shy here - how can we get this' - tossing ideas and strategies to cut the desired result in the end. The first take, the horse...