Request Long March rockets

[Submariner]

@Abdullah Radwan put a lot of effort into the documentation. Official release here. Breathing spaces and Astronauts can be done without coding, but the same as UMMU/UGCO vessels do.

Orbinauts have good longevity! As it's open source changes, fixes can be made.

@N_Molson Would be nice to see more representation of the Chinese Space Program in Orbiter, With luck (fingers crossed for @Matias Saibene!) Multistage will be O24 compatible, which at least gets the LV covered.
Wishing you motivation for your projects.

One reason more to give the new version a chance.

Also, if we promote Orbiter better, we can have a lot of new players, the niche is there for us to claim:

• KSP is likely also not seeing any new updates or DLCs. The last update was 4 years ago. I am not sure if KSP was Unity based, but it did not appear in the long list of games patched last month because of a security issue in Unity.
• I am not sure what to make of Kitten Space Agency (KSA) yet, but it might become a major competitor for us. RocketWerkz at least knows to make good spacethemed games, like Stationeers. Also its "far future planned features" overlap a lot with Orbiter.
• Reentry is limited to Earth and Moon for now, is stuck in the 1960s of the US and doesn't like freedom.
• Flightgear only has the Space Shuttle currently (but JSBSim could support more spacecraft) and only has Earth.

I think, we should start playing out Orbiters strengths compared to the competition. One strength is that its still in active development. Another that we have a full solar system and can even support more.

Also I think we should create more interoperable, simplified add-ons that could be used to build a common, large, open world for Orbiter that can easily be configured to the likes of the players. Even with multiplayer. Maybe even gamify it a bit.

Orbiter could also be used better by far for teaching than KSP, since it is free, open-source and quite adaptable. We just need more teaching materials made by teachers, that can be used with Orbiter. We could even make a "Orbiter4Schools" distribution, that bundles everything. I think this option of creating different distributions for different target groups can be a quite powerful advantage for Orbiter, but could lead to fragmentation of the community. We shouldn't overdo it.

I’ve been an Orbinaut since the 2006 version, and honestly 2010 was the last “ complete version “ for me. I don’t have any programming experience, but for me the fun of Orbiter is challenging myself to build spacecraft, space stations and bases out of what’s available for resources. To that end, UMMU, UCGO, Multistage 2015, and Spacecraft 4 are non-negotiable. They are perfect for a casual Orbinaut like myself. I just have so much time invested in building a “ world “ with these addons I couldn’t imagine “ playing “
Orbiter without them. Yes, sometimes I yearn for the beautiful graphics and improvements of 2016 and 2024 (haven’t tried it yet) but I keep coming back to 2010 because it is fully functional for me, and anything I don’t have (UMmu compatible Soyuz, for example) I could build myself for my own use. I can’t speak for anyone else, but Orbiter 2016 just never was complete enough for me, and now there is a new version to learn and “ build up” and I just don’t have the time. Everytime a new version is released there are many of my favorite addons that become broken and are forgotten. It’s like starting over when really, a new version should be a continuation and an improvement over what’s already there. I really appreciate everything that addon developers have done over the years, your creations have brought me hours and hours of joy. Thank you all and I wish you the best.

 

[N_Molson]

Thanks for sharing this, it is always interesting to know what are the end user interests. Yes, we lack a true 'mix & match' feature. I have a few ideas, but first I need to get VS2022 set up correctly.

 

[Urwumpe]

Thanks for sharing this, it is always interesting to know what are the end user interests. Yes, we lack a true 'mix & match' feature. I have a few ideas, but first I need to get VS2022 set up correctly.

Same here, maybe we can at least coordinate the efforts in a common thread. But my idea is rather about staying the "DG Tech" / slightly unrealistic range. The more realistic or contemporary things get, the less interoperable are they.