Making a public Mars landing demo based on Orbiter

[SiberianTiger]

Guys, I know I am mostly looking like I'm a deep space probe coming out of hibernation once in a while to send out a status beep, :hmm: but this is called for by various RL duties I'm sucked into.

Happily enough, one such duty has brought me back on track with Orbiter. Here in Moscow we have a private entertainment center for kids and adults called Mars-Tefo, which is a hint to terraforming of Mars. They occupy a hall in what once have been a space exhibition building at VDNKh, and built a full-scale mock-up of a Mars research station where you can walk in the interior, look out of the windows, see a lab and a reactor room. That last bit is especially tasty, as it runs a simulation program for reactor control. That, and also a computer-simulated Mars surface journey is used in the process of game-like role playing sessions they are conducting for audience, mostly, kids.

The girl who is behind the stage of this enterprise asked me (as a well known local Orbiter expert :lol to help add them one more step for their simulation environment: capsule detachment from LMO-orbiting station and landing at the base, simulated on a PC, using Orbiter software.

So I'm thinking of either picking a ready addon or creating a custom addon for their need. I'm not sure what do I need to do to have the whole thing not too complex, visually attractive, controllable by the people who might be looking at it for the 1st time, and not taking way too long to complete. Ideally, 30 mins should be the "mission" time.

If you have any experience using Orbiter for public demos, can you share your ideas with me, please?

 

[N_Molson]

Seems an excellent project. Is the base set on a defined location, in which case we can estimate its coordinates ?

 

[Cosmic Penguin]

Someone really should do a MSL Curiosity add-on just for this purpose!

(and if you think that's too difficult, then try Mars Pathfinder instead - should be easily doable with reference to the MER add-on.)

 

[SiberianTiger]

Seems an excellent project. Is the base set on a defined location, in which case we can estimate its coordinates ?

Yes, and there's a kind of back story. I can ask Olga for details.

 

[SiberianTiger]

BTW, am I right in saying her that a PC running Orbiter is still best doing on a Win XP OS?

 

[SiberianTiger]

Someone really should do a MSL Curiosity add-on just for this purpose!

(and if you think that's too difficult, then try Mars Pathfinder instead - should be easily doable with reference to the MER add-on.)

Ah, that has to be a manned lander.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

I haven't played around with it in quite a while, but this looks pretty good.
[ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=5208"]Design Reference Mission 1 v1.4[/ame]

 

[SiberianTiger]

Wow! And UGCO/UMMU compatibility should certainly help!

 

[SolarLiner]

BTW, am I right in saying her that a PC running Orbiter is still best doing on a Win XP OS?

Well, from my POV, there is no real changes.

Aside from that, I suggest you to use the D3D9 Client because because better performances, better graphics, better everything

 

[kamaz]

We have most of the needed technology, you just need some plywood...

HazMatt has built a portable simulator: 1, 2.

For input, I think you should use a USB keyboard with custom labels. (USB keypads would be even better due to how key are arranged). Since default key bindings are not in a logical layout, use this program to remap -- it also handles multiple keyboards. If you want physical switches, try Modular Simpit Controller. For joystick, see this thread.

If you want to use more than one monitor, try master/slave renderer. If you want to have MFDs on separate screens, see the VNCMFD thread.

A simpit system based on master/slave renderer and VNCMFD is described in this post.

 

[Linguofreak]

BTW, am I right in saying her that a PC running Orbiter is still best doing on a Win XP OS?

I find that Orbiter works well on Win7 (at least with the desktop in classic mode, I haven't tried it under Aero).

Also, Microsoft will cease providing support and security updates for XP in a few months, so it's much better to go with Win7, even if it is suboptimal for Orbiter.

 

[SiberianTiger]

(USB keypads would be even better due to how key are arranged).

Wait, what? There's a chance to rotate and translate at the same time, is my perception correct?

Thanks for the great set of suggestions, Kamaz!

 

[kamaz]

(USB keypads would be even better due to how key are arranged).

What I meant is that if you want to make "realistic" spacecraft controls by relabeling an off-the-shelf keyboard, then numeric keypads are better because "1" is directly below "4" etc., while on alphanumeric keyboards, "z" is not directly below "a", but shifted to the right. So if you go with numpads, the fact that you have repurposed a keyboard is less apparent And, with my remapper, "1" on keypad #1 can do something else than "1"on keypad #2

Wait, what? There's a chance to rotate and translate at the same time, is my perception correct?

Yes, if you use a joystick (or two joysticks), because [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3223"]Fly-By-Wire 0.9.1 beta[/ame] allows to map RCS rot/lin independently to joystick buttons / axes. My patent (described in the joystick thread linked above) was to map RCS rot to axes and RCS lin to hat switch.

If you want to use two keypads (one for rotation, the other one for translation), then this is currently not possible with off-the-shelf solutions. But after looking at the API I can relatively easily write and add-on which does that. Let me know if you want to go this way.

 

[N_Molson]

But after looking at the API I can relatively easily write and add-on which does that. Let me know if you want to go this way.

Yes, assigning the corresponding thruster groups to custom keys should work well, no reason it wouldn't work :yes:

You won't be able to throttle the thrusters because you won't have joystick axis, but you could make something comparable to what Thorton did in his Soyuz-TMA addon : simulating the "RCS pulses" (and even better, things work that way in real life, AFAIK attitude thrusters are not throttleable, but can be lit/cut off in nanoseconds, allow "discontinued thrust" modes).

Yes, and there's a kind of back story. I can ask Olga for details.

Sure, seems interesting !

 

[kamaz]

Here in Moscow we have a private entertainment center for kids and adults called Mars-Tefo, which is a hint to terraforming of Mars.

For people who can't read Russian: go to http://marstefo.ru/marsopediya/Category:Mars-Tefo_base/ and click on links below "Страницы в категории "Mars-Tefo_base"" to see the pictures.

 

[SiberianTiger]

For people who can't read Russian: go to http://marstefo.ru/marsopediya/Category:Mars-Tefo_base/ and click on links below "Страницы в категории "Mars-Tefo_base"" to see the pictures.

The actual base is yet in the initial, "2012's" stage.

 

[Cholgaa]

Hello, friends. I am Olga and I am one of the developers of the project Mars-Tefo.

We make our design inspiration young people and the dream of a progressive future.

We believe that we have a mid-21th century and the first human base is already on Mars. The crew operates on a watch. We have a large space station on orbit of Mars, where the docked spacecraft from Earth every two years and will start from the ship back to Earth. And there are small SpK for people and goods between the station and Mars orbit. We would like to simulate the flight of this complex in orbit and landing control and takeoff capsule arrival and departure relief crew .

We would like to include research on small mission apparently jet apparatus during the expedition itself. The first geological exploration. Now we have a model of scanning the surface of Mars from orbit, and it is still very conventional, not tethered to any realistic model of the satellite. I would like to simulate cloud satellites around Mars - geological , meteorological, communications, etc. How many of them will already be in 2050? Whether they can provide continuous communications or conversations need to count?

We can model not only existing spacecrafts. We can dream, what spacecrafts could be in 2050.

Flight and landing must be done fairly quickly, for 5-7 minutes . Mission can do longer - up to half an hour, yes ..

Earth-Mars flight are not considering.