The problem is that people won't treat vague estimates as vague. They'll treat them as exact release dates as we've seen with Dan Steph and his upgraded arrow.
The next version of orbiter will be out when it's out. The current BETA gives a taste of what is to come. Whenver people ask when the next version will be out I have to ask 'Whats missing from the current version?' and I mean that in terms of what orbiter does best - the physics core. I know that most people want collision detection and better graphics but both of those are being taking care of in the DirectX clients that are being written so what's missing from the core?
Yeah, I remember this past spring people were begging Dansteph for an Arrow2012 release every week. Addon development is really time consuming.
Important point with regards to who takes care of what-Graphics improvements will be the province of the client teams, but isnt collision detection solely coming from Martins side? I gather that adding in collisions anywhere outside of the Orbiter core is quite difficult.
I know some would consider this to be a job for the addon devs, but I personally think that the next orbiter release should have a final multistage vehicle solution. For orbiter to really progress as a tool to understand modern spaceflight, we need to make launching a
Saturn V, SLS, Soyuz, Falcon Heavy, one of the first things a new user tries after flying the DG for the first time, but for any of these things, you need either:
Multistage
+very common, popular lots of choice
+simple to use
-buggy, boosters dissapear without certain patches, payloads never have any fuel, & cant have a UMMU crew unless hardcoded in the DLL
-Unless Im mistaken, Multistage3 is never coming. If a new orbiter release is incompatible with Multistage2, were going to have a lot of quality addons become useless
or
Velcro Rockets
+very flexible, hard to imagine anything you cant do with it
+usually seems very stable
-very difficult to use. Unless someone does eventually create that visual interface for building them, velcro rockets arent very easy to adjust or create
What we really need is a Dlled vessel class that can be built through the scenario editor or some other program to create a config file which loads the desired launch vehicle, can add payloads in the scenario editor, and can have its guidance set by the user while on the pad (more or less this [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=5442"]http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=5442[/ame])
in a general format. I dont think it will be easy to create this, but either through martins or the addon devs, were going to need some sort of better solution for mutistage vehicles.
