Project Orbiter Navigator

[Moach]

i'm go for testing as well... i may not have much time, but what i do have i try to put to good use

 

[Zachstar]

Looking forward to those features! Good luck with the beta test stage.

 

[Jarvitä]

Oh let me think.. hmmm.. tuesday ?

No honestly.. i don't know..
I have now added basic support for loading and saving planned maneuvers and an autoburn function in the MFD. I still want to add an attitude hold autopilot to the MFD which will probably take some time. Also i have some improvements for the interface of the app in mind..
I'm currently thinking about doing a closed alpha/beta test with a few users to gain some insight how the interface works out.

I don't have any academic obligations until the end of September, I'd love to help you beta test.

 

[Aiyel]

You'll find no shortage of testing volunteers.

 

[Mindblast]

Thank you to all the brave volunteers. I have sent you an invite to the Orbiter Navigator beta testing group. Let the bughunt commence.. and may the mighty be with us.

 

[Aiyel]

Thank you to all the brave volunteers. I have sent you an invite to the Orbiter Navigator beta testing group. Let the bughunt commence.. and may the mighty be with us.

Not all of us, apparently.

 

[Mindblast]

Not all of us, apparently.

Oops sorry.. i sent you an invite too.

If anyone else feels like testing, please drop me a pm. But be aware in the current stage this is more of an alpha test. There are still some missing features and probably a lot of annoying bugs. So be patient with me..

 

[MisterBurkes]

Thank you I tried it, its sometimes confusing, but i do think that i have the hang of it now

 

[ghostrunner01]

I would love to test this! It seems awesome, might be the best addon since UCGO.

 

[jedidia]

I'll be back home in the evening, looking forward to playing with this over the rest of the weekend. Just one problem... I can't find the social group anymore :blush::facepalm:

 

[Mindblast]

I sent you a linky..

 

[Zachstar]

Any news? How is testing going?

 

[Tex]

Thank you Mindblast, this project looks very promising! I'm excited to see its development. I think the visual environment for planning and understanding interplanetary travel is very intuitive and will help a lot of people better understand the concepts behind what they're doing!

 

[jedidia]

Any news? How is testing going?

Testing is going well, although unfortunately some of the Beta crowd seem to have lost their enthusiasm somewhat. You should think that in a closed Beta, everyone that aplies would do his job...

Anyways, Mindblast is currently not around (I didn't quite get wheather he's on holyday or buisness trip, but he had to stop developement for a some days). However the last version he put out was very stable. We have a major hickup still with direct editing of floating point numbers, which is due to some countries using a , and others a . as deliminator (damn .Net framework, this would have been somewhat easier without culture sensitivity!), and the MFD doesn't have a vector view. So currently, although you can plan maneuvers with mixed Delta-v's, you can't fly them (unless you run the numbers through a calculator and then use attitude mfd to point your ship in the right direction).
Mindblast also wants to put in some more precise autopilots, because the stock autopilots lead to major course deviations in longer burns, and he also wants to make the whole thing stable under higher time acceleration so we can make use of the full capabilities of this thing.

This will definitaley be the long yearned for solution for low-thrust trajectories a lot of us have been waiting for. It integrates both burn time and fuel consumption, and the results are amazingly precise when flown with a decent attitude hold autopilot. It isn't really possible to plan the whole flight in advance (like, earth eject, Hohman to Saturn, Saturn inject, plane change and another burn to head for one of it's moons) because there's some inprecision in Orbit propagation over long periods of time (majorly because it's still a two-body solution, anything else would be a CPU killer anyways), But you'll be able to plot a course to any planet pretty comfortably, adjust later burns to correct inprecisions resulting from your previous, and search for the best aproach solution to hit any of its moons once you're in the vicinity. It also works flawlessly with custom systems.

We'll have to give Mindblast some more time to implement the features mentioned above, but then we'll have a pretty nice first release.

 

[Mindblast]

Hey guys,

as Jedidia already mentioned i'm currently on a business trip, will be back home on Tuesday. I didn't have much time for Orbiter Navigator this last week but i was able to do some coding on the autopilot function and burn vector view. Its looking good so far but there are still some problems with high time accelerations.
Face also had success integrating the .net application into Orbiter using a separate plugin so the current plans are to leave the choice to the user whether he wants to use it as a seperate application or inside an orbiter dialog window.
Still a lot of testing to do and some features are missing too like saving the flightplan to the scenario via the MFD... i guess it will be some more weeks of coding and testing before we will have a public beta.

A big thank you to Face for his work on the Orbiter integration and to the active beta testers, especially to Jedidia who is doing a great job testing this thing.

 

[Zachstar]

Glad to hear! Good luck!

 

[statickid]

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WOW! awesome! this looks incredible. I can't wait to try it out! It is my belief that communities of thought such as the one revolving around orbiter (no pun intended) are like the communal brainstorm of our society progressing ever closer to being a space faring species. Understanding orbital mechanics becomes as simple as driving a car to the mall. Even if the driver doesn't understand everything about the car, or how to build roads or program stoplights, they can get there. Keep up the good work!

 

[Moach]

yes... few as they are, "think tanks" like these here forums have yet to sooner or later gift the world with some great triumph of knowledge :hmm:....

i wonder if NASA knows about Orbiter?.....


anyways, this navigator is an awesome idea... having it "built-in" instead of an external app makes it all even better... and as if this wasn't enough - it hooks up to an MFD :tiphat:

this is -like work, i tell you! :hail:

 

[Mindblast]

Ah well.. news..
The autoattitude function is in there as well as saving maneuvers and targets to the scenario via the plugin. The orbiter integration is looking quite good too, just the save and load file dialogs are still causing some trouble.
Unfortunately all the beta testers now seem to have run out of time so i'm currently contemplating moving to a public beta with the next version which should be ready in a couple of days.

 

[jedidia]

sorry 'bout that, pal. I'll be back home at wednesday, I should be able to get some more testing done until the end of the week. been on the road the whole month...