Three bugs I encountered with v1.2
1) I have disappearing chutes. Whenever I deploy them they are there, a quick look through the periscope (F8) and back will make the mesh vanish. Functionally they are still there.
I can confirm this problem. I have tried to fix it, but to no avail. So as for the time being, you just have to ignore that problem.
2) My periscope misses the black border shown in the screenshots. Gradiations are still present.
There is actually no border on the screenshot. The real-life Mercury periscope had an FOV of 175 degrees, but Orbiter "only" supports up to 160 deg, so that's where we are. If you go high enough, and point the capsule 14.5 degrees down (toggle orbit attitude -14.5 deg and -34.0 deg with
K during flight), you can see an "entire" globe in the periscope screen.
I have actually thought about adding a border, but am restricted by the limiting FOV (making a full Earth more rare), and the general projection by Orbiter.
Compare the atmosphere in the screenshot or in a simulation with this short video:
https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/v...atlas-periscope-stock-video-footage/143575397
3) On splashdown the capsule bounces several 100m in the air again multiple times. I ran the historical Liberty Bell 7 mission using the autopilot only. So far this was the only version I could run to splashdown.
Oops, my bad. :facepalm: Thanks for pointing that out! New release (1.2.1) in main post. No new release for Orbiter2010 version needed, as it's has touchdown points defined differently.
The others had me loose a booster after 2 mins, separate the capsule with the escape tower and multiple crashes on separation and flip. Not sure where the crashes stem though.
This is all on Orbiter16 with the D3D9 Client.
Yes, the addon is quite buggy, especially during abort and parachute deploy. But I have never found any specific cause, so I'm tempted to believe that it's due to Orbiter itself, and me implementing stuff in a less-than-optimal way (many changes and transitions between stagings, jettisons, scenario loadings, ...). I can only recommend to quicksave often (Ctrl+S), or use something like
https://www.orbithangar.com/showAddon.php?id=ebe2f606-e602-4af4-970b-3b25848fdd95 if it still works for the newest Orbiter version.
I hope this gets a cockpit, I loved the look of the original Project Mercury interior back in the day.
Ah, yes. I guess this is a good time to lay out the future of this addon (Project Mercury X):
Both I and 4throck are still working on adding different stuff, to in a sense "complete" this addon.
But while we're adding, the big thing that ProjMercX lacks compared to the original Project Mercury 5.0, is the 2D cockpit. Due to big changes to the Orbiter SDK since 2005, it is not feasible to revive that work. In that case, it would have to be remade from scratch. If one would do that from scratch, I would much prefer to instead work on a 3D cockpit, because it would be much more immersive.
Of course, we would both love a fully fledged 3D virtual cockpit, but are lacking a combination of, between other things, skill (mainly in my case) and free time (mainly in 4throck's case).
Therefore, my hope was that someone would be skilled enough, and willing to spend that much time on modeling a 3D virtual cockpit.
So if anyone reading this is up to the challenge, I would pledge myself to help out with all my previous research on the Mercury project, and of course implement such a cockpit mesh into this addon.
So if anyone is interested, please contact me on PM, and we can take it from there. But remember, I can offer nothing but eternal appreciation. :hail:
---------- Post added at 01:31 ---------- Previous post was at 01:30 ----------
Maybe I missed it, but the periscope function seems to not be in the 2010 version.
Yeah, I noticed that, too. Haven't looked much into it yet, so as for now, you'll just have to restrict yourself to the generic cockpit in Orbiter 2010.
