Real Time Inc Test Mission

[Athena]

What's the crew size of this mission? 3 or 4? (Unless its not decided yet)


And *if* we are going for realism, we should try a capsule at least.

 

[Face]

"Collision on commit" would not take place here by definition, because TMac3000 has several pilots who take turns playing in pre-agreed order -- in other words, pilot B will start playing only after pilot A finishes his turn and executes SVN commit. This is trivial to achieve just by using SVN logs (not to mention forum or e-mail). There's no need to go into the extra complexity of distributed version control, quite the contrary in fact -- a centralized repo forces the timeline consistency, so to speak.

I see your point, but I disagree. Everything works out according to a plan - in theory. Real life is something completely different.

I can see where a dropbox solution could work with a small team. If it gets bigger than e.g. 10 members, I can also see where it will be a pain to coordinate properly, though.

And of course SVN and the (single) dropbox instance are single points of failure.

But I have to admit that I don't plan to actually participate in such a mission, so I'll stop discussing this now. I'll still be watching your progress, as I'm curious how it will turn out. Maybe your efforts will make it into my next blog post .

regards,
Face

 

[TMac3000]

What's the crew size of this mission? 3 or 4? (Unless its not decided yet)

Probably only three for the ISS milk-run. Iron Hill is designed for a crew of five. The A-Crew is currently down to three (Mojoey and Lydia dropped out), and the B-Crew is still at five (though I've had no word from Rtyh-12, Tacolev, or Sam Edwards in some time). Add an MCC team of 3 (Sorindafabico, Indy91, Astrosammy) and the entire IHP team comes to eleven. The current system in which we post states on the board, is ugly, but it does work. I can't see DropBox as being anything but an improvement on that.

And *if* we are going for realism, we should try a capsule at least.

I agree--sort of. A Soyuz (or a SpaceX rocket) would do fine for this mission. But if we were going for strict, and I mean strict, realism, then IHP wouldn't have happened at all, because humanity does not currently have the money, and only barely has the technology, for a manned interplanetary mission. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm no pessimist--a manned landing on Mars is coming, and very soon.

But I think that by the time we can do manned missions to the planets, we will probably have SSTO technology. I'm particularly proud of the efforts of Burt Rutan, Richard Branson, and SpaceX. I'm pretty sure they'll build an SSTO vehicle before any government does.

So we are going for realism, tempered by simplicity and the need to keep our options open.