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Originally Posted by Lieste
Well, the orbit is an ellipse, with minimum altitude at perigee, and maximum at apogee. If the current shuttle altitude reads below the value listed at OPS105 or OPS202 as the 'current perigee' then I see a problem  |
Resounding doh! I should've guessed you were looking at the orbiter instruments, tricky guy you are.
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As far as I can tell, the 'simulator' does in fact run on rails... but it can get confused by pauses in simulation rate (either by explicitly pausing, or due to poor optimation - hell they know exactly what textures and sounds are going to be needed during ascent... it can't be too hard to ensure that you perform these prior to lift off, rather than at the point of highest dynamic change?
Once it has got itself out of sync the lack of proper simulation calculation>display>perform correction is painfully obvious. How they manage to fudge the rendevous navigation with this sort of simulation methodology I can only guess at, but I think it may not be pretty
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I'm going to try to throw a bunch of pauses at the sim during launch and see what dirty tricks rear their heads. The sim is certainly VERY mission time governed in its dynamics and procedures. I think if errors happen the sim irons itself out and puts everything back on the rails when you hit the "next action" button and fast forward a few hours/days forward into the mission to the next player action.
I don't mind the riding the rails, as enough of spaceflight is computer controlled anyways and the sim does make for a convincing experience. And the physics manual orbital rendezvous/formation maneuvering seems to be legit when your rotating/translating around objects. But I suppose that's just a matter of relative speeds/simple energy impulses and can't be that hard too pull off. I've been playing for about 50 hours I'd guess, and only had one "huh?" moment when doing an orbital rendezvous (the farther off portion, which starts after a few burns, you hit next action and the sim spits you out about 45,000 feet from the rendezvous target and you manually translate towards it using the rendezvous panel. It was fixed by me just selecting the "next action button" again and being properly spat in to visual range of the rendezvous target.
Annoying, but tolerable to me. It's the only real game in town for a detailed Space Shuttle sim.
PD