Space Shuttle

[legoboyvdlp]

Also, GinGin, if you are looking for inspiration for a new tutorial I would love to see an Abort Once Around tutorial

Thanks for help on landing!

[GinGin]

Ahah, I am working on that ATO and AOA
End of the month I think, I am playing like a kid with 2 engines abort so far ahah

[Thorsten]

that's a quirk of the weather code... you can also see it if the observer point (example tower view) is further than a certain distance from the craft..

Actually it's a different one - the renderer isn't aware that Earth is curved, it assumes it's locally flat to determine the snowline.
Of course, once you look far enough, it really isn't.

Just move the snowline manually as high as possible, and it won't bother you much.

GinGin, could I ask how you aim your landing? Do you put the -- not sure what you call it here, but in the Airbus we call it the bird -- onto the circle at the end of the line extending from the runway as seen in your HUD?

The circle is the aim point, during the approach you try to aim there to have the right glidepath. At some point, the so-called flare triangles approach from below, when they pass your flightpath marker you pull up such as to keep the flighpath marker between them.

If done right, the whole maneuver will bring you right into the final flare, at which point you monitor vertical speed and airspeed to determine the precise touchdown point - basically you try to bleed off excess speed while in the air (though KSC has a long runway, so it's not as important to touch down early than on a short runway)

You can watch the whole maneuver for real here (last part of the video):

If done right, it looks practically the same in FG (in fact, this video has been a major resource to do the HUD code).

(Beware if you're flying with realistic navigation and have a bad state vector aim point and flare will then lead you astray and you will crash. If you see the runway, have a bad state vector and know it your best bet is to ignore the HUD cues and do it by feel...)

Advanced weather is stuck at 250 km, no way to increase that in command line?

There is. but I have to look it up - you need to set the log of the quantity as a property if I remember correctly, it wasn't straightforward.

[Thorsten]

Look at that painting

Did I ever mention that I really love sunsets? Sadly, I still don't seem to be able to bring all their subtleties into the ALS code, often I can't even pin down properly what is missing.

[GinGin]

Nice video

Ah cool for the advanced weather.
And yes, Sunsets/rise are already breathtaking

[Tim13]

Why does my shuttle look like this, and not like the fantastic pictures I see posted by others?

Newb to FG, flight simming veteran for 30+ years, and 15 year veteran of Orbiter. All I really want to do with FG is use the shuttle addon, have it look good on my new gaming rig, and have an alternative to Orbiter.

Thanks for any help.

Tim

https://ibb.co/gB9VbT

[legoboyvdlp]

You need to turn Atmoshperic Light Scattering and Advanced Weather on in the launcher and enable the Model shader in the View > Rendering menu in-sim. Also enable automatic transition to earth view in Simulation Options.

I turn advanced weather off in the environment > weather menu after earth view comes on (85000 feet by default) as my system appears to freeze due to advanced weather if I leave it on in orbit, particularly with live weather (and understandably so - it was not designed for orbit!)

The Orbiter runs great at 35-40fps with ALS, Earth View, and the Model Shader on a i5-7200U and 920MX - relativitely weak specs for most games (only 15fps in X-Plane 11!), so with any decent GPU, even a relativitely older one such as this and a good CPU you should be fine. Be aware the SpaceShuttle is very heavy on memory (though not as bad as you would expect!) at about 59% total memory useage (8GB) on average.



Thorsten, awesome video

GinGin, I made stable orbit and fully configured for orbital ops for the first time (simplified DPS)

Next challenge is to learn how to do it in advanced DPS and of course how to get home again

[Tim13]

@legoboyvdlp

Thanks for the tips.

How about the inside cockpit? It looks pretty monochrome, almost textureless, compared to pics I've seen. Also the overhead panel seems to be missing?

Thanks,

Tim

[legoboyvdlp]

You need to enable the high detail cockpit in the simulation options dialog.

And turn on the lights in the cabin lighting menu.

Best,
Lego

[Thorsten]

@Tim13:

May I suggest you go to my page and grab the FG Shuttle manual from there (Standard edition is free) - even if you know how to operate an Orbiter, the first chapter describes how to set up everything withing FG (commandline switches, in-sim config options and what they do, starting location for the various scenarion, how to interact with in-cockpit clickspots, move the view,,...) and skimming through that may save you a bit of grey hair.

@legoboydlp:

GinGin, I made stable orbit and fully configured for orbital ops for the first time (simplified DPS)

Congratulations!

You'll be flying contingency aborts before you know it

[Thorsten]

@GinGin:

With regard to your weather question

The visibility parameter you're looking for is

/local-weather/config/aux-max-vis-range-m

which is the log of the desired value. Currently the max. value in the dialog is 12.42921619 and exp(12.42921619) = 250000.0, so you can open to 250 km.

If you want to have e.g. max. 600 km visibility, you can change the value to 13.3046849341983 and AW will (altitude-dependent) open up.

Also, to get rid of the snow, make sure snowline isn't updated by METAR and set

/environment/snow-level-m

to 100000.0 via the commandline.

Use these settings at your own risk and don't file bug reports if all crashes - I don't recommend using the default terrain engine or AW at that altitude, it may or may not work.

Otherwise, if you feel experimental, here's some things which ought to work but I've never gotten around to try:

* Survive a 3EO abort. Conceivably the time sequence of the engine losses makes a huge difference. So far I've tried a simultaneous failure of all three, but the issue was that I could not dump OMS propellant quickly enough to have a viable CoG during the pullout, this always ended badly. I suspect if you have a staggered failure so that the propellant is gone by the time the last engine goes, or if you're fast enough such that you don't fall quite as rapidly it might all go better, but I haven't found the time to test this.

* Do an ECAL landing - due to the relatively large choice of landing sites, this actually ought to be easier than the Bermuda flight since you have more conrol over the ranging - guidance is implemented for a lot of sites (all in the ECAL map).

(* Stuck throttle procedures - but you wanted to do those anyway...)

* Do a single engine TAL from beginning to end - this requires a not so extreme droop, because if the droop us too severe, the range is insufficient. What would be cool is a rather severe droop on a TAL to Banjul and then re-designate the Cape Verde as landing site - but I have no guidance implemented for the airport there yet:-(

[Tim13]

@Thorsten,

The e-book is invaluable. Thanks for pointing that out.

One question....the starting coordinates place the launch pad in the Atlantic ocean. Is this just an issue with how FG displays the land around the Florida east coast?

Tim

[legoboyvdlp]

You might not have scenery installed - do you have automatic download of scenery enabled?
You might also have inverted lat / lon or forgotten a negative sign.

[Thorsten]

One question....the starting coordinates place the launch pad in the Atlantic ocean.

The ones I usually give should place you on land - assuming you have the scenery installed. But simply starting once with the ufo at the spot with automatic scenery download enabled will fix that for you (I don't recommend going into orbit with automatic scenery download installed - it won't keep up and most likely nasty things will happen - so you have to pre-fetch all locations you want to launch/land for spaceflight).

[legoboyvdlp]

I took the approach trainer out.

After a few landings with mixed success:


and beautiful clouds



I might have... ah... er... turned the Shuttle upside down



rolling over on final actually worked