chopcat

This is interesting to watch.

or How to destroy food with high powered rifles.

I’ve given myself quite a hobby lately. I’ve decided to mimic the Project Mercury efforts of NASA from 1959 to 1963. In REAL LIFE, this was the first manned space program into space by NASA. It consisted of a series of launches of the mercury space craft on top of some very large bottle rockets. I want to do this in SL.

Things that I have to consider: Physics in second life are not so great. It has lots of limitations and “weirdness” that I will have to work around but this is part of the fun right? I want to make it as real as possible within the confines of the Second Life universe but there are going to have to be a lot of compromises, for example, joystick control is out so I am going to opt for some of the earlier capsule designs in that instead of a joystick to control pitch, yaw, and roll. I will be using a “push pull” style controls.

More interesting to me is not really manual control of the flight but what was known as the “chimp box”. This is analogous to an autopilot. Basically automating the whole flight. Not knowing much about how the capsule was made or even the maths involved with ballistic physics, it is certainly going to be a challenge.

One thing that is going to be interesting, the height of the flight… Mercury went miles and miles into space…. But once you start getting to 40-50km in second life in altitude you start to experince “strange” effects. I am going to initially limit the spaceflights to <20km in height. this will also help keep the ballastic flight within the confines of the "world" which while it is large, it's not really THAT large... this will most likely keep the flights <5 minutes long. things will be happening very fast. I really hope though it will be a fun experience.

The Builds:

• The Frost Capsule
A simple sit in minimal prim “capsule”. A cone, a flattened sphere and a couple cylinders. Minimal because I have to work within the bounds of <31 prims for physics to be enabled.
• The “HUD”
This will be the controls and telltales for the flight. Unfortunately I will have to use a listener script for this to communicate with the mission simulator script with in the capsule. But this is where the attitude indicator will be, the pushpull controls for attitude, booster ignition, retro ignition/cutoff, mission timer, retro timer and all mission control sounds/communcations.
• The Frost Boosters
Nothing fancy here, they will have to be single cylinders because I believe that when a prim is delinked, itself is delinked and no child prims. This will be resolved in experiments.

Some Project Milestones:

1. basic capsule control
consists of control of PYR (Pitch, Yaw, Roll) of the capsule
2. basic booster control
consists of initial force or launch of the frost capsule, as well as “detachment”
3. basic PYR control
consists of simulating the attitude jets on the frost capsule with out which we will have a pretty boring flight.
4. basic retro control
consists of deorbit force of the frost capsule, as well as “detachment” of the retro package.
5. basic recovery control
consists of the final phase of the launch, INduction of bouyancy to simulate the recovery parachute
6. basic hud control
consists of the attitude display, mission control display, and controls of the basic functions of the capsule/booster/recovery packages (the hardest part of this will be inertial navigation tracking)
7. basic events trigger
this is the ROOT of the chimpbox, this is what will watch the flight and trigger events based on the flight

Some Project Flights:

1. booster, attitude and retro tests
to determin the levels of force needed to move the whole package around in the SL world
2. manned verticle flight test
tests will be to help determin timing/events needed to handle a full ballastic flight (over my own land to prevent space junk (haha))
3. ballaistic tests
the real meat and final adjustments to timers and events triggers
4. chimpbox ballaistic test
fully automated chimpbox tests
5. regular spaceflight
final tests complete, this stage means the program is a sucess. This also means that we can adujst the length of the booster burn and still have a safe recovery.

I could have used one of these when I worked in California.