Space Forum / Space Flight / August 2003

http://www.alltel.net/~estar/orbiter.html

Animated parachutes like the most recent gemini.
The Retrograde clock and timer.
Automatic calculation of retro time for three orbits.
Automatic calculation of retro time for orbit 1 and 2 if you choose to
abort early.
However my current math doesn't work real well for high inclination
orbits.
(Thank Duncan Sharpe for making this possible)

Better ASCS for holding orbital attitude. This means you can time
accel up to a 100x without killing your fuel. Apparently the real
mercury had two modes a high torque mode for just after turnaround and
retrofire, and a low torque mode for all other times.

Used Radu's OpenGL ADI ball to render a 3D Earth Globe.

More accurate coding of the sequencers take to the mercury
familization pdfs I have from Adam Bootle. Again thanks for such a
great donation!
The change is mostly that the light turn red 2 seconds before the
actual event and then turn green.

Also the real nasa manuals for mercury are at
sourceforge.net/projects/mscorbaddon/

The source code is in a separate file now along with all the bitmaps
used.

Earth 1962 2.0
Courtesy of John Graves the launch pads for the Mercury Redstone have
been added.

I want thank BigJimW for his testing and video.
The orbiter beta team for helping me with the math.
And to missleman01 and friend (sorry I forgot your name) to finding a
last minute problem that helped me a lot.

Source code avaliable for the model under the BSD liscense

Enjoy
Rob Conley

Pictures
http://www.toolcity.net/~estar/merc_redstone_pad.jpg
http://www.toolcity.net/~estar/merc_retro_clock.jpg
http://www.toolcity.net/~estar/merc_earth_globe.jpg
http://www.toolcity.net/~estar/merc_parachute.jpg
http://www.toolcity.net/~estar/merc_landing_bag.jpg