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Open Office's word processor can export to PDF. If you want to see a sample of a finished product, I used it to do this tutorial: Gemini semi-optical rendezvous tutorial (v 0.3) Like the rest of Open Office, it's somewhat clumsy to use (IMO) compared to similar commercial apps, but it is...

> Lol, you reminded me of this quote: "What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough." Yeah, I definitely need to get a refill on my meds. :rofl:It's a lot easier to...

I usually consider 30 the cutoff between "questionable" and "acceptable"; I figure if I'm happy with my TV @ 30 FPS, that's good enough for PC games. PC1 = Dell Dimension E521, XP/SP2, dual core 2.4 GHz CPU, motherboard's built-in video, ~70 FPS PC2 = Home built, Windows 7, quad core 2.3 GHz...

That definitely helped. VistaBoost adds about 10 across the board to FPS (high 20s - low 40s; average mid-30s), and the jerkiness is a lot less. Enough of an improvement to move it from "unacceprable" to "tolerable" -- thanks! SAM

I don't believe the overall idea at all (UFOs, little green men, etc.), but a lot of ham radio gear can receive across wider frequency ranges than just allocated ham radio bands, so no problem there. The scrambling might present a problem though. :rofl: SAM Ham radio operator since '77

Win 7 (64) too. No matter what I do, I can't get beyond this ceiling; FPS ~= 25, occasionally breaks 30 momentarily, and with occasional dips into the high teens. That applies whether I'm on a takeoff roll with scenery whizzing by me, or in deep space looking at nothing. And there seems to be...

Just want to reassure anyone wondering that I am indeed still alive. Parallel processing turned out to be more intriguing than I anticipated, and I ended up going for a CUDA processor. The thing flies, but a bit of a learning curve! SAM

LOL — Well, the parallel processing was something I had wanted to dig into for a long time, but had never gotten around to. With the run times of some of the programs I'm doing, I actually went websurfing to see if I could rent a small amount of time on a supercomputer somewhere. (Every place I...

I got sidetracked for longer than I thought it would take, and during that time my ability to run XP was somwhat impaired, but everything's back to the way it was last week. The Beowulf is up and running. Each slave PC boots from a CD, which pulls the boot code via the network from the Linux...

I'm keeping busy on this end. It finally dawned on me that a lot of what I'm doing is ridiculously parallelizable; the individual simulated orbits are all independent of each other, so each can be computed separately. So I get to try something I've always wanted to dig into -- at the moment...

OK, here's where I'm at. As always, anyone who wants to jump in and offer comments, suggestions, etc. is welcome to do so. I ran a test flight to look at several things: (1) Sextant MFD (zip of beta test stuff is attached); (2) try the method in lunar orbit to make sure I wasn't accidentally...

That did the trick -- thanks! Based on what I've seen so far in the sims, I've got a couple of ideas to refine the procedure. I'm getting ready to do a test flight and try out one of those ideas, and will also check Sextant MFD's numbers along the way. If I see any problems, I'll let you...

The zip file has the SCNs in it, which are just different permutations of trying to turn the MFD on then quicksave; turn the MFD on then off again before quicksave; etc. > I can't seem to replicate the bug here. Yeah, my PC is weird. I saved a few bucks by getting XP Media Center instead of...

Looks great! Unfortunately, I can't seem to use it :( If I include Sextant MFD in the modules tab of the launchpad but don't use it, everything's fine. But if I start up the MFD once in Orbiter, attemping to quicksave causes Orbiter to crash. Same thing if I turn on Sextant MFD then switch...

LOL understood ... I've had clients try to squeeze me for all the "for free" they can get. ;) A little behind schedule, but the Monte Carlo programs are finished. If I can twist my arm for a moment and indulge in a little self-congratulatory patting of my own back ... Program A computes true...

The radar was an interesting device in its own right. Three identical spiral antennas, one for reference which was wired to be 180 degrees out of phase with the other two, and pitch and yaw antennas which were respectively below and to the left of the reference antenna. If the signal was...

One of the problems I've had trying to find out things like this is that there's just not a lot of good technical data out there, and sometimes different sources will disagree -- even two different sources from within NASA. Those numbers I cited earlier (250 nm, 25 degrees) came from two...

Sounds like we're working at about the same rate. On the Monte Carlo thingy, I've gone through three iterations of pseudocoding and am now most of the way through coding it. Only 30K+ lines of code so far (32768 of which are a direct rand() to Z value lookup table for the normally distributed...

Ah, ok ... that's what I get for trying to think at 2 AM. :rofl: First I gotta go back to my usual disclaimer -- I don't know exactly what they did, I've tried to put together a plausible method of how it might have been done, calling into play the same principles that would have applied, etc...

Thanks! If you've looked at the thread in the "Flights and Challenges" section, a few of us are discussing it over there and I've been convinced to move away from the "start making MCCs and keep making 'em" model to a two-MCC model. I've found a few NASA sources that imply that they did two...