Tutorial Home Direct problem solved

[nigelb]

I am learning IMFD 5.5 and I used the excellent tutorial that guides you from the Moon to Earth directly to the Cape. It is included in the IMFD Full Manual/Playback and also can be found as "Home Direct"

The first couple of times I ran the tutorial, the XR5 crew all perished approximately halfway to Earth when the oxygen ran out, despite the fact that at the start of the trip there was a full supply on board. Not good. ..:sos:

I noticed it was when the time accelerated to 100000x. I have a fairly old computer and guessed it could be related to that. So I taught myself a little about the flight playback files and to make a long story short, found that changing the \Flights\Home Direct\XR2-01.atc file fixed the problem. If you have he same problem, edit that file with notepad (backup that file first) and do a search for this:

148035.148 TACC 100000.000000

Change it to this:

148035.148 TACC 10000.000000

For the curious from what I have learned, the first parameter is the tutorial time, the second controls time warp, and the third entry sets the time warp, so I reduced the warp. The next line in the file does the same thing at 360835 which is now a duplicate after my change except for the tutorial time, but I left it alone.

Viola! Problem solved. The crew can now breathe the whole way home! :thumbup: :sweet:

 

[Tommy]

How strange, nobody else has reported this problem and I don't have it myself. Were you using Orbiter 2010? I recorded that flight on Orbiter 2006P1, using an older version of the XR-2, so it's possible that there is some incompatability caused by the version change.

At any rate, thanks for posting this solution for anyone else who has this problem.

 

[nigelb]

Yes Tommy, I have Orbiter 2010 installed. I tired three times to run the scenario as it was when downloaded and got the same result so it was not a fluke. After my change everything was ok. I suspect it might be that my ancient computer ( 9 years old) can't handle all the computations at the original time warp speed.

Anyway, that tuorial is just fantastic - the best I have found for learning the IMFD, so thanks for that! :tiphat:

 

[Tommy]

My computer is as old as yours, but I haven't tried this on 2010 yet. We are working on an update to "Full Manual", so I'll test it and possibly make the change on the new version.

BTW, markl316 is the one who did most (by far) of the work on that, I just provided the one annotated recording and some tips and advice. I've done 4 new flights for the update, and I think Mark has done a few as well. About the only thing we haven't covered is Tangential Transfer - I may do that as a separate tutorial if I find the time, but TT is actually quite simple so if you know the rest, TT isn't hard to figure out on your own.