General Question I'm back after not playing Orbiter for a long time. It looks like there have been some changes regarding add-ons?

[Gothmog]

So I had this old laptop with a broken hard drive, and I recently replaced that with an SSD.

Now that I had a spare working computer again, I thought it might be fun to return to Orbiter. I've done the download and install, and everything seems to work fine, or it will when I finish configuring the keymap for a keyboard without a numpad. I haven't installed any add-ons yet, though.

I've always been interested in the early historical space programs, so the first thing I looked for in Orbit Hangar was Little Joe, and here's the difference. Rather than a stand-alone add-on, it appears that Little Joe has been merged into Project Mercury. Also unlike before, when I look at the entry for Project Mercury, I don't see a list of prerequisites that I have to install before the add-on will run, for example Multistage, Earth1962, spacecraft.dll, and so on. Has the framework been refactored so that we no longer need to separately install this infrastrucure? Or was Project Mercury reworked to include the infrastruture?

I even noticed that a couple of hundred more people have downloaded my Gemini Joe add-on, which if memory serves I developed for Orbiter 2006! Obviously I have no way of knowing when the most recent downloads were, but I'm pleasantly surprised to see that the counter ticked up.

 

[Max-Q]

The old Mercury 5.0 addon from o2006 is dead.
The replacement addon is quite good, Project Mercury X is standalone and IIRC has no dependences, just follow the instructions for installation.
If you're interested in historical spaceflight, you might also check out these other great addons:
NASSP v8.0 - Project Apollo
Vostok + a bunch of other early Soviet stuff

If I may make a suggestion, it might be a good idea to buy a 23 key keypad. It really makes flying so much easer.
You can get 'em for less than $10 on Amazon, like this one.

Welcome back to Orbiter!

 

[Gothmog]

Thanks for replying. I'll have to see what I can do about getting Gemini Joe to work in the current version.

I had a lot of problems with the infrastructure for NASSP. Has that also been revamped?

 

[n72.75]

Thanks for replying. I'll have to see what I can do about getting Gemini Joe to work in the current version.

I had a lot of problems with the infrastructure for NASSP. Has that also been revamped?

NASSP is under pretty much continuous development. Our installation instructions are here: https://www.orbiter-forum.com/threads/nassp-8-installation-guide.36801/

We also have an IRC channel (#nassp on liberal.chat)

And a discord server that we are very active on.