Project N1 Lunar

@dennis.krenz love your hoodie man
looks like official Soyuz merchandise eh ? :unsure:
perfect match :giggle:

Wrong colour and the original soyuz thermal protection is approximately the same grey as the modern one. The old films just had been more sensitive in the green part of the spectrum.

Thats actually a hoodie of my favorite football club.


But don't mention the wa..... the current season. At least 12th of 18 in the league now, but still only four points away from dropping into the second league.
 
Wrong colour and the original soyuz thermal protection is approximately the same grey as the modern one. The old films just had been more sensitive in the green part of the spectrum.
I remember this from over a decade ago, and help me if I'm being closed minded or missing something, but to be honest I've been considering this matter resolved for a while now because I'm still yet to see evidence against green prior to Soyuz-T, only the poor film claim. If anything I question the exact shade of green, which may not have even been consistent FWIW. For it, however:

NASA ASTP documentation:
1769467897291.png

High res ASTP photography and video with american cameras and film correlates with this:
1769469170925.png

We have references with a known colour in the same images, like the Vzor, and I don't notice that any other hardware or feature seems so drastically off colour.

Period soviet photography and video I'll consider unreliable for the sake of this, and I also don't want to fall into the trap of artificial colouring of B&W, though it's pertinent to me how consistent the green presence is over the years with different capture media and environments (both indoors and outer space), and how Soviet graphical depictions include it even chronologically past the point of expectation of hiding the design from the West (post-ASTP), as they did earlier with the Kosmos dockings. Museum displays show it too. For fun, even a soviet movie which evidently had some level of access to the space program depicts the same kind of green on what is obviously modelled after a 7K-T, were they fed a, or in on a conspiracy? A perpetuating misconception? Who knows.

As far as modern digital photography:

Period flight-like hardware

Almaz was of course developed in parallel with DOS which itself derived from Almaz and shared a lot of hardware with Soyuz (and DOS media up to Salyut 6 fit into the idea of the previous paragraph), I think it reasonable that they would have reused the thermal protection, and in that sense:
Unflown Almaz hardware 1
Unflown Almaz hardware 2

We also see that the green sightings disappeared with the introduction of Soyuz-T, were all cameras or film development updated to match for that switch? One example of the disappearing green with (still rather poor) footage of -T. I first saw this image attributed to Soyuz-10, which doesn't at all match any 7K-T so that's not it, not sure if it would be a Soyuz-T or Soyuz-TM which the visible lack of either Igla or Kurs doesn't help, I'm leaning -TM but anyway:
1769473727483.jpeg

I mean only ASTP is non-circumstancial here and I suppose one could then say "maybe only 7K-TM was green", which would be odd they only did that once, or maybe it was part of the 7K-S experiments that never made it to Soyuz-T and onwards. I just see way too much smoke here to not be a fire.
 
Good point, ASTP pictures were taken on 'Western' film.
 
Salyut 6 images are consistent with a green early Soyuz spacecraft as wellsoyuz-31_salyut.jpg
That's Soyuz 31 photographed by the crew of Soyuz 30 (forgot if this was taken during arrival to or departure from Salyut 6)
 
Yeah, I think the occams razor answer here is "they were green". But also probably less green than the saturated green we see on some soviet film. That much is evident comparing to the ASTP photo.

If anything, the source of the perception idea that early Soviet space hardware was grey not green is even more interesting.

  • A not insignificant amount of the population is color blind.
  • There are sometimes very surprising cultural and linguistic differences with how we categorize colors.
 
I still think that many modellers make the spacecraft more "painted green" than "shining green" or even "illuminated greenish". That the hardware is also green in modern photography is surprising, because I thought that only the green shine was exagarated by 60-70s photography. Which was not true colour in the sense of how we expect it today (especially if you look at old family photographs or films). The film material really became better in the late 1980s.

Its also obvious if you look at the Soyuz launcher itself: In the bright daylight, its a dull light forest green color, but in the ambient light lower in the pit, it appears grey:

960px-Soyuz_TMA-13_erected_at_Baikonur_Cosmodrome_launch_pad.jpg


Also also look at the signal orange parts of it below in the pit and at Blok I skirt.

Now I wonder how it would look like next to a red pad. Any bets that it would become a dull red launcher?
 
That greenish paint look a bit 'metallic'. It 'reflects' the dark environnment of the bottom of the pit. The orange paint is almost fluorescent and handles the light in a very different way.
 
I must admit I took an artistic un-educated guess.:)

A couple of points on the subject:
Old film was very varied in colour, I use to choose the film according to what hue I wanted. IIRC Fuji film was always very green.
Also we are discussing two different things, the green metalic paint on the boosters and the "plastic" insulation material of the BO, SA etc..

I made the texture from a winter coat and actual ref. material in this pic (thanks @diogom) and based the colour on that.
fig2b.jpg
 
Yeah I think the bigger question is more the shade of it, that does vary quite a bit and so does my opinion every time I look into it, as far as Soyuz goes I might still change it again one of these days. The film quality or type would influence it, as well as lighting (unfiltered sunlight in orbit vs indoor lights), maybe they even tuned the fabric a bit over the years. Worth considering also sun exposure over time, we see modern Soyuz launch near black and undock an almost light grey 6 months later (side by side of an old timer and a fresh arrival), though most pics/film of the old stuff are either pre-launch or with little time in orbit.

For example this one of an early 7K-T (allegedly Soyuz-10):
1769557907056.jpeg

A lot more subdued and darker here, to the point of barely being noticeable, than that BO mockup or ASTP's US captures (even these vary a bit shot to shot). FWIW that near-black "shielding" adjacent the solar panel mounts becomes brown in the ASTP ship but it could just be different material. Or compared to this one of (allegedly) Soyuz-3, which granted appears less true colour than the previous pic:
1769558120144.jpeg

Or a more neutral tinted version of the Salyut-6 pic:
1769558432210.jpeg

This all rings a bell with a different rabbit hole with figuring out Titanic's White Star Buff or dark mast with orthochromatic film for a model, where red components just look black, and the yellow sheer line fades into the black hull, and tracking down 60s colour photography of ships once operated in Edwardian WSL livery as a joint venture... Anyway, kinda hijacked this a bit with the green. All I can say is it seems plausible L3 would reuse the same or similar material as L1 also seemed to (seen at least one indoors LK (T2K) pic also with the green hue). For the exact shade across the years, we might need an airtight DeLorean, or maybe Energia has a bunch of the stuff rotting in some warehouse (ebay exists y'all).
 
Or more photographs in different lighting conditions, which is also unlikely. There are possibly more grayscale photographs of German WW1 military airships than colour photographs of early Soyuz spacecraft.
 
Project Status Report

First off a shoutout to @CurlSnout who inadvertently kickstarted this project.;)
A very big thank you to @BrianJ who has brought this endeavour far beyond my initial aspirations.
And @diogom who's knowledge and contributions have added another level of detail and immersion.

What we have so far:

N1 LV- completely reworked by BrianJ, sfx including hot-staging for both BlokB and BlokV, ullage simulation and parking orbit autopilot...
BlokDG/ L3 complex/ LK- TLI ullage simulation. Descent/ascent autopilots with engine failures and abort sequences. Full HUD info, and more...- BrianJ. Working VC console with clickable buttons and display- Diogom
LOK with animations and VC.
Full mission profile up to reentry.

To do:
SA animations, reentry sequence, textures, plasma heating (VC) effects etc.
Finish SA, BO, and LK cockpits. SA 10% complete, BO 50%, LK 90%.
Comprehensive documentation.

further ambitions:
Cosmonaut and equipment for surface EVA
Cosmonaut and animation for orbital EVA sequence
Complete launch facility

Maybe one day:
Lunokhod to drive, full pre-manned landing mission program
N1 variants
Retro lunar base construction

Hope to have a first release, or at least a beta up soon...:)
 
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