V8 Release Work Thread

[indy91]

To enhance the latest Virtual Cockpit update even further, a new type of rotational switch class has been implemented to allow lighting controls (and some others) to work more like the potentiometers they were and have finer control over them:

As you might be able to tell from the video, these switches are now operated by holding left click on the knob and pulling the mouse to the sides to rotate them. On the 2D panel the control has been made consistent to this changed VC behavior, although the finite number of bitmap states for the switches make this slightly awkward. I think the consistency of control between 2D and VC is more important though.

When updating to the latest NASSP Beta, the affected switches will sadly have the wrong switch positions in old scenarios, so be aware of that. The switches are:

-All flood, integral, numerics controls in the CSM and LM
-CSM high gain antenna and LM steerable S-band antenna pitch and yaw controls
-ORDEAL altitude selection in CSM and LM
-SPS gimbal trim thumbwheels (control hasn't changed for this, but saving/loading in scenarios at the 0.1° increments is fixed now, see https://github.com/orbiternassp/NASSP/issues/1209)

 

[indy91]

He has done it again!

Now available in NASSP is Comanche 67, the CMC software flown on Apollo 12. The software comes from the flight spare rope modules and was read by @thewonderidiot with his rope reader, as before for the Skylark modules and others.

There is only one major update from the Apollo 11 CMC software and a bunch of minor quality of life updates. The major update is Verb 79, a little program for automatic passive thermal control (PTC) and orbit rate pitch maneuvers. On previous missions these were accomplished with direct manipulation of DAP variables, which always seemed a bit scary to me. Comanche 67 puts these in an extended verb. Eventually, in Artemis (Apollo 15+), this feature got extended and incorporated into the universal pointing capabilities of P20.

The step from Apollo 12 to 13 is fairly small in terms of software changes, so it is probably possible for @thewonderidiot (and my usual 1% contribution for these things) to reconstruct the Apollo 13 CMC software from these newly found ropes. No promises though and it will definitely take several weeks, as the Comanche 67 source code will first have to be reconstructed. Until then our Apollo 13 scenario will keep using the Apollo 11 CMC software, to avoid changing this twice and potentially breaking/interrupting more missions that people are flying.

Thank you so much to Mike and the anonymous collector, who owns the rope modules, to preserve this software and make it possible to be used in NASSP!

 

[indy91]

As it turns out the Comanche 72 reconstruction might be a bit tricky. I also discovered that, due to the small number of differences between Comanche 67 and 72, old scenarios using Comanche 67 would not break when changing to Comanche 72 in the middle of a mission. You could just be in P00 and get a restart from the rope switch, but the lack of any relevant padload differences between the two ropes means you could continue as normal, without erasable memory edits in the scenario.

So considering these two facts, our Apollo 13 scenario(s) from now on uses Comanche 67! May it take a few days or months to get Comanche 72, as I said, it won't matter much for ongoing missions.

The switch from Comanche 55 (which our Apollo 13 scenarios were using until now) to 67 is not as painless though, so I cannot recommend doing that for an ongoing mission.