- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
Fucking wild to look up at the Moon tonight and think that in just under a week, they'll be orbiting that big chunk of regolith. Will be even fucking weirder when we land on it again to look up at it and think "yeah there's people fucking walking around up there at this very moment, or sleeping up there, or whatever they're doing."
Wonder if they'll include a rover this time. From what I understand it was actually quite a pain in the ass for the lads to assemble up there, but it was necessary to reach certain objectives near the landing site. And somehow getting it up there attached to the descent module fully assembled would be an even bigger engineering pain in the ass, which is something I learned quite well playing KSP's Real Solar System mod. It was funny because originally I started out trying to do my own design for a lander that would pop down and return without any separation, but ultimately I found it unfeasible and went with the tried and true method of having a lander and a separate ascent module. Of course I forgot to load some of my research into the ascent module, so it's just sitting there with the lander forevermore. Believe I had three successful landings and I suspect watching the launch yesterday is going to force me to boot it up again. Would like to try a rover this time, maybe land near one of the poles as I've pretty much milked all other scientific objectives dry. Cool thing about RSS is that you actually sort of do need to mirror the real lunar program, first sending up various altimetry satellites and such to try and pick out suitable landing sites, then unmanned surveyor probes dropped on candidate sites.
That game is crazy fucking entertaining for the right sort of person, scratches my autistic itch just right I guess. I still haven't fucking cracked a manned Mars mission yet and last time I played, I had a vessel with four separate lander probes headed for the Martian system [three to touch down on Mars, one to either check out Phobos or Deimos] and a lander headed for Venus.
That's one thing I wish we would do in real life - more Venus shit. I've always been fascinated by that planet for whatever reason and only the Russians managed to put something on the surface that didn't immediately combust, after quite a few failed attempts, one of which IIRC was partially stymied by a camera lens cap that refused to come off. Of course I get why we don't really fuck with Venus that much, it's hard to put anything on the surface that isn't immediately destroyed and we can be fairly certain there is no water or the slightest possibility of life on the surface, so it's not as scientifically interesting as Mars and not as "easy" to reach as the Moon. A Mercury lander would be cool too but due to the velocities involved, that's really, really fucking difficult to do.
Wonder if they'll include a rover this time. From what I understand it was actually quite a pain in the ass for the lads to assemble up there, but it was necessary to reach certain objectives near the landing site. And somehow getting it up there attached to the descent module fully assembled would be an even bigger engineering pain in the ass, which is something I learned quite well playing KSP's Real Solar System mod. It was funny because originally I started out trying to do my own design for a lander that would pop down and return without any separation, but ultimately I found it unfeasible and went with the tried and true method of having a lander and a separate ascent module. Of course I forgot to load some of my research into the ascent module, so it's just sitting there with the lander forevermore. Believe I had three successful landings and I suspect watching the launch yesterday is going to force me to boot it up again. Would like to try a rover this time, maybe land near one of the poles as I've pretty much milked all other scientific objectives dry. Cool thing about RSS is that you actually sort of do need to mirror the real lunar program, first sending up various altimetry satellites and such to try and pick out suitable landing sites, then unmanned surveyor probes dropped on candidate sites.
That game is crazy fucking entertaining for the right sort of person, scratches my autistic itch just right I guess. I still haven't fucking cracked a manned Mars mission yet and last time I played, I had a vessel with four separate lander probes headed for the Martian system [three to touch down on Mars, one to either check out Phobos or Deimos] and a lander headed for Venus.
That's one thing I wish we would do in real life - more Venus shit. I've always been fascinated by that planet for whatever reason and only the Russians managed to put something on the surface that didn't immediately combust, after quite a few failed attempts, one of which IIRC was partially stymied by a camera lens cap that refused to come off. Of course I get why we don't really fuck with Venus that much, it's hard to put anything on the surface that isn't immediately destroyed and we can be fairly certain there is no water or the slightest possibility of life on the surface, so it's not as scientifically interesting as Mars and not as "easy" to reach as the Moon. A Mercury lander would be cool too but due to the velocities involved, that's really, really fucking difficult to do.
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