rdfox

Moho. Moho Moho. Moho Moho Moho, Moho Moho, Moho Moho Moho Moho Moho, Moho, MOHO. Mo-**********-ho! I've tried to send probes there dozens of times. Of them, only ONE has ever even had an encounter, a lander that was built with far, FAR more delta-V than any calculations said it needed. That one managed to run out of fuel at exactly the right moment to plow straight into the planet at over 4km/s. :rage: :ragegasm: :throw computer out window:

I asked on YT about whether this uses a predefined menu of landing site options, or if it uses onboard sensors to select a new landing site entirely autonomously. Even if it *is* picking from a predefined menu, it's a major step towards that sort of fully-autonomous site-selection option.

And KSP: The Flamethrower, A Children's Toy.

I suspect part of the reason Apollo has never gotten much attention from modders is that they feel that the stock three-man capsule is a decent analogue to the Apollo Command Module, and the rest of the system (except the LM) can be "easily enough" assembled from stock parts. Not true, of course, but I can see why they think that way. Heck, one of the first "universally accepted" mod parts for KSP was... I think it was called the "Translatron," though I'm not sure, and it was an unmanned command pod (the only non-SAS part that had reaction wheels at the time--this was back in the days when Kerbals were about 40cm tall, and the original three-man Mark I pod and the Stayputnik were the only root part options!) that was visually modeled after the Apollo Service Module. It carried no propellant (sadly, if you wanted to use it as an SM, you had to bolt a small fuel tank onto the rear, making it excessively long, visually), and served only to provide a huge torque boost for steering large boosters (important, as at the time, the only control surfaces available were the spaceplane ones, and there was no thrust vectoring yet). Still, bolt it onto the rear of the Mark I pod, slap a (superfluous) LV-909 on the rear, and it looked a LOT like the Apollo CSM... Side note: Frizz, I don't know if it would be feasible, since I'm not sure exactly how you're modeling the S-I/S-IB stage (wasn't the only difference there that the S-IB had uprated engines?), but would it be possible to also have a Jupiter stage come out with it? (This assumes that the plan is to have us assemble the S-I/S-IB stage in components, with the top structure, then the central Jupiter LOX tank, then symmetrical Redstone tanks for LOX and kerosene, then a thrust structure on the Jupiter tank, then the engines below that. If you're planning on just making it a single part from top structure to thrust structure, obviously, that wouldn't be very viable...)

This Space-Car was sometimes carried to space by the Up-Goer Five. It made the space people able to do much more when they got to space, but cost lots and lots of money and didn't even have any fire thingies of its own. Space people kept breaking parts of it, but they could always fix those parts and didn't have to go home early because of that. It ran on batteries like your car uses, but a lot more of them. It held two space people, it only worked in space, and only in one place in space, and it didn't come back to Earth. It didn't even have a door!

What about with the Lazor System cameras? They're the only part of the Lazor System I use, but I really like the docking cam and remote cam from it, and I know that they've been pretty much stable for quite a while now.

Not YET...

The Road to 0.24? Is that anything like the Road to Wrestlemania? (KIDDING, kidding! Though I *would* laugh madly at seeing a Kerbalized version of El Hijo del Santo, Mil Mascaras, or the original La Parka...)

Personally, I'd *like* the superstrong head concept becoming canonical. It's just silly enough to work, and would mean the devs don't have to fix that particular bug. Actually, that could also explain why Kerbals have such large heads compared to the rest of their bodies--not only are their skulls thick and very dense (which also explains their poor balance while getting back up!), but they also evolved to have most, if not all, of their most vital organs actually located within the skull, which would allow them to survive massive shock damage to the rest of their bodies long enough to heal up. (Think about the accelerative loadings generated when you land on your head--that'd cause most of the rest of the bones in the body to break hard.) Perhaps their brains are cushioned in a thick layer of fairly viscous fluid that acts as a shock absorber, making it harder for them to smash against the inside of the skull, making them much more resistant to closed-head injuries? As for the photosynthesis explanation, given that we know they eat snacks, I'm of the theory that Kerbals have sort of a hybrid biology (actually akin to Tamaraneans and yellow sun-exposed Kryptonians in the DC Universe) whereby they can generate a minimal baseline amount of energy through photosynthesis, enough to handle routine "staying alive" functions, but anything requiring more energy than your basic "bedrest" levels of activity requires consuming energy-containing foodstuffs, water, and oxygen to operate it. In fact, this would vastly reduce the life support requirements for them, as they could act, to some degree, as their own oxygen supply and carbon dioxide scrubbers, since, during their sleep cycles, they'd be just photosynthesizing the energy to stay alive and thus *consuming* the CO2 and *producing* the oxygen (as opposed to more active periods, when they'd likely be net consumers of O2 and net producers of CO2). Of course, this is just me spitballing here--remember, I'm the guy who, back in the days when KSP had only "fuel," instead of fuel and oxidizer, suggested that the way *that* worked with an Isp. that was too high for monopropellant was that the ship was designed to extract ammonia from the urine that Bill continuously produced, then use that to burn the fecal material that Bob continuously produced, using that to boil water to run a small steam turbine to generate electricity and electrolysize water into hydrogen and oxygen to burn in the engines. Sounds logical (in the days of only the original three-man Mark I capsule), until you start doing the chemistry to find out what the energy of burning cellulose (the primary component of feces) in ammonia is, and then remember that ammonia is NOT an oxidizing agent...

Which, technically, is already the case. (The KSC launch pad is actually at... IIRC, 0d5'32" S, not directly on the equator.) Aha, so THAT'S why KSC2 exists!

I think I might have found a bug, though I'm not sure it's been reported yet. The short version is... any time I have a Kerbal go on EVA from the Big G, when he reboards it, it separates the Big G from the Gemini capsule. Anyone else have this problem?

Would it be possible to add the remote camera "periscope" functionality as a separate mod? I like the default IVA and don't want to install RPM (again, I like the default IVAs), but the "periscope" function would be immensely welcome in a lot of my applications. (If nothing else, to use when I'm flying an unmanned landing probe somewhere--imagine setting MechJeb to land automatically, then watching what they'd see in Mission Control, a TV feed from a camera on the spacecraft.)

Side note: The problem with the Reliant Robin rocket (a single miswired explosive bolt) was detected during checkout the night before the launch. However, the BBC was up against a strict deadline to get the film in the can to make the show's air date, and correcting the problem would have required about two days of work de-stacking the rocket, rewiring the bolt, and then re-stacking the rocket. Since they estimated that there was a 50-50 chance of it working correctly, and one of Top Gear's mottos is that they're "ambitious, but rubbish," the BBC decided to press on and launch anyway, knowing that it'd be good television whether it worked right or not. (If it had been a MANNED launch, I'm pretty sure they'd have scrubbed and repaired, but with an unmanned launch and no real payload, they weren't too worried.) James and Richard distinctly knew that there was a good chance it would fail in exactly the manner it did, so part of their reaction is acting (even if they'll admit they're not very good actors). (May's final line refers to much, MUCH earlier in the show, when someone had asked why spaceflight is so bloody expensive and it takes so many people so much time to get a vehicle designed, built, and flying. "THAT'S why.") Trivia: That segment inspired a game on the Top Gear web site where you attempt to launch the Robin yourself, and see if you can either recover it intact, or exceed the altitude that the real one reached. A few years back, Harv stumbled on that game, and, while playing around with it, thought he could come up with a better one, and then he remembered his playing around with tinfoil men and fireworks rockets in his childhood... I think you see where I'm going with this.

OK, there's several reasons for starting the turn early. The first, and single most important reason, is range safety. NASA honestly isn't THAT worried about an exploding booster dropping debris back on the pad--after all, it could just as easily explode on the pad and completely wipe it out. However, the horizontal distance that debris will travel before hitting the ground depends on altitude, and if they launched straight up, it wouldn't take long for an exploding vehicle's debris to be able to travel far enough to land in Titusville or other open-to-the-public areas. Therefore, just after clearing the tower and completing the roll program, they initiate an early part of the pitch program to pitch over about five degrees and start the vehicle downrange. This actually costs them a little extra delta-V, but it's considered beneficial for range safety requirements. Secondly, yes, the drag model in KSP is screwed up (and so is the *rate* of change in the atmosphere's thickness), resulting in the lower atmosphere being like soup compared to Earth. This means that you do want to start gaining downrange velocity as soon as possible (look, for example, at films of Polaris or Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles being test-fired from submarines and starting pitchover almost immediately after ignition), though not as aggressively as the Shuttle did; that profile was almost entirely for range safety. Third, as noted, an early start to the gravity turn is very important to avoid excessive aerodynamic loads on the vehicle. This is more important than you might think--most people think that the Challenger was torn apart by the force of the external tank exploding; it wasn't. When the ET ruptured and the LH2 and LOX burned, it generated very little force, at least compared to what the Orbiter's structure was built for. What caused the Challenger to break up were the extreme aerodynamic loadings caused by the Orbiter abruptly pitching towards the horizon due to the now off-axis thrust provided by the main engines (still burning on residual propellant in the lines). That accident happened at fairly high altitude and low velocity, yet the aerodynamic loads were still enough to break the vehicle apart. (The Saturn V started its turn later because a "single stick" configuration is more tolerant of aerodynamic loads than a winged vehicle--there's no big flat wings to build up massive loads and tear off.) Side note: The Saturn V made the earliest pitch maneuver of any manned spacecraft ever. In the first few seconds after launch, the booster was within ten meters of the launch umbilical tower, and the inherent imprecision in the guidance system could have easily had it drift over into the tower in a vertical launch. Therefore, pretty much as soon as the engines were clear of the flame pit, the S-V was programmed to make a 2-3 degree pitchover *away* from the tower; it would then pitch back to vertical as soon as it had cleared the tower. This was internally known as the "lean," and was only there to decrease the odds of a catastrophic collision with the LUT, and is, to my knowledge, completely unique to the Saturn V (though I wouldn't be shocked if the Saturn I and IB also had a similar maneuver in their profile).

Look up "Declassified Nuclear Test Film #55" on YouTube for one of the several such tests done. Operational ballistic missiles very deliberately do NOT have any form of abort/self-destruct/range safety package on board, simply because having one would make it possible for the enemy to work out a way to trigger it. Once launched, it's going to fly until it either suffers its own failure, is shot down, or reaches its target...

My personal favorite is the one I can't find the footage of right now, but where either a Thor with an upper stage or a Juno (and I can't identify it any more precisely than that) is launched and immediately starts turning hard left, getting about 135 degrees of rotation before the RSO sends the Destruct command. Why? Because it had what strikes me as a very Kerbal cause--someone miswired the connection between the guidance system (which worked perfectly) and the thrust vectoring gimbal servoes (which worked perfectly), so when it started leaning a little to the left after liftoff, the guidance system said, "hey, turn right," and the gimbal heard "hey, turn left," so it did, and the guidance system started saying "right, right, RIGHT!" louder and louder, and the gimbal was hearing left all the way, and soon, it was hard over to the left because that's what the commands it received said. The runner-up is a fairly famous clip of an Atlas in ICBM configuration being launched where it oozes off the pad slowly and sort of drunkenly wobbles its way into the sky for the first few seconds, before it has some speed built up and straightens up and flies right... and then one of the booster engines undergoes rapid unplanned disassembly, and it ever so slowly tips over to that side, finally ending up at about 90 degrees to the flightpath and completely enveloped in its own exhaust plume before they send the Destruct command. That one strikes me as Kerbal for three reasons. First, you wouldn't believe the number of boosters I've had seemingly fly just fine until they get to some point in the burn, the CG versus CP geometry changes, and it starts tumbling. Second, that drunken wobbly stagger off the pad just feels like something that Jeb would build. But the third, and biggest, reason it feels Kerbal to me is the cause of the entire accident. One of the launch clamps released something like a quarter-second after it was supposed to--and after the other one did release. This caused the whole vehicle to rotate just enough that it partially crushed the booster engine on the OTHER side against its launch clamp, leaving it generating only about half thrust--hence the slow acceleration and drunken wobble off the pad, due to a low TWR and thrust asymmetry. (In the closeups of the aft end of the rocket at launch, you can see the verniers frantically correcting for the asymmetry.) The rocket managed to survive liftoff, and might have been able to compensate for the reduced thrust with a longer booster burn time, but when the damaged booster engine finally ruptured and destroyed itself, the thrust asymmetry was more than the verniers could handle (though they damned well TRIED to--notice how slowly it tipped over!) and it finally tumbled. (Side note: the guidance people were ECSTATIC at that flight's results, because not only was it not THEIR fault, for once, but they could prove that their system fought the good fight right up to the very end, nearly saving the mission and definitely saving the launch pad's support equipment by getting it up to about T+30 seconds before the tumble... and still fought the end even after the booster engine exploded and the mission was doomed. "Well, OUR part worked far BEYOND what it was supposed to! Hooray!") So yeah, in that case, a multi-million dollar test missile was destroyed by a slightly sticky holddown clamp. That strikes me as immensely Kerbal...

Sorry. I tend to write in paragraphs, not soundbites. I guess I'm of the generation that, y'know, had an attention span. (It's not a simple topic, so you can't expect short, simple comments...)

Aha. I did a little research, for the record, and you might be able to do both Gemini and LC34/37 Saturn I/IB-style LUTs with minimal work. The one that swung down at the base was the "white room" gantry for Gemini; it, like the Mercury white room, clamshelled around the entire capsule, but whereas the Redstone and Atlas gantries for them rolled back on rails (pulled by a bulldozer, no less!), the Titan II version was hinged at the bottom as described. Redstone and Atlas didn't actually use launch umbilical towers--because they were essentially single-stage boosters, they could get all their umbilicals through the booster's tail. The only exception was a simple hinged pole mast next to the Redstone that carried an external power line to the Mercury capsule, allowed to free-fall away from it on launch (I believe Atlas had a wiring tunnel to keep the Mercury batteries charged). The basic LUT structure for both the Saturn I family and the Titan II looked very similar to what you have; the big difference is that the Saturn LUT used swingarms (which swung in both directions(!) at launch), while the Titan II used simple hose and cable connections with no supporting arms to them. (In fact, if you look at photos of the Gemini 10 launch, you can see that one of their upper stage umbilicals failed to disconnect from the booster, and instead ripped clean off the LUT, as designed to allow a clean launch in the event of a disconnect failure.) Maybe you could make a "hoses only" version of the LUT for Titan-based vehicles? Also, if you do make a Saturn V-type LUT, it'd be awesome if you offered two sets of launch clamps, one just the standard clamps used for the Saturn V, and one simulating the "milking stool" structure added to Mobile Launcher 1 in the early 70s to allow the Saturn IBs used for Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz to launch from LC39 instead of having to reactivate the mothballed LC34 or LC37. (Basically, it was a similar structure to the LUT gantry that sat atop the Mobile Launcher's platform, supporting a work deck and holddown clamps high enough above the platform's deck to use the existing White Room, Service Module, and S-IVB swingarms on the LUT with the shorter booster; it was permanently mounted to ML1, and the S-IC swingarms removed, while the S-II swingarms were modified and repositioned to support the S-IB first stage.) That's not really *critical*, of course, but it'd be a cool thing if you ended up having the time to do it...

For the record, I've always heard that the big reason that Gemini used ejection seats was the planned paraglider landing, which, being on land, offered little leeway for problems, and it was felt that it would be a good idea for the crew to have an escape capability during the landing. The seats, along with the individual hatches (which were needed more because there was no way to use a single hatch to stuff two men in pressure suits into a space as small as the Gemini capsule--remember, it was originally called "Mercury Mark Two"--and were clamshell because they wanted to have EVA capability) then ate up enough of the Titan II's payload capacity that it meant that a proper LES tower wouldn't be possible (because it would make the spacecraft too heavy). The pressure suits and ejection seats used on Gemini (and on STS-1 through STS-4!) were the exact same models used on the SR-71, with an envelope that went from zero-zero to about Mach 3.5 and/or 120,000 feet. (Columbia's ejection seats, BTW, remained, albeit deactivated, until after STS-51L, simply to save time during a period when Shuttle launches were insanely frequent. The hatches, though permanently sealed, remained to the end, but the seats were removed and replaced with the same ones as the others had during the post-51L standdown, to reduce vehicle weight.) And Gemini's planned Rogallo inflatable wing (parafoil) recovery system did have one lasting legacy on the spacecraft--it's why the Gemini recovery procedures always included a transition from a one-point (nose only) to a two-point (nose and tail) suspension system. Since the spacecraft was designed to provide cushioning of impact forces in a horizontal landing attitude, even using a circular parachute, it had to come down in that same attitude to protect the crew on the 20mph splashdown--thus they retained the aft parachute mount point and blowing the clip to swing it into two-point suspension mode once the parachute had deployed. As for submariners, we don't think you're strange for riding around in a deathtrap (that describes a LOT of jobs in all branches of the military, starting with helicopter pilots); we think you're strange for volunteering to serve on a ship that's actually designed to sink! (Hey, I'm going into naval architecture, I'm allowed to make that kind of joke...)

Well, since this HAS been necro'd... Minuteman also uses blowout ports on the third stage (they treat the PBCS as a fourth stage, at least in text). That's largely because the first three stages of Minuteman III (the only version remaining in service) are pretty much identical to the stages used on Minuteman I and Minuteman II, which were single-warhead missiles and used the thrust-termination to provide a lower, faster trajectory while having sufficient accuracy. The liquid-fuel PBCS was added on Minuteman III to both provide final fine correction of the warhead trajectory for greater accuracy, and then to provide MIRV capability. I'm not sure if the now-retired Peacekeeper (MX) used trajectory shaping or final boost stage blowout ports along with the PBCS. The Space Shuttle's SRBs nearly had a Thrust Termination System (blowout panels) based on that of the Minuteman, but NASA cancelled it to save money on the theory that spaceflight was now safe enough that they didn't need backup systems or intact abort capability all the way from the pad to orbit... but that's a rant for another time.

NASA had a functional "space tug" design completed in the 1980s that would have used a small nuclear thermal rocket to retrieve failed satellites from geosynchronous orbit and bring them down to an orbit where they could be retrieved and either repaired or returned to Earth by the Shuttle, but never actually built it as A) they were a bit leery of launching an NTR in the Shuttle's cargo bay, and there was never a demand for it. IIRC, it was really a leftover from the late-60s planning for an on-orbit assembly manned mission to Mars, but when the Mars mission was cancelled, they managed to save that part of it by recasting it as an orbital transfer vehicle... though it ended up never happening because it would have cost so much more than other options.

Not... technically correct. First off, in both the US and Soviet Union (and in Russia now), while only the head of state could authorize the release of nuclear weapons, even for him, the "two-man rule" remained in effect. For those who don't know, the "two-man rule" is one of the most basic safety precautions regarding nuclear weapons, and it's a very simple one: at no point will ANY one person be alone with a nuclear weapon, or in a position to be able to launch, release, or initiate one unilaterally. The most famous example of this is, of course, the ICBM crews that had two men in a launch bunker who had to separately give a launch command within something like a quarter-second of each other for their missiles to launch (and, if they made more than a certain number of attempts within a given span of time WITHOUT synchronizing, the control consoles would short themselves out to prevent an unauthorized launch), but this also extends to loading nuclear bombs onto aircraft, guarding nuclear weapons storage facilities, technicians working on the weapons... and the head of state being able to order their use. In the US, for example, only the President could authorize the release of nuclear weapons to military leaders (in MOST cases, this would result in an immediate launch order, but, for example, in a tense crisis, POTUS might authorize the release of a limited number of tactical weapons to a four-star theatre commander, so that he could use them for a quick response to an overwhelming surprise attack)... but then the Secretary of Defense would have to confirm the President's order before it could go into effect. (If SecDef was unavailable, the most senior available government official confirmed by the Senate could do so. However, this doesn't mean that POTUS could go down the line of succession until he found someone willing to go along--if even one of them refused to confirm the order, it's dead.) Since the whole point of the two-man rule is that it prevents a "Dr. Strangelove" situation where a single individual goes mad and unilaterally initiates use of nuclear weapons, it makes sense that it would have to apply all the way up to the President. (Possibly even MORE sense than with the military people who had custodianship of the weapons, since, unlike them, elected/appointed officials don't go through the psychological screening and reviews that the military requires of those who work with nukes...) The "two-man rule" even extends to such things as the physical design of the launch bunkers (the two men in the bunker must turn two separate keys, thirty feet apart, within a quarter-second of each other, to send a valid launch order, in an effort to make solo launches impossible--and in the 60s, the bunkers were redesigned after a bored missile crewman came up with a way to use shoestrings to turn both keys by himself and reported it to his superiors), and even to the bunkers themselves. In the days of Atlas and Titan, each silo had its own launch bunker, meaning that even if both men in a missile crew (or one man who got creative with the limited resources on hand) went mad and initiated an independent launch, there would be, at most, a single missile launched, which is a situation that could probably be salvaged Fail-Safe-style over the Hot Line, though likely only through the sacrifice of a similar American target. However, Minuteman saw such an expansion of the missile arsenal that it rendered single-silo launch control centers prohibitively expensive, in manpower if nothing else, so a new pattern was devised where each LCC had control over several dozen missiles. This raised the specter of a potential large-scale attack being initiated from a single insane missile crew, so instead of having a single LCC for each missile field, there would be three of them; any two of them could start a launch by BOTH issuing launch commands within a certain (short--the exact number isn't public, but it's believed to be less than five minutes) period of time, thereby extending the two-man rule to the LCCs themselves. Additionally, if a launch command is received from the "Looking Glass" airborne command post or a little-known system called the "Emergency Rocket Communications System," basically a Minuteman missile with powerful radios instead of warheads, which would transmit a launch command if ever fired, that command can count as a "vote" to launch, making it so that a single LCC could then fire the missiles, but the launch keys for Looking Glass are held by the four-star general (either the head of Strategic Command or his deputy) on duty on board the airplane and the second-highest ranking officer on board, while the ERCS (if it even still exists--I'm not sure it wasn't decommissioned after the end of the Cold War) can only be activated by launch keys held by a four-star general on duty at STRATCOM Headquarters at Offutt AFB, Nebraska, and his deputy, so even then, it requires the same two-man rule to activate them (and they have to send correct PAL codes, too--see below). As for the "launch code" being 00000000, that's not right, either. See, not only is there no actual Red Button, but there's no single code that authorizes a launch. The way it works is this: IMMEDIATELY after taking the Oath of Office (usually between his Inaugural Address and his leaving Capitol Hill for the viewing stand for the Inaugural Parade), a general takes the new president into a secure room, where he hands him a card, one the size, shape, and material of a standard credit card, which has a large (20+) number of code groups on it; each code group is a pair of ten-digit codes, generated randomly. The new president is asked to select a code group from that card, memorize which one it is (there's various ways to help him remember included on the card) WITHOUT marking the card in any way to indicate which one it is, and then read the actual code group off to the general, who will transcribe it. Only the President has the card the code groups are on; the actual code group he selects becomes his code for verifying his identity when giving a nuclear release order. (The point of this is so that if the card is lost, it's unlikely that someone would guess which code is correct.) That's actually as close as we have to a "launch code" in the classical sense, in that it proves you're authorized to release nuclear weapons to military commanders. The next thing that might be considered a "launch code" is the contents of an Emergency Action Message sent out to the nuclear forces to order a launch (that's what you hear being read over the loudspeakers in "The Day After" and at the start of "WarGames"), but that's simply an encrypted message that, when decoded, tells the forces which, if any, weapons are to be released, what their targets are, and what the Permissive Action Link code is. EAMs go out all the time; most of them are either practice alerts, practice (simulated) launch exercises, or even just routine status updates saying that it's now time to stop using January code book "J" and start using January code book "K", but they're all encrypted as practice for the crews. The one that was actually set to "00000000" up until 1977 was the Permissive Action Link code. The PAL is a device integral to each nuclear weapon's firing circuits that has a single purpose--without the correct, current code inserted into it (usually via a control device next to the release switch), any attempt to initiate the weapon will, instead, result in the weapon destroying itself without any nuclear yield. (Early ones would set off the high-explosive implosion apparatus in "one-point-safe" mode, preventing the physics package from getting into a potentially supercritical configuration and instead basically pulverizing it; more recent ones have taken a bit less violent approach, and will instead simply pass so much current through the firing control circuitry that it instantly fries, thus rendering the weapon unable to fire until it has been returned to the factory for repairs.) As a side note, it was only weapons in the custodianship of the US Air Force that had their PALs set to all zeroes; Navy nukes always had fully active PALs on them. The Air Force believed it was likely that, in wartime, the PAL codes wouldn't be successfully received by the crews (either they would be garbled and unintelligible, they would be cut off in mid-transmission, or they'd simply never be sent), thus rendering the Air Force's nukes useless. Therefore, either Curtis LeMay or his successor, Thomas S. Power (a man even LeMay considered unstable), ordered that the PAL codes be permanently set to all zeroes and that ensuring that the control devices were so set was included in the launch checklists. When Jimmy Carter (who, despite his reputation for having dismantled the military, was actually highly concerned with our military readiness--he largely retired obsolete platforms that were of only marginal value any more and cancelled programs that were either going to fail or were no longer relevant following changes since their inception) found out about this during his highly detailed review of nuclear weapons protocols, he was FURIOUS, and issued an order as Commander-in-Chief of the US military requiring that the USAF's PALs be activated and put in compliance with their original purposes. Since POTUS outranks any general, despite resistance from SAC and the Air Force Chief of Staff, the order went into effect and the PALs have been active ever since. (Carter, despite being seen as a "failed" president due to his frankly being too nice and good a person to be effective in the office, did trigger a LOT of reforms regarding our nuclear deterrent force *and* the whole Continuity Of Government plan. Example: After the inaugural parade, he was being briefed on the military plans to be able to whisk him away from the White House at any time if we detected a Soviet missile launch, and when they said that they could have him on Air Force One or the National Emergency Airborne Command Post and taking off from Andrews AFB in under eight minutes at any time, he simply cut off the general and told him, "Good. Do it. Right now. Prove you can do it." The general tried, I'll give him that, but it took them almost fifteen minutes just to get the helicopter to the White House helipad, at which point Carter cancelled his order, pointing out that if it had been a real nuclear attack, Washington would have gotten hit about the time the helicopter got there to pick him up. His point made, he then ordered a revamp of the plans and a lot more practice at actually accomplishing the task...)

On the topic of the launch gantry, I know that there was at least one combination (and I want to say Gemini-Titan) where the gantry for crew boarding actually swung down away from the spacecraft on a hinge at the *bottom* of the tower before launch. If you could get that to work for the final one, that'd be truly awesome!

For the record: The dark smudge in the Baker shot photo is the 27,000-ton, 562-foot-long retired battleship ex-Arkansas (former BB-33), which was located just 250 yards from the burst point. Also, Baker is one of the *least* common-looking nuclear tests, being a shallow underwater test in the humid South Pacific. The initial atmospheric shockwave (since the surface *was* breached by the blast, rather than it coupling to the surface and staying underwater) first caused what's called the "Wilson Cloud Chamber effect," basically compressing the air along the shock front to the point of condensing the humidity into an expanding spherical cloud that rode along the shockwave, leaving the cameras unable to see exactly what was happening for the first two seconds or so, until the cloud dissipated. Once it dissipated, what you see rising from the surface there isn't actually the explosion, the fireball, or the mushroom stem--it's a hollow column of water shot into the air by the blast, 6000 feet tall, with walls 300 feet thick. (The apparent "mushroom cap" in the photo is actually the still-lifting-and-dissipating Wilson cloud; photos later in the sequence show a "cauliflower head" to the water column, akin to the top of a geyser, where the water has stopped climbing and started to fall due to gravity.) In the image, Arkansas has her bow pinned to the bottom of the lagoon, with her stern 350 feet in the air. She's about to flip over backwards and land inverted to sink. She was then thoroughly crushed against the bottom by the weight of the water column falling back onto her. As for the whole thing about the colors, much of the red and orange seen in color films of nuclear tests isn't actually original--it's a case of the film itself having badly deteriorated due to poor preservation by the US military. If you do look for Trinity and Beyond, find the DVD version, because after the DOD and DOE saw the VHS version, director Peter Kuran was given access to the original films instead of n'th-generation prints, under the condition that he do whatever he could to restore and preserve the films. This means that it has far sharper and more-accurately-colored versions of the test footage than anyone else has seen; there is also footage that was declassified specificially for him to use in the DVD version. (Likewise, his other nuclear testing documentaries saw him get freshly-declassified footage and get to work with the original films instead of the tenth-generation stock prints everyone else uses, due to his reputation for making an unbiased and high-quality documentary that he got with Trinity and Beyond.) Personally, I like nuclear weapons on an engineer's level (they are an incredibly simple and elegant machine, in many respects), I have an appreciation for the aesthetics of a large explosion witnessed at a safe distance (mushroom clouds are... really pretty, honestly--and that's just as true of a one-gallon gasoline bomb's cloud as it is of a twenty-megaton nuke's cloud), and much like with tornadoes, I'd love to be able to witness the raw power of an atmospheric nuke test from a safe distance, plus I think that they *do* have certain peaceful uses that the whole "nuclear is EEEEEEEVIL!" taboo/propaganda makes politically unacceptable--but I desperately hope that they'll never be used in anger again. (That said, I fully expect there to be a limited nuclear exchange involving a rogue state--most likely Iran or North Korea--within my lifetime...)

For the record, real manned spacecraft that use escape towers have a fairing over the command module, too, to protect it from the escape tower's exhaust if it's used. It's generally jettisoned along with the tower.