lindemherz

Hey Beale! You might want to check out http://space-architect.com/en/; the closest thing to an official website I could find for Galina Balashova, the actual interior designer for manned soviet spacecraft (after Vostok, Korolyov not only wanted them life-supporting, but livable). @kopapaka's picture is one of her designs.

A bit to the party, but I. AM. SO. DROOLING. RIGHT NOW.

Grunge level 1, 10%, for me. Even for stuff that has just come out the assembly building you can see a little bit of stuff here and there coming into the creases just by sitting at the pad, or being manipulated. If it's not absolutely mission critical, chips of paint *will* fall off, glosses will dull, blacks will decolour at spots, just by cleaning them up. A living vehicle will have been tested and retested, filled and drained, over and over, and at least minimally stained and cleaned and wiped. But not so much. Kerbals might be reckless, but they ain't filthy.

Hey Cobalt, those shots look gorgeous. Care to share which visual mods you use?

More possible reference material here. Unearthed Nash Vek (Наш век), an impressionist film-essay by Artavazd Peleshyan about cosmonautics up to 1983; although mostly about cosmonauts in training, it has myriad seldom seen shots of soviet hardware (including a very nice view of an engineering mockup of a first generation DOS, if not the actual Salyut-1 or DOS-2 during preprocessing).

To think those crazy stand-up guys actually thought of it...

AFAIK Salyut only needed to do attitude changes to point the docking port towards the approaching craft, with the translation in charge of the active craft.

Damn, them DPOs be Russia Stronk

A bit late to the party, but here I am. The Soyuz/Progress MS has totally revamped it's DPO (Dvigateli Prichalivaniya i Orientatsii, Berthing and Orientation Engines) system, having now at least 10 pairs of thrusters midship (4 pairs on the Z-axis, 4 pairs on the Y-axis, and 2 pairs on the X-axis pointing towards the front). They can be seen quite clearly in the pictures below, 2 Z-pairs around the Instrument/Descent/Orbital umbilical and a 2 Y-pairs 1 X-pairs next to the root of the solar panels. Additionally, there are 4 more Z-pairs pointing towards the back on the base around the KDU (the Soyuz main engine). Try as I might, I couldn't find any more clear images of the back of the ship or even of Progress MS, either during processing or in orbit. Surprisingly enough, it seems the MS series doesn't have any skirt thrusters anymore; they have been quite conspicuous in the previous versions of Soyuz/Progress (and the MS thrusters seem to be the biggest ever), and unless they are hiding behind the "lollipop" antennae at the base of the skirt it'd be safe to say they are gone. That said, it seems the Z-aligned thrusters on the base are angled inwards, and may be playing a dual role, translating on the Z-axis when firing together, and pitching and yawing when used individually. RussianSpaceWeb does show skirt thrusters on their diagrams, but photos show nothing but thermal blankets on their supposed location. There are no thrusters on the orbital module; the only Soyuz to ever feature them was the LOK, and it carried its own tanks on the orbital module for that. One last question remains: How the f@#! do they roll??

If anybody could please copy us the correct values for them I'd appreciate it immensely. I'm only getting a huge yellow ball with a buzzer haircut no matter which values I have.

On bright side, Komandir Kerablya can finally touch instrumentiy with own hands. On down side, even less instruments than Vostok Such is life

Dammit, I leave for a few months to deal with real life shenanigans and @KSK's already built a functional Kerbal language that even accounts for sociological/historical factors and that might even give us a clue to the greater way of thinking of the Kerbals (like in, to my understanding, the ambiguity of Kerba's "negative-statement" constructions leaving room for them actually meaning "superseding/exceeding/surpassing-statement," which basically embeds possibility and hope in parsing the meaning of every expression - a quintessential Kerman characteristic if any). You the man =D Also, my vote goes for -ad, if only because Firesvarad reminds me of Nagyvarad (Oradea), my currently favourite city in the world, Hungarian, and its agglutinations (which language inspired Old Kerba grammar anyway?). Absolutely love the terrible territory the Kerm and Kerbals are plowing through now, Jeb's desperation at the best of Kerman not being able to offset the worst of Kerman, and Val's being so bloody smart she can figure out how to defeat infrareds using the sun even though she hasn't seen seeking missiles in her life. Cannot wait to see where we're going now that the war's really burning.

Not bad! But after seeing it again, I think you get away with just pulling up the existing connectors to where the new one is right now, widen the point where they connect to the tankage so they have the same triangular footprint as the belt struts, and call it a day. They would be even sturdier than a belt strut - and you can always pass them off as heat shields.

My pleasure, Beale! With you bringing us all this cool stuff, helping you out is the least one could do. Assuming the large cylinders on top of the engines are the turbo pump casings, the side-ways ring, although it is aesthetically pleasing, wouldn't have an internal spar that would make it a rigid ring (since this spar would go through the turbo pump). It'd just be holding on to the casing itself, so the lateral forces are actually transferred to the casings instead of being dampened by the ring itself. In the current design, the casings are the thrust bearing structure (thus sturdy as hell), so no worries about regular forces ripping off cases, but I would be worried about an exploding or otherwise "bad" engine affecting the thrust structure of a "good" engine when the forces of the failure get transferred to another engine, losing two for the price of one.

Jesus, Beale, that's gorgeous. Totally dig the new scheme. And I'm always amazed at how much mileage you can get out a single texture sheet. Engineering nitpicking time! On the third stage, the long boxes on the fuselage of the stage should be aligned with the engine mounts. In real life they were covers for fuel lines that went over the liquid oxygen tank, so it would be easier for them to go straight into the engines instead to have to do two 90 deg turns inside the thrust structure. On the second stage, the last fixture for the engine thrust structures/turbopump assembly/etc. is that dark grey thick strut right before the orange stripes, and roughly halfway between the powerheads/engine bells and the thrust attachment point to the stage. Considering the power of the engines we're dealing with, in real life that could allow the engine mount a lot of room to vibrate before these vibrations reach an structural element that damps them (one of the reasons why in real life powerheads are fastened to something sturdier as soon as possible in the vertical axis, even going through the hassle of putting the turbopumps to the side of the powerhead). Vibrating powerheads + vibrating fuel lines = pogo. Although there is a strut ring right after the orange stripe, these struts would transfer those vibrations to and from the other engines, not really solving that. I would probably just pull down the dark grey fixture from before the orange stripe to were the strut ring is, if not even a bit further down, perhaps changing them into a triangular structure like the third stage struts or having the triangular structure and the original fixture if you can spare the polys. Btw, structurally speaking, if we are dealing with the same engines, the third stage should have similarly robust fixtures, although the length of their assemblies is short enough to give it a pass. Nitpicking apart, this thing looks beautiful and I'm more than aching to get Jeb stranded in Duna with it.