Recent content by levans

Parallels vs Fusion and Orbiter 2010 Now that Orbiter 2010 is out I've decided to play some more. I have always wanted to run Orbiter under virtualisation on my Mac instead of from my Boot Camp partition and I'm pleased to say that both my copies of Fusion and Parallels do a much better job...

I'm not sure if this is the same thing, but my experience is that the first time I try to use external view in any Orbiter session, I find that my ship is not visible. The camera slew keys seem to indicate that I ought to be looking at my ship (i.e. it ought to lie in the view frustum). The...

This turns out to be perfect for my current requirements (tooling around, getting acquainted with everything). I like the fact that it's equivalent to having "super engines", i.e. fuel is still consumed, which provides a relative score of your efficiency in repeated maneuvers, and you can dial...

I've read the "Go Play in Space" section on ISS rendezvous, and elsewhere I have read about "phasing" (only the term, not an exact definition). The GPiS tutorial suggests making your orbit more eccentric (or I suppose just larger in general, with larger orbital period) so as to allow a...

Thanks for the tip. This works very nicely for orbit circularisation (as advertised). Is there anything equivalent for plane change maneuvers? I know the basic tool tells you when to burn, but you have to manually control the engines, and it seems like one (minor) step away from having the...

IMHO, there is much to like about ZIP delivery. It has a simplicity and allows archiving and inspection of components. As a newbie I've had no problems actually installing base system, or add-ons. Probably, the target market for a sim of this calibre is likely to find people who have 'clue'...

So far so good. I've done a manual launch to ISS orbit, with an orbit plane correction and intercept. No docking yet. Questions so far: Is it possible to have the vehicles (I was using XR1 variant of the DG) do the burns automatically? I've been doing these manually, though using assists on...

That's great. Just the sort of info I was hoping for. I'll check out the XR-1 as I kind of like what I'm reading about the XR-5, though the latter is described as a more tricky bird to fly in the opening sections of its manual - so perhaps the XR-1 is kind of an XR-5 'lite'. Anyway, that's...

OK, good. I have also spotted the XR5 Vanguard, which from the 'marketing' alone looks like a righteous addon. Have just finished some more reading. I suppose to begin with, here's what I'm thinking I want to do: - I'd like the most advanced craft that can indeed "fly itself" - I'd like to...

Very excellent. The sheer wonder of this thing blew my socks off this afternoon. Very glad to hear we can expect it to go onward and upward. This compliments the other piece of software that threatens to eat too much of my time on occasion: the X-plane flight sim. It seems it's also similar...

Just found Orbiter. The only thing that could make me happier right now is if it was available as a native Mac app - call me 'eccentric' if you like :P Thankfully I have Bootcamp. This is just the sort of thing I've been looking for - seemingly for ages, and I'm absolutely delighted with the...