The Friendship 7 rattled and shook

[austin_dern]

Well, this is nice. I picked up a magazine called Mac Format, a really oversized thing with a pair of CDs included in jewel cases that, it turned out, were taped maybe too much to the magazine, and one of which was broken so it was less a CD case and more an impromptu razor.

But on the disc in the razor blade case was version 3.0 of A-OK! The Wings of Mercury. This is one of those awesome little projects of a lone, determined, slightly insane person, who decided to build his own exact, switch-for-switch replica of the Mercury capsule. I had a copy of this nearly a decade ago, and it's quite the ride. You can play on the 15-minute Redstone or the five-hour three-orbit Atlas flight (or start at various interesting times inside the Atlas flight). There are some problems created by trying to imitate all four billion switches of the Mercury capsule through a computer's interface, but fewer than you might think. It's pretty straightforward.

This version is an upgrade on what I had years ago and includes the setup for multiplayer mode, with somebody as the astronaut, somebody as mission control, other people for various stations, and so on. I hope I sometime get an uninterrupted block of five hours or so to do some orbital missions, since they do offer so many interesting experiments, like balloon-spotting. The game still shows a few quirks of its shoestring operation beginning, such as some sort of programming glitch that causes the final parachute descent to slow the simulation to where one second of game time takes three or four seconds of real time(!), or there being easy ways to open up windows zooming in on button panels, but no way to close them. It's still an incredible project.

Trivia: John Glenn lost five pounds, five ounces of weight during his Mercury flight. Source: This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, Loyd S Swenson Jr, James M Grimwood, Charles C Alexander. NASA SP-4201.

Currently Reading: Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, by Edwin G Burrows, Mike Wallace.

Comments

[sennard.livejournal.com]

Oh! I've seen software for another simulation like this some time ago, it was more based on a multiplayer starship bridge, with officer controls and various crew stations, but of course I can't remember what the pet project was called.

I've always thought that if they got something together like this, it would be an interesting game to play, a bit more teamwork would be needed than the 'you be the driver, I'll be the gunner' games they have today.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The original intent of the game was that it'd be good for school children, as a collaborative endeavor to understand all the different parts of the team -- that's why there are spots for the astronaut, sure, but also the flight director, the medical officer, and so on. I believe there's also a spot for the guy to program in system failures, to see if the astronaut can avoid dying as systems continue shutting down mid-flight.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't think there were that many failure modes available to a Mercury capsule. I recall years ago when I saw a flown capsule at the Huntsville museum, what chiefly impressed me was how cobbled-together the whole thing looked. The 'cabin temperature' gauge was a Kodak Mirro-band thermometer, precisely like the one I had in my darkroom, glued to the instrument panel.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'll have to get a screen grab of the fuse switches, the general fix for the things that might go wrong. There's everything from booster engines failing to fall off (in the Atlas), failure of capsule to separate, failure of the escape tower rockets, failure of the backup rockets ... it goes on and on. In the old version at least you could count on something serious failing just about every time, at least on the orbital missions. I think only once did I get through all three orbits on that, in fact. And then the mission evaluation summary gives you a snotty comment for the mission objectives you failed to meet because you aborted on the second orbit, just because three-quarters of the fuel for the attitude control system leaked out, the cooling system wasn't working, and the blood pressure gauge had stopped sampling.