I just thinked it...

[hispaorbiter]

I'm thinking to model a really BIG asteroid, about 2 km of radius, and make a scenario where the asteroid falls to Earth. Now, build a spaceship to rendezvous it, dock with it (the asteroid will be a spacecraft.dll type ship with docking ports to attach a mass driver) and burn to change his orbit, like in Arthur c. Clarke book (God hammer, in spanish is "El martillo de Dios"), where a ship does it with an asteroid called Kali who is going to hit the Earth...

Any idea about it?

[DanSteph]

That would be a cool idea.... I think, for guy that have made already the tour of the solar system that there is some lack of mission (fortunately this isn't my case)

the dock should be exactly at the bottom middle of the Cg just say that another mission  fixed it sometime ago.

and I wonder suddenly one things: as this is a vessel will he have the reentry texture in case you miss your mission and watch it reentering in atmosphere ?

the code to change the shape and size  of the reentry texture is really simple you can have a big one.

Appart the model himself at first I see no big problem here.... I suppose we can move even a 2km asteroid if we have time and fuel.

Dan

[reekchaa]

Wow... Sounds like a pretty cool project suddenly... when you add all the parameters.   Of course,
to what extent could an Earthly Collision be animated?  No matter how cool and complex the
Mission is, there will be tons of 12 year olds demanding 'Armageddon' realism.
Once the cool reentry texture poofs out dramatically through the atmosphere, Then
What?  

[MattNW]

Sounds fun. You'd have to come up with a challenging distance to put it at the start of the
scenario. From far enough away a bottle rocket firing on the thing would make it miss. You want it
close enough so the player needs to do everything right or watch it slam into Europe/NY/Tokyo
etc... yet not so close that there isn't any thing that they can do.

[jlkingiii]

I have the same idea. But I was thinking of developing a special ship that is nothing but a docking station with rotational engines (i.e. no main thruster or hover thruster). It would be a two part mission. First the shuttle takes the special docking station out to the asteroid and with remote controls it is positioned and attached to the asteroid. Then the object can be moved.

Star Gazer lent me some meteor meshes which I draped with Phobos' texture. For testing I did put a docking port on it and put it in orbit around the Earth.  I'm still really new at this, but I found moving it really hard. It helps if you change thrusters to linear mode, but I still found myself tumbling before I can move it very far. I had the most success just waiting for the prograde circle to swing back around and do short little burst while the vector was still close. Slowly the two of us became a little more stable along the vector I was tiring to effect.

On a side note, how can you change a jpg to a dds file? I found a plugin for Photoshop that lets me view dds, but I can't do a 'save as' with any other format and save it as a dds.

[MattNW]

jlkingiii wrote:

> On a side note, how can you change a jpg to a dds file? I found
> a plugin for Photoshop that lets me view dds, but I can't do a
> 'save as' with any other format and save it as a dds.
>
>


Use DxTex that comes with the Orbiter SDK.

[John Doe]

Just 1 question...
If it Earth then ? Fortunately proboblay nothing will happen...
But besides it it's a great idea can't wait to see it

[hispaorbiter]

And with the new particle system (for the new release), our asteroid/ship would become a REAL
comet, with geisers and plumes around it.