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Last week I started reading the book co-authored by Astronaut
David Scott and Cosmonaut
Alexei Leonov. Each authorcovers his own career in an interweaved fashion, which realy help getting the feeling of the space race that both
superpowers were in at that time. So far (I just finished the chapter on Leonov
space-walk during
Voskhod 2) so good, it's an enjoyable read. Speaking of
books ... I'm still waiting for my
Soyuz books to show up ... more than a month after ordering them :-( The delay seems to be due to one of them being
marked as pre-order (but it was released 3 years ago!) ... Oh well... In the meantime, castorp and I are continuing working on our Soyuz add-on for
Orbiter. Altought we badly need these books, we are still making some progress:
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Yeah .. took me a while to equip our
Soyuz 7K-T with some thrusters (22 in total) ... But it's finaly there .. altought they need to be adjusted (like I was saying some months ago ... it's hard to find good data on Soviet hardware). The orange/yellow plume visible at the aft of the spacecraft is the exhaust of the backup engine which was part of the
KTDU-35, as used on all Soyuz (up to the late 70s). In thoses early days, most (if not all) of the Soviet manned spacecrafts were equiped with backup engines (same propellant, one use, lower thurst/ISP). Modern day Soyuz, use the
KTDU-80 which only have one engine.
Needless to said, there is a frame rate hit when the RCS activity is high ... I may want to considere using 2D exhaust (texture) instead of
particle stream ...
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