Archives gones wild! #3

Woot! Major update to the Project Apollo Archive over the last few days, with over 2200 new or updated images! Yahoo! ... Eh? Surprise that I still talk (a bit) about Apollo? Well, yeah I may have taken a very Soyuz oriented approach to space, but I'm still an Apollo junky, don't worry :-) Here, for example, I finished two days ago Two sides of the Moon, by David Scott and Alexei Leonov, that's an Apollo related book, no? Ok, yeah ... I admit it also talk about the Soviet space program, but altought it is co-authored by one astronaut and one cosmonaut, it is clear that the Scott's part is way more detailed and complete ... so in the end I was a bit disapointed, by the lack of real details on Leonov's part :-

On the Orbiter front, work is continuing at a rather slow pace on my part. Castorp is churning new meshes and update at an infernal pace (7K-OK meshes) and I can't really keep-up :-\ ... As we have switched to Obiter 2006, we are taking advantage of the new beacon API to add some light and strobe effects to the Soyuz. The following screenie show the SA (reentry module) after a night landing with the its post-landing strobe deployed:

The circle that can be seen in the middle of the beacon light is due to the beacon it-self been placed inside of the bulbe of the strobe light mesh. A solution to avoid this not so nice effect, is to make that part of the mesh invisible when the beacon is ON and visible when OFF.

Castorp and I have been going over our resources and checking quiet a few pictures to see how many light beacons (and where) were located on the Soyuz variant we have currently. Needless to said, this is yet again another wild goose chase ... c'mon Amazon.ca! Ship that Soyuz: A Universal Spacecraft book already!