First Steps

Realism levels Quickstart mode For beginners Orbiter-like control of the spacecraft Almost no panel usage necessary Standard mode For advanced users Realistic behavior of the spacecraft Panel usage necessary Virtual AGC mode For experts Like Standard mode Uses the Virtual AGC

After you finished the Installation of the latest beta version the Project Apollo scenarios are in the "Project Apollo - NASSP" scenario folder and subfolders. Because of the ongoing development many of the scenarios and missions are not working yet, but you can try the missions and scenarios mentioned here.

Project Apollo - NASSP supports different levels of complexity or realism modes, so you can adjust the difficulty level you want to use. You choose the desired mode by choosing the appropriate scenario. At the moment there's the Quickstart mode for beginners, Standard mode and Virtual AGC mode are intended for the advanced user.

Quickstart mode

The Apollo 7 Saturn 1b on pad

The Quickstart mode is intended for beginners, who are already familiar with Orbiter in general, but don't have much particular knowledge about Apollo and the historic spacecraft. If you aren't familiar with Orbiter yet, we suggest to try the built-in Deltaglider at first.

In Quickstart mode as much as possible is done automatically and the spacecraft behave as much as possible like standard Orbiter spacecrafts. It's only very rarely necessary to use the panel. All (or almost all) critical maneuvers are done by autopilot and you can also fly the spacecrafts "more manually" than the real Apollo spacecrafts.

Missions

The following missions and scenarios are available for Quickstart mode:

• Apollo 7
• Apollo 11
• Apollo 14 with Moon landing scenarios

Standard mode

The Apollo 11 Saturn V on pad

The Standard mode is intended for the advanced users, who already have some basic knowledge about the Apollo missions, are familiar with Orbiter and now want to do it like the real astronauts did.

In Standard mode everything is as authentic as possible and you have to fly the mission (almost) like the real thing. You have to do long checklists and control the internal systems manually. The spacecrafts behave more like the real ones, the SIVB is restartable only once for example.

A very important device of the Apollo spacecraft is the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), which normally does the guidance, navigation and control tasks. Unlike the Virtual AGC mode explained below the Standard mode uses the "Simple AGC", which tries to behave similar to the real AGC but is an NASSP specific C++ program with several differences to the real AGC.

On real Apollo missions, many things went wrong, mostly minor. In both Standard and Virtual AGC mode, some of these failures are simulated at the appropriate time in the mission. So be sure to perform your control panel checks and work around any failures which do occur.

Missions

The following missions and scenarios are available for Standard mode:

• Apollo 7
• Apollo 11

Virtual AGC mode

The Virtual AGC mode is quite similar to the Standard mode, but another AGC implementation is used. The Virtual AGC, an Apollo Guidance Computer emulator running the original, authentic Apollo flight software (at the moment Colossus 1A, build 249 from October 28, 1968, flown with Apollo 9). It's still "experimental" and intended for the advanced user, who wants to have the ultimate realism, but of course with the Virtual AGC you can do all procedures exactly as described in the original documentation.

Attention

Because of the AGC hardware emulation time acceleration higher then about 10x is not possible.

Missions

The following missions and scenarios are available for Virtual AGC mode:

• Apollo 7
• Apollo 8
• Apollo 15 (experimental)

Unmanned missions

Also some of the unmanned Apollo missions are supported. The missions run automatically, you just need to activate time acceleration and wait for the next event, time acceleration will be deactivated a few minutes before that.

• Apollo 4
• Apollo 5
• Apollo 6

Fictional missions

Scenarios in Fictional missions directory:

• Random failures
• Saturn 5 INT 20
• Apollo to Venus

Documentation

As always, be sure to review documentation relevant to your mission. The Checklists section is a good place to begin.