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Simon_Jester wrote: Did you check to see if Faaabio work with either of them? If so, I could send the odd man out to advanced docking training (potentially making him more suitable for a moon mission in the 3-man Lapot), while holding the other two together as a backup crew (so that I have enough crews to fly two manned missions at once if need be).

I also need to seriously look into recruiting the Group III cosmonauts... aargh.

Comrade Syeriy, any thoughts?

The only compatible pair of all the remaining cosmonauts are Petrov and Beregovoy. Sorry

LaCroix wrote:OOC: Can you hack this? Pretty please? Figures that I get the one that nobody likes. LIVE HATES ME!!!!!

I'm pretty sure you have a decent chance to get someone who actually likes Pollackistanis with strange names in the next cosmonaut group

And I'm not going to hack Irina in. I thought about uh "artificially inducing" the female cosmonaut event, but I'd rather not have it than screw up the saved games. Besides, it would take a SHITLOAD of time to figure out.

FaxModem1 wrote:Rex continued working. Apparently the engineers and the bureaucrats had invented more and more paperwork for him to fill out. As he did so, he looked at the roster. Conrad and Johnson were going to fly next time. Rex got a smile on his face. He needed to make sure that their night before launch was a special one.

Fax, please remember that in real life there is some degree of quarantine and control applied to astronauts about to go on a launch, especially a long-duration flight. You do not want someone catching the flu the night before they go up into orbit for a week.

ChaserGrey wrote:Given how antisocial the cosmonauts are, Comrade Syeriy's recommendation would be to just form the crews. The 'nauts will be unhappy, but at the end of the day we all must serve the glory of the Zenobian Onion. Plus, we'll need to recruit another group for the Lapot program anyway, so if one or two quit...we live with that.

Compatible crews are good, but generally I think it's better to have a problem crew that can get the job done than a happy crew that just can't cut the mustard.

OK. Revised team organization:

Digaditch/Belyayev (a fairly solid team for most Voskhod tasks), and Petrov/Beregovoy (Syrgy Pavylyvych privately considers them a Designated Backup Team for missions of relatively low importance)

The odd men out, comrade cosmonauts Faaabio and Brzęczyszczykiewicz, are to report for advanced capsule training, to improve their utility as potential mission commanders. Be careful with those jet trainers, comrades!

[When life hands you lemons, make lemonade, or in this case, a CAP 4 pilot]

There. How does that sound? If I've got four teams, that's good enough, and ultimately the fundamental weakness of both Faaabio and Brzęczyszczykiewicz lies in relatively low piloting skill.

Simon_Jester wrote:Fax, please remember that in real life there is some degree of quarantine and control applied to astronauts about to go on a launch, especially a long-duration flight. You do not want someone catching the flu the night before they go up into orbit for a week.

Oh come on, what else are you going to do in quarantine besides get hammered? Have to maintain some kind of 'naut tradition.

What of Manshuk, comrade director? Anything for me aside this Vostock?

Akhlut wrote:What of Manshuk, comrade director? Anything for me aside this Vostock?

You fly into space in a few months, Comrade Mametov, to perform first Zenobian spacewalk! Good luck!

(Please to attend to my posts, and to PeZook's posts, in which these things are revealed)

Good news everyone, the NKDVDROM has solved the 'Piss on Murica from space' problem.

The soultion is simple, before the launch the brave comrade cosmonaughts will piss into a jar, which we then seal and load onto the spacecraft, then when the time comes for the EVA, they simpley throw the bottle down when over Murica!

I know that and you know that, but Rex may or may not know that. He's also a bit of a trouble maker.

FaxModem1 wrote:I know that and you know that, but Rex may or may not know that. He's also a bit of a trouble maker.

OK, just... try to exercise some degree of OOC responsibility and restraint even when your IC character is a wild child, OK? Let's not have a repeat of some of the more absurd bits of the Fax/Drago storyline here.

OmegaChief wrote:Good news everyone, the NKDVDROM has solved the 'Piss on Murica from space' problem.

The soultion is simple, before the launch the brave comrade cosmonaughts will piss into a jar, which we then seal and load onto the spacecraft, then when the time comes for the EVA, they simpley throw the bottle down when over Murica!

Hmm. Much better, but that must be a well sealed jar, da?

Akhlut wrote:Spoiler

My apologies. I've been a little busy the past couple of days. My car got a small amount of panel damage in a small accident yesterday, and my wife and I are stressing over her mother visiting in a few days for about a week. And her mom is a bit off-kilter.

Spoiler

Da Comrade! Sealed with the finished sealing technology in the Onion, we get well muscled Boris here to screw the lid on as tightly as possible.

This can't possibly go wrong!

(Backup plan: if jar breaks inside capsule, depressurize capsule... if we can do that, which we bloody well ought to be able to after all the extra work that went into this Voskhod variant...)

OmegaChief wrote:Good news everyone, the NKDVDROM has solved the 'Piss on Murica from space' problem.

The soultion is simple, before the launch the brave comrade cosmonaughts will piss into a jar, which we then seal and load onto the spacecraft, then when the time comes for the EVA, they simpley throw the bottle down when over Murica!

A brilliant and elegant solution in true Zenobian fashion! In retrospect the specially designed EVA suit is of positively Thanasian complexity.

Indeed, comrade. Though the Thanasians do learn, in time.

Comrade Syeriy must point out that this only works if the cosmonaut has a sufficiently mighty throwing arm to drop the jar into a landing orbit. Otherwise it will simply orbit close to the spacecraft, possibly causing embarrassment during later maneuvers.

Perhaps a small de-orbiting rocket attached to the outside of the jar?

Hmm. How much delta-v do we need? A fastball of 50 m/s or more seems most unreasonable to ask of our cosmonauts, and I doubt that would be enough unless the Voskhod capsule's own orbit is dangerously low.

A fair bit. I just checked orbital velocities, and the difference between a low circular orbit and an ICBM-type landing orbit is about 1 km/sec.

Perhaps a large de-orbiting rocket attached to the outside of the jar?

Perhaps if we issue our Cosmonaughts with some kind of Rocket launcher they can tie the jar to it and fire it down at the planet?

Just attach the jar to the retrorocket pack. That's not coming home.

I sketched out this problem a while ago to try to calculate the minimum amount of energy needed to bombard a planet with mass drivers from orbit. It's at home, and I'm at work, however, so I can't help much right now. (I also don't remember the numbers, sorry )
But I'm pretty sure the solution is to first calculate the difference in energy between a circular orbit and an elliptical orbit with the same apogee, but perigee at 0km altitude, then just convert that energy to DV. (You can even save some energy by calculating perigee at 50km or sufficiently low enough that atmospheric braking will ensure your "payload" lands on Murca)

LaCroix wrote:(OOC: Has this milestone been granted IRL, already? )

From what I recall, NASA's position is either "No" or "We do not discuss matters like that." However, I think I remember reading that a pair of crewmembers got married just before a Shuttle mission, so you can draw any conclusions from that as you will

Back to lurking! Keep it up, I love this!

IC

Digaditch, in best tradition of the cosmonaut corps, decides to celebrate his assignment as an actual, honest-to-Shroomanski cosmonaut, a capsule pilot(he's a lot less cynical / jaded than Nikov right now - not to mention the Zhtalingradite doing this weird "teetotal" thing for the moment) by getting completely rat arsed.

Digaditch being a hard-drinking, slightly underweight, midget from Novosibirsk (he might actually have had to look up slightly to Gagarin in OTL), this doesn't actually take that much vodka as you'd expect.

Dammit, the flight psychologist said he was loud, he was going to be loud!

Now to find Belyaev and get him as loaded and loud as he planned to be...

Dave wrote:Just attach the jar to the retrorocket pack. That's not coming home.

But the retrorocket is not always successfully released; if the straps don't let go, the retrorocket pack remains attached and the cosmonauts will have pissed on themselves!

YES.

Okay, I've gotta know. HOW, you bastard?

Maybe if he controlled the USSR into standing still, got all the firsts, and was indecently lucky...? That, or he used an infinite money cheat maybe. With infinite money I bet you could do it by then...

ChaserGrey wrote:

Okay, I've gotta know. HOW, you bastard?

To be honest, a lot of savescumming.

Missions went as follows:

Explorer I - Orbital Satellite - November 1957 - Success

Mercury I - Manned Suborbital (Schirra) - May 1959 - Success

Mercury II - Orbital/EVA (Shepard) - May 1960 - Success

Mercury III - Orbital/Duration B/EVA (Grissom) - November 1960 - Success

Gemini I - Duration C/EVA (Carpenter/Cooper) - October 1962 - Success

Gemini II - Unmanned Orbital Docking - December 1962 - Success

Gemini III - Lunar Pass (Grissom/Schirra) - April 1963 - Success

Gemini IV - Docking/EVA/Duration D (Young/E. White) - June 1963 - Success

Gemini V - Docking/EVA/Duration E (Conrad/Borman) - November 1963 - Partial Failure (on one of the later Duration steps; docking was successful)

Gemini VI - Planned Lunar Orbital for Fall '63, scrubbed because both primary and backup crews broke up

Gemini VII - Docking (Young/E. White) - April 1964 - Success

Gemini VIII - Lunar Orbital (Stafford/Lovell) - June 1964 - Partial Failure (but overall successful)

Gemini IX - Docking (Glenn/Cooper) - October 1964 - Success

Gemini X - JT LOR Lunar Landing (Armstrong/Yeager) - December 1964 - Success

I got extremely lucky, too - I'd started Cricket up as early as Fall '60, I think, and the next turn got a Failure Mode Prevention for it.

Fast forward to Gemini X - my heart stops momentarily as the bar shoots up into the red on the Lunar Landing step - then, "Oh, crap, I am too lucky".

Add that to no equipment downgrades in the Newscast events except for a very early Cricket problem and that adds up to this landing.

Inspired by a comment on this video:



And no, no infinite money cheats, and I was playing against the computer (set to difficulty 3 while I was on 1, again, being honest). But when you play as the US in the Historical Model and get a lot of successes and all the prestige firsts (as I was doing; the computer wasn't having so much luck. I noted in the Mission History afterwards that the Soviets had attempted 4 Orbital Satellites - and had -12 Prestige. They did manage to get a man into space in 1960 though, but they weren't getting very far.), your budget becomes pretty generous.