Direct ascent Apollo, Nova booster?
Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2014 2:56 pm
Well, I figured I will post this suggestion here to see what other forum members might think.
I first considered an Apollo direct ascent version when I played a GSA game with soviet rockets and had the UR-700, which had enough power to make a direct ascent with this spaceship, but such an option was not available.
Now I was making my NASA sandbox playthrough. I usually do some background reading before I do my AAR posts, and I came upon the Nova rocket. This was a planned NASA booster, similar in many ways to the Saturn V but larger and more powerful.
In the early 60s there was an influential group on NASA designers who favored a direct ascent option and the Nova was supposed to be the central piece of this plan. Only in 1962 was this option dropped alltogeather in favor of the Saturn V docking LEM variant.
You can read more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(rocket)
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/nova.htm
Currently the NASA player has no alternatives and unlike his soviet counterpart, he has just the Saturn V as the only option for the moon missions. I think this would add some needed variety to the NASA games. It would also make sense with the game's part 2 in mind - giving the player a heavy booster tech tree for possible use in alternative approaches (moon bases, large space stations etc). The Nova was originally in RL envisioned as the first step in a family of rockets that were to be used for a manned mars flyby.
I first considered an Apollo direct ascent version when I played a GSA game with soviet rockets and had the UR-700, which had enough power to make a direct ascent with this spaceship, but such an option was not available.
Now I was making my NASA sandbox playthrough. I usually do some background reading before I do my AAR posts, and I came upon the Nova rocket. This was a planned NASA booster, similar in many ways to the Saturn V but larger and more powerful.
In the early 60s there was an influential group on NASA designers who favored a direct ascent option and the Nova was supposed to be the central piece of this plan. Only in 1962 was this option dropped alltogeather in favor of the Saturn V docking LEM variant.
You can read more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(rocket)
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/nova.htm
Currently the NASA player has no alternatives and unlike his soviet counterpart, he has just the Saturn V as the only option for the moon missions. I think this would add some needed variety to the NASA games. It would also make sense with the game's part 2 in mind - giving the player a heavy booster tech tree for possible use in alternative approaches (moon bases, large space stations etc). The Nova was originally in RL envisioned as the first step in a family of rockets that were to be used for a manned mars flyby.
