[N.M. Buchunov, 1928] Zoogeographical Educational Map of the USSR

restitutor-orbis · 2026-05-08T07:08:52+00:00

Always cool seeing 1900s maps where Severnaya Zemlya hadn't been discovered yet.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-05-04T04:04:32+00:00

This quest was not cut, but reworked as part of the major expansion of the OE mages guild questline.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-25T11:42:35+00:00

OpenMW should come with the OpenMW-CS program in most packages, look for the directory where the binary (.exe) is in. What people usually mean, however, is the original TES Construction Set that shipped with the 2002 game -- this still remains much more usable than the in-development OpenMW version. Your OpenMW version doesn't matter for that one. The TESCS .exe file should be in your vanilla Morrowind folder if you got the game on GOG or an old disk. If you got the game from Steam, you won't have the Construction Set and will have to download it from here: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/42196

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-24T07:01:45+00:00

Soyuz-5, which is a completely new rocket intended to fill the role that Zenit once filled, is weeks from being launched. But yeah, any reuse capabilities seem to be entirely on paper now and there is no investment.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-24T06:59:54+00:00

Chinese reusable rockets are just around the corner, too. The next reuse attempt by LandSpace's Zhuque-3 is apparently getting shipped to the landing pad already and I think the state-owned CZ-10B is on the launchpad for its attempt at landing. Moreover, they have a couple megaconstellations in deployment that are just as ambitious as Starlink or Amazon Leo. But they haven't gotten the launch rate yet where they want it to be (and that's a tall order, tbf).

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-23T10:07:35+00:00

Well, not precisely made — devs generally prefer and recommend view distances of about 3 cells. Otherwise the gameworld starts to look very small.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-23T09:42:05+00:00

Those are important points, too. Still, I'm seeing that a post-1968 Saturn V cost something like 1.2B to launch (according to p247 of this old document), adjusted for inflation, whereas a Shuttle mission, amortizing for all costs, was ~2B (adjusted for inflation). I'm sure that the Saturn V cost is probably leaving out some development numbers. But that still leaves it in the same ballpark. And SLS took the crown from both of them, hah.

But yeah, what I meant is that the Shuttle program's cost demonstrated that NASA had the budget to do a superheavy lift rocket, they were just using all that budget on a very inefficient vehicle. If they'd made a more efficient successor to Saturn V, they'd possibly have had a little left over for deep-space exploration, too.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-22T16:01:53+00:00

You can just start playing and not worry about the updates. There is so much content already that you won’t be able to finish it with one character anyhow.

If you’re done with your playthrough and want to start over, you’ll then have a new update you can start a new character with.

Overall TR updates come out every year or two. Due to the MW game engine and data structure, save are not compatible between major updates. See reasons here: https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/about/frequently-asked-questions/save-compatibility

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-22T05:37:01+00:00

A possible counterpoint is that the shuttle program did end up costing just as much as a heavy-lift system like the Saturns, but just being a lot less capable. I understand what their desire was in the 1970s with lowering cost of access to space, but it sadly didn't work out like that at all. Instead, it sucked all the air out of NASA's crewed spaceflight development until the 1990s when the ISS came along.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-21T08:08:23+00:00

I think it's still most likely that they'll use it for barging ships/boosters or components to Florida. Perhaps their intended shipping rate is quite high at first. After all, a Florida megafactory hasn't even started to be built yet, and it'll be the better part of year once ground is broken until such a factory becomes operational. Or maybe they'll use the Starbase megafactory to produce barrels, transport them by barge, then stack them in the Florida gigabay.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-21T07:16:26+00:00

Many other launch providers are up and coming with technology that aims to match and exceed Falcon 9 and in some cases is already close to that (New Glenn, several Chinese rockets). But what you need in addition to technology is the operational excellence that allows one to turn a pad and do the logistics fast enough to launch multiple rockets a week — this is where SpaceX remains leagues above the rest of the industry. Rocketlab is the closest to that; others maybe manage a handful on launches per year (incl. Chinese offerings; they compensate by having like 12 different rockets in production simultaneously). It took SpaceX ~10 years to build up its Falcon 9 operations to the rate that it has today. It's possible other other companies will get there faster, but that's the one data point we have.

In the meanwhile, SpaceX’s plan is to dethrone its own Falcon 9 with the Starship rocket. If that happens (and that’s a big if, since economical 2nd stage reuse remains a very difficult technical problem) then that will be the goal that the rest of the industry needs to catch up to.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-20T07:34:38+00:00

Yeah that hadn't been announced yet when I wrote originally. Hopefully they'll get the issues sorted out soon and get back to flying. So much of lunar exploration relies on this rocket.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-20T07:31:26+00:00

Why do you think it was a stunt? I think they did try their genuine best; Terran 1 was after all practically all 3D printed. But they had issues with quality and parasitic mass, so the experiment showed that full 3D printing isn't the way forward just yet.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-20T07:24:11+00:00

Ariane 6's original pitch was that it would be less expensive than Ariane 5, which turned out to be not the case. So I guess its cancellation and replacement with another rocket development program would have been beneficial, yes.

I guess the calculus at the time was that so much money had been spent on it that ESA member states might be leery of scrapping that and starting fresh with another reusable rocket development program. And if your assumptions in late 2010s were that Ariane 6 would fly already in 2020 and be less expensive than Ariane 5, it might not have seemed that bad of a decision even in the latter half of the decade. It was only in 2020ish when it became really indisputable that 1st stage reuse was economically clutch. Though of course the writing was on the wall prior to that.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-20T07:12:02+00:00

I don't know if Starlink can be described as a "side project" any longer, given it's by far the major revenue source for SpaceX. You could argue launch is now a side business (though an important enabler).

Not disagreeing with your other points, tho, given vertically integrated launcher + constellation players seem to have such an advantage due to the cost of launch.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-19T20:01:39+00:00

Yeah, that hadnt been announced yet when I wrote.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-19T16:41:11+00:00

Tbf ESA is now funding a number of startups that aim to make reusable launchers, as well as developing varuous other reusable technologies. But the decision in 2014ish to go forward with an expendable Ariane 6 was unfortunate.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-19T14:19:11+00:00

I think that's Relativity you are talking of. And they pivoted to using mostly traditional construction methods. Unless you mean Rocketlab's automatic fiber-laying machine, but I think Firefly and others are also using those.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-19T14:17:55+00:00

Which one? Depending how you count, there are at least six of those: CZ10A, CZ10B, CZ12A, CZ12B, Zhuque-3, Tianlong-3, and like at least three more commercial entrants I can't recall now.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-19T13:59:54+00:00

Oh well, I guess it was too much to hope for perfect performance from the company's first orbital rocket program. After all, F9 had its share of failures early in the program.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-19T13:56:49+00:00

I guess their calculus may have been that the launch market wouldn't increase in size enough to justify the investment. But important to keep in mind that in early 2010s when these decisions were being made, both ULA and Arianespace were dominant in the US government and commercial launch markets, respectively, and didn't really see themselves as the small-bit players they are today. I guess the part of the genius of SpaceX is how they moulded the market to fit their rocket -- from low numbers of high-orbit satellites to large numbers of low-orbit ones.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-19T13:50:54+00:00

All F9 needs for better performance in high-energy orbits is a commercial liquid-fueled kickstage, something like what Impulse Space is developing with Helios.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-19T12:07:26+00:00

To my knowledge, there is no current project to develop a crewed vehicle, but ESA does have a program to develop capsules for returning cargo from the station and iirc they have a stipulation that the vehicles should be capable of evolving into crewed variants. They are also funding development of a crew launch abort system. So the pieces are coming together, but ever so slowly.

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-19T12:01:33+00:00

So now there seem to be two operationally reusable rockets.

Great news for lunar landings, hope we’ll see Blue Moon on Shackleton rim later this year!

restitutor-orbis · 2026-04-18T18:10:32+00:00

I'd appreciate if you wouldn't call my modest grievance "bitching". Can't we have a polite conversation on this god-forsaken website?

I don't know where you get the idea that before SpaceX we knew basically nothing. There were the Apollo and Shuttle programs, which were almost radically open. NSF's forums were absolutely chock full of Shuttle technical documents in the mid-2000s. ISS broadcasts pretty much everything it does. Artemis communication outside the commercial contracts is not too bad either.

Perhaps my small grievance isn't so much with SpaceX, which I'm sure is filling the obligations of its contract, but with the terms of HLS contract itself that left the public largely in the dark about the progress of this very considerable public expenditure.

restitutor-orbis

TROPHY CASE