Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Completeness Obsession

I have something of a completeness obsession. If I buy a book that's part of a set, I usually end up buying the set. When I was collecting CD's for my major Mozart phase in the early 90's, I had to have all 626 Köchel numbers (I don't think I got all the a,b,c, etc. versions though, and I think I missed some of the choral pieces).

Over at Orbit Hangar just now, I happened to notice an Orbiter add-on that reflects a similar completeness obsession, "Space Race Complete." The author has compiled 341 dated scenarios from the launch of Sputnik to the ISS and just about everything in between. Pretty amazing. A supplement adds 36 more scenarios from 1996 to 2001, ending with the de-Orbit of Mir in 2001. These are only the scenarios, not the add-ons needed to run them, which are listed in the readme file.

The zip file dates from mid-2004 so some of the add-ons it references are not the latest ones for Orbiter 2005, and I haven't tried any of them yet myself. But it's pretty impressive and would make a good accompaniment to This New Ocean, the history of the space age that I read in December.

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