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by mittermayr 10 days ago
Well, I have no idea how complete this is, but perhaps a neat Christmas-time-project for anyone with seemingly unlimited tokens to take this and let it build up a simulator, using the real code to drive simulated machinery.
2 comments

Or you use the virtualagc project linked in the readme to do the same thing without wasting a bunch of money on tokens.
And miss the chance to rewrite it in Rust?! How dare you, good sir!
My favorite complaint during development of our simulator was someone who insisted we give them the means to replace the "jingoistic" American markings from the spacecraft so they could pretend the mission was flown by some multinational utopian organization like Starfleet. Of course, that person evaporated when things actually started to work and they would have to actually put effort into their Starfleet artwork instead of just continually trying to start political slapfights on the internet.

The moon hoaxers were boring and unfunny. I remember writing something along the lines of "There is a chance that this will never work because it was all a hoax and never worked in the first place, but I will try anyway because I am an optimist." I think that made them madder than anything else.

The real problem with it turned out to be that while the software is complete it expected data to be provided from both the crew and the ground at different points in the mission. Without this external data (and more importantly, the procedures and processes that generated it) the software is really just a very obtuse desk clock.

Actually making use of the software required years of extra work in document archaeology and reverse engineering the processes and constraints that generated the data used during the flights.