Like a sunflower ...

While I can't openly talk about [CENSURED] yet, I can at least post about some of the things we have been outfitting our Soyuz addon with. However, you should know that we are mainly using it as technological guinea pig, while the new project is still on the drawing boards. Anywho, last week I was bitten by the "how can I orient a vessel according to the sun" bug. Right before falling to a real bug (some sort of cold/flu) I managed last week to write a program (to run inside our virtual GPC) that when running will aim to orient the solar panels towards the sun, using the attitude control thrusters. Gotta said it's pretty cool to see that 7K-OK tracking automatically the sun during the sunlight part of its orbit :-)

Being just for testing purpose, that program isn't historically accurate obviously. For example, once the proper solar attitude is reached, it's likely that CMG type devices should be used to maintain the orientation within certain limits while the vessel moves along its orbital path, in order to conserve propellant.