Probe
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Project home: Luna E3 'Probe' (CVEL) at CCCP Fleet |
History
Dealer McDope created a series of Soviet-era meshes between 2002 and 2004 included in these was a basic, green, Luna E3 mesh. The Luna E3 was the first probe to photograph the far side of The Moon, launched atop an R7 booster.
When the CCCP Team, co-ordinating on OrbiterIRC, set about writing C++ code for McDope's meshes the generic test object of choice became the Luna E3. Sticking to the naming convention McDope adopted of simply calling it Probe, an in-joke cropped up by which whenever a developer conducted a flight test, cries of Hail Probe! would abound.
This in-joke gained popularity when a post to the old M6 off-topic forums introduced the concept of Hailing Probe to a wider audience with a thread titled The Cult of the Probe. So ensued the second longest-running thread in the old Forum's history. Without a single flame.
The Probe has been hailed a great number of times afterwards; one notable example is during the Winter holidays in the end of 2008 (http://orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=5947).
Such was the following of the thread that it spanned two years and even spawned Probe Day (4th October -- the date of both Luna E3's launch, and two years earlier, that of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite).
Unfortunately, with the migration of the Orbiter forums to a new system in Februrary 2006, the thread was not ported.
Regardless, it is the obligation of orbiternauts across the world to hail the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent probe. Hail probe!
--New information-- 4/2/07
A long time Orbiter fan and forum lurker has archived the thread in a .mht file and now needs to figure out how to restart the thread.
