Prologue
The Apollo command and service module was one of two principal components of the United States Apollo spacecraft, used for the Apollo program, which landed astronauts on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. It was initially designed to land on the Moon atop a landing rocket stage and return all three astronauts on a direct-ascent mission, which would not use a separate lunar module, and thus had no provisions for docking with another spacecraft. This, plus other required design changes
Cabin interior arrangement
The central pressure vessel of the command module was its sole habitable compartment. Dominating the forward section of the cabin was the crescent-shaped main display panel measuring nearly 7 feet (2.1 m) wide and 3 feet (0.91 m) tall. It was arranged into three panels, each emphasizing the duties of each crew member. The mission commander’s panel (left side) included the velocity, attitude, and altitude indicators, the primary flight controls, and the main FDAI (Flight Director Attitude Indicator).
This is the most important part of the entire craft to me, I want to use this control panel as the detailing for my prototype by arranging it into the shapes of what I hope will be a good representation of both High Fleet’s UI and the overall messiness of the computers from that time period. When looking at the entire control panel you will see there where sets of smaller control panels flanking each side of the main panel. On the left side were a circuit breaker panel, audio controls, and the SCS power controls. On the right were additional circuit breakers and a redundant audio control panel, along with the environmental control switches. In total, the command module panels included 24 instruments, 566 switches, 40 event indicators, and 71 lights.
When looking at it, the first thing I thought to myself was how do you keep track of all these switches, buttons and other input devices? To me it seems like you’d be getting a visual overload if this was placed in front of you. But to me thats sort of the joy of it, thats what makes it interesting to me. The idea to mimic this using the style of a game make it a lot more managable to me, because I decide what goes where and thankfully the UI High Fleet doesn’t have this many switches in your face at one time.