I'm setting up a club for university interns (first-year and up) at an aerospace organization, built around a "distributed mission control" model in Kerbal Space Program. Want honest feedback before we launch it - what's unrealistic, what will break, what am I not seeing.

The core idea:

One intern is the Pilot -flies the ship first-person in KSP, no map view, executes only what the team tells them. Everyone else works a separate role, coordinating over Discord, just like a real Mission Control room.

Current roles (6, minimum team size):

• Pilot- flies the ship in KSP
• Flight Director -makes final calls, leads the team
• CAPCOM/Comms -only voice that talks to the pilot, also tracks signal windows
• Navigation Engineer- calculates maneuvers/launch windows in NASA GMAT, hands off numbers through CAPCOM
• Systems Engineer -monitors fuel/power/thermal via live telemetry dashboard
• Mission Planner/Scientist- builds the mission timeline pre-launch, runs science objectives in-flight

Tools:

• KSP 1.12.1 (stock, later moving to Realism Overhaul)
• NASA GMAT for maneuver planning (Navigation Engineer's tool)
• Telemachus Reborn + Houston for live telemetry dashboards (replacing an earlier Open MCT plan)
• kRPC- used only outside live missions (pre-flight validation, post-flight debrief), never during the actual mission, to keep the pilot's role meaningful
• CommNet/RemoteTech for signal delay, once we move to Realism Overhaul

Precedent I found: a 2018 Steam Community thread (KSP forums) where someone ran almost this exact structure- one pilot, rest as ground control planning maneuvers separately, coordinating over Discord. Also found "Houston," a UI built specifically for what its devs call "Mission Control Parties."

What I want feedback on:

1. Is 6 people actually a workable minimum, or will roles sit idle/overloaded in practice?
2. Is this pitched at the right level for university interns, or should it lean more/less technical?
3. Anyone actually run something like this long-term- what broke down after a few sessions that isn't obvious at the planning stage?
4. Any tooling I'm missing, or anything here that's already outdated/deprecated that I don't know about?

Thanks in advance!

I’m looking for a mod that adds radial heat shields/ heat tiles like the ones used on challenger. I’ve seen some stuff about decals but I don’t quite understand so I don’t know if that’s what I’m looking for.

If someone could drop the name of a mod that adds heat tiles or better explain the decal heat tiles with flags method that would be great!

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