Orbiter!

[Chrissyo (Chris)]

Wow, I can't believe I haven’t thought of mentioning this here yet!

There is an extremely awesome program on the internet to download for free called Orbiter (Some of you probably have heard of it). It is a real time space flight simulator, using real physics and the like. I’m sure a lot of you would be quite interested in this.

It can be found here, http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~martins/orbit/orbit.html A new version has only fairly recently come out, so it’s pretty up to date at the moment.

Every wanted to fly the Cassini mission in real time (7 years, yeah right . There are several time accelerations) using a real physics engine? Well here’s your chance!

I strongly recommend checking it out. Though, don’t think its going to be easy. There is A LOT of stuff to learn if you want to fully learn the program.

Anyway, hope you guys like this!

[Striker (Tony)]

Downloading now...haha I feel sorry for people on dial up.......sorry

[MiG]

Yeah, it is fairly tricky. I suck at intercepting orbiting things from the ground and reentering (properly) and haven't yet figured out how to do interplanetary (moon included) transfers.
It's quite fun though.

[Chrissyo (Chris)]

Yeah, I still can't reenter, or even take off properly yet. I just start each scenario docked with Mir, ISS or just in a general low earth orbit. So far, my skills include alligning orbital plains and using the Transfer MFD to make an escape trajectory to the moon, and parking in a low moon orbit. And this has taken me a few months to learn.