Orbiter Space Flight Simulator

Television, Movies Games and Books Games & Toys
#1

Since I know that some of you are totally hooked on the Space Program, I thot that this would interest you (if you didn’t know already).

Found the “Orbiter Space Flight Simulator” which is just like the MS Flight Simulator, but it’s a freeware and it lets you fly into space, dock on stations, collect satellites, land on the moon, other moons and other planets (Mars).

Til now I’ve only tried the getting into space, archiving a steady orbit and then landing back on earth with the Delta flyer. You can also use Space Shuttels to recreate previous missions. The program can be found at: http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/home.php

Fly safely! :wink:

#2

Windows only. Bleh.

#3

Orbiter is fantastic, and really drives home just how hard it is to navigate with any precision in space.

My kids have had fun by docking the Shuttle-B with a station and altering its orbit (one kid ‘landed’ it on the moon, sadly impact physics were not modeled). Playing with time acceleration helps make these exercises feasible. :slight_smile:

#4

When I was a kid, my mom was occasionally required to put in some time at the cable company on a Saturday and she would drag me along an pull up some games on the timeshare computer they used (prolly a VAX.) Lunar Lander was a real bitch to do (no graphics, you just typed in numbers and got numbers back.) I decided that it was more interesting to see how big a crater you could make if you deliberately crashed into the moon (and it would tell you exactly how big the impact crater was. Oddly, the most concrete information in that iteration of the game.)

Good times. :smiley:

#5

You could still change that in the realism settings. :smiley: