Snazzy little program came onto the Steam marketplace a couple of days ago, called Universe Sandbox. Basically, the premise of the game is you’ve got complete control over all aspects of the universe. You can take our solar system, see what would happen if you dialled the mass of the sun up, or try and set up a Geosynchronous orbit around the earth. 
^ In this one I tried to see what would happen if the earth had a set of rings like Neptune, Saturn, etc etc, at the same point as the moon. The gravity of the moon caused some really cool twists and turns in the rings, and a bunch of asteroids broke orbit and crashed into the planet.
Dialling the gravity up a couple of notches is a fun one too, if you get the gravity high enough the sun turns into a black hole, and everything slowly collapses in on its self. Before then though, some of the planets do a slingshot around the sun and end up reaching the escape velocity and buggering off into space.
Using timing and changes to speed and changing the semi major axis I tried to dock a “teapot” with the ISS (the teapot is one of the random weird objects you can use as they didn't have a shuttle…) It was going quite well, I got the closing velocity down really nice and slow, but when the teapot finally got to the ISS (represented by a piece of rock…) the collision engine picked it up as a crash and smashed my teapot… Doh!
This is quite a fun little game, especially for those who are white and nerdy enough to get out the calculator to figure out all the velocities, forces and radii needed to get objects in certain places, it is still very buggy and has crashed on me a number of times, so hopefully in time they’ll release a patch and fix that all up, also I’m hoping for more models,spacecraft, satellites, gas clouds etc etc. But we shall see.
If you like astronomy, astrophysics and anything else to do with stars and SPAAAACE (Portal 2 reference for you there), I’d strongly recommend this, it’s only a few quid at the moment, so get it!
-Skip
^ In this one I tried to see what would happen if the earth had a set of rings like Neptune, Saturn, etc etc, at the same point as the moon. The gravity of the moon caused some really cool twists and turns in the rings, and a bunch of asteroids broke orbit and crashed into the planet.
Dialling the gravity up a couple of notches is a fun one too, if you get the gravity high enough the sun turns into a black hole, and everything slowly collapses in on its self. Before then though, some of the planets do a slingshot around the sun and end up reaching the escape velocity and buggering off into space.
Using timing and changes to speed and changing the semi major axis I tried to dock a “teapot” with the ISS (the teapot is one of the random weird objects you can use as they didn't have a shuttle…) It was going quite well, I got the closing velocity down really nice and slow, but when the teapot finally got to the ISS (represented by a piece of rock…) the collision engine picked it up as a crash and smashed my teapot… Doh!
This is quite a fun little game, especially for those who are white and nerdy enough to get out the calculator to figure out all the velocities, forces and radii needed to get objects in certain places, it is still very buggy and has crashed on me a number of times, so hopefully in time they’ll release a patch and fix that all up, also I’m hoping for more models,spacecraft, satellites, gas clouds etc etc. But we shall see.
If you like astronomy, astrophysics and anything else to do with stars and SPAAAACE (Portal 2 reference for you there), I’d strongly recommend this, it’s only a few quid at the moment, so get it!
-Skip
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