Back on M6 somebody posted about a simple gravity/solar system simulator in the form of a web-based applet. It was very addictive.
This is the link to the 'satellites applet', but you are limited to creating satelltes in the earth/moon system.
www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/applets/satellites.html
This applet (and Orbiter..) inspired me to make
my own gravity simulator some time ago in 2004. Recently, I continued this project. You may keep an eye on my blog about the simulator, it could be possible that I release an updated version within some weeks.
But I'll get back to the original discussion I had with Tomek, the talk about Interactive Physics/Working Model 2D simulator. In interactive physics/WM, you can change the gravity setting to 'planetary', so that's what you have to enable to get all the gravity fun. I looked on some backup discs back from 2003, and found some IP2000 files I created, I'll give a brief history...
It all started with creating 'planets'
like this with little cars on it. When driving around the planet faster, objects carried by the car will start to fly off. The cube here has controlable (on/off) forces on each side, so I could control the orbit.
Then, I replaced the 'cars', by 'rockets' (just rectangles actually), and trying to use some controlable forces to get it into an orbit around the sphere. Those simple rockets quickly advanced to capsules
like this.
(usually in a simple vertical or no-gravity environment)
After this, the capsule design was
evolving a little.
... Untill I added more advanced rotational/linear RCS control, and automatic 'kill-rot' forces on the capsules,
like these.
Back then, it just fun to be able to control al those joints/motors/forces/etc in the capsule, and let the human float around..
I actually stopped evolving them because the computers where too slow, the simulations with the capsules ran really slow at some point. Also I struggled with the limitations like the simple air resistance model (unrealistic).
Of course, I found Orbiter too at some point (I think it was in 2002 or 3?), so I continued using that instead. But some time ago, I discovered Working Model 2D and Visual nastran 3D, so I sometimes use with these physics simulators again
Here's another
Zero-G vehicle, and
another capsule with some humans..
regards,
mcduck