Question How did you get into Orbiter Sim?

[Krishnan]

Hello Everyone!
How did you discover and start playing Orbiter Space Flight Simulator?
My story goes like this.
I was watching a youtube video where the Youtuber Swiss001 builds his own aircraft and tries flying them.
Instead of doing my work, I procrastinated and decided to give the game a try. It was called Kerbal Space Program.
I fell in love with it, and became a huge fan and would play it all the time.
About a year later, I was bored in class, and I wanted to see if there is another game like Kerbal, so I searched up "Online game like Kerbal Space Program"
Then, on a random KSP forum post, I discovered someone mentioning the game "Orbiter".
I immediately went to http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ and read through the description.
I was excited and was ready to play. I downloaded it and tried to play it, but I had no idea what the controls were (I was naive and didn't read the manual).
I tried playing the "tutorial" in which you learn about reference planes and the "Navball", but since I didn't know the controls, I used the orientation autopilots and made the narrator mad ? .
Anyways, I discovered David Courtney's videos and began binge-watching them. I slowly but surely learned concepts and in-depth of the basics I learned from Kerbal, and I applied concepts from one to the other.
I did my first orbit, first rendezvous, first docking, first lunar fly-by, first lunar landing, first LEO reentry and landing, then I got a bit more confident and fell in love with the XR2 and XR5.
I recently did my first lunar direct reentry and landing, which I think is a pretty great feat.
Thanks for reading my story, I can't wait to read your stories.

 

[Eccentric]

Apologies for the necro-post. Perhaps this will breathe life into the thread.

I think for me, I was bored one night. I was in China (2011-2020) teaching English by day, and playing on my PC by night. I was aimlessly following click-bait links when I encountered a video about UCGO, and especially the Arrow Freighter.

Then of course the long, hard learning curve to figure out how to use the modules.

Then I upgraded to the 2016 version of Orbiter, and the Arrow broke!

Today, I was going through old files, consolidating doubled-up pictures and stuff, when I encountered some tutorial videos for Orbiter, and the bug bit again. Of course, the first thing I searched for was dansteph's Arrow, and guess how happy I was to see the new improved, 2016 compatible queen of space ready for download...

Except it's been so long since I've been on the forum, it seems to have forgotten me, and now I have to wait till two posts are "approved" before I can download (even though I downloaded in the past).

Lessons in patience.

 

[n72.75]

I was looking for Celestia add-ons in 2006 and googled the right combination of things to end up on the Orbiter home page.

 

[WolfAngriff]

I was looking for "free" simulators, in 2009 / 2010. From trucks to forklifts, trains, planes, factories, politics, economics... I don't remember how, but i've found the download page of Orbiter 2006. As it was realy free, i've tried it. And as i found it realy tough, i decided to go on. And here we are.

At the same period, i found the other simulator i'm still playing : Farming Simulator. So when i go to my "office", my wife often answers : "So, darling, where will i find you ? In Space or on the fields harvesting crops ?"

Sadly, thre's no tractor addon for Orbiter. It'd be a cool payload under Falcon Heavy's fairing !

 

[Pioneer]

When I was younger I got interested in space exploration. After many hours, weeks, months of watching space-related stuff on YouTube, I stumbled upon one of rseferino's videos. Eventually I wound up downloading Orbiter 2010 P1 myself, just a few days after its release! After a long time of just playing around I eventually made my first interplanetary flight from Earth orbit to Venus thanks to flytandem's videos.

 

[steph]

Well, it was a long time ago. 2006 or 2007, I think. I was a teenager, 9th or 10th grade, and I liked gaming, of course. Had a 'beast' of a Pentium 2 at 733 MHz, 128 MB of RAM and 32 MB graphic card. It was after passing to ADSL internet , having previously used dial-up. Had a few truly old games, mostly on MS-DOS, including a Shuttle sim, that was apparently too realistic, as in I had loads of switches to flip etc. So I looked for a 'realistic space sim', and stumbled upon Orbiter. Learning curve was relatively steep, but I loved fooling around with the DG and the idea that it's really the entire globe/Solar system , with upgradable textures etc. I remember spending a Christmas vacation playing mostly Gothic and Orbiter, and the later 18 Wheels of Steel and Battlefield Vietnam etc, but I enjoyed spending literal hours in Orbiter just doing stuff like ISS flights etc, it was fascinating.

@WolfAngriff which version of the Farm SIm? I keep seeing it in stores, I'm tempted to get it, but it seems like there are tons of versions for different platforms etc.

 

[TheShuttleExperience]

It was so long ago... (2001/2002). Someone else discovered it and gave me the Orbiter files on CD-ROM since my internet connection was too slow for download

 

[N_Molson]

Had a 56K too back in the days Probably still have it somewhere... 2 or 3 Kb/s were a feast back then

 

[TheShuttleExperience]

Had a 56K too back in the days Probably still have it somewhere... 2 or 3 Kb/s were a feast back then

Yeah And I still remember DSL1000. That was fast. I'm afraid it's already two decades

 

[Kyle]

My dad was playing Orbiter ~2002 or so, saw it on his PC and got hooked.

 

[Boxx]

I was trying to build an Earth-Mars trajectory with Celestia, I guess in 2008 or something, then a friend told me: why don't you fly it in Orbiter? in what?! Then......

 

[pushkin]

My physics teacher used it to demonstrate orbital mechanics around 2008. Been hooked ever since

 

[Krishnan]

It was so long ago... (2001/2002). Someone else discovered it and gave me the Orbiter files on CD-ROM since my internet connection was too slow for download

In fact, Go Play in Space even says to get a copy of Orbiter from CD from a magazine, apparently

 

[statisticsnerd]

It was 2005 or 2006 when I discovered Orbiter. I had played the various versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator going back to when I was a kid, and I believe that I had searched for a space simulator and Orbiter popped up in the search results.

 

[indaba42]

Hi Orbies, just wanted to drop some post to have XR2 download access, then came along this thread, read, liked it much, so here's my part:

It somehow started in the early '80 when I got a programmable calculator, a HP-41C, with the most simple moon-lander as programming example. Couldn't stop before I finished a moon orbiting and landing program with realistic physics - which took a while. Then a C64, but before my moon-lander was converted to basic I came across Elite - a space game with wire graphic and something like add-ons - just got hooked. Then life changed.

Decades later, back to civilisation, I acquired a notebook, installed LINUX and found Oolite - a perfect Elite-Clone - in the pack. What a pleasurable reminder of the past. And for sure played it for a while. But it was internet times and hardware much, much faster so there must be something way better around, I thought. The only really good space simulator to find was Orbiter - and for free!! Too good to be true. Well, wasn't as Orbiter only runs under MS-Windows and I wouldn't install that stuff just because of a game. So it took a while before I could run Orbiter in Linux (the D3DX9-client was a toughy, would only run in a 2014-beta).

I immersed in the simulator and it's beautiful graphic using three screens for vision, instruments and a tutorial video so I could slowly learn how to orbit, dock and go to the moon. (First crash-landings felt a little like on the HP-41C ages ago - me just being to dumb to do it right). Watched the HiRes Moon surface while orbiting for hours being mesmerised by the 'dark side of the moon'. Constructed my 'better Brighton Beach' a simple TinyHandbook-MFD etc. and then crash-landed my HDD - all gone - before I even could go to Mars, not talking of......
A reinstall proved unsuccessful due to by then different versions (Linux, wine, oriter-beta) and a lack of time and patience.

Just a few days ago I sieved thru ancient DVD-backups and found some old Orbiter screenshots. Seeing them, downloading and installing Orbiter was one thing. This time all worked out of the box. Easy.
Not so easy is flying again. After all that time it will take a lot of it before I'm back to old glory, but I'll work on it. So, see you on Mars - then.