Orbiter
There are few flight simulator of this realism on the market. Orbiter has been developed by Martin Schweiger from Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering at University College of London. Martin is not a pilot nor a cosmonaut but a true guru in simulation. Orbiter is not an arcade game like other Space commander like. This is a space flight simulator using realistic physical models for spacecraft dynamics, atmospheric effects and planetary motion. A must for all fan of astronautics and future space explorators.
Orbiter uses sophisticated instruments and navigation computers to travel between spaceports on planet surfaces and orbital stations throughout the solar system driving cargos, space shuttles or prototypes.
Orbiter is also amazing by both the rendering of images and its technical sophistication. Ergonomic and highly configurable it allows you to modify existing objects as well as to add new spacecrafts, orbital stations, surface bases or to construct a new planetary system from scratch.
To make the most of Orbiter, the user has to understand the basic of physics, flight and space navigation. Hopefully the author provides all documentation you need to complete a mission to ISS or a space station orbiting a remote planet.
But to succeed in doing all the cheklist requested to complete a mission, calculating the transfer orbit, counterbalance yaw or pitch and docking the you will neeed a lot of experience and knowledges. At the end you will be exciting by your expertise in that field.
The program runs on Windows 32-bit OS and requests at least a 133 MHz CPU with Direct3D 7.0 or higher, and DirectX compatible 3D graphics accelerator card to render planetaries landscapes at low resolution. To use this highest resolution of 8192x4096 pixels Orbiter requests an AGP 3D graphics accelerator card with at least 32MB of VRAM, 128 MB RAM, a CPU over 233 MHz, the hardware supporting DXT1 texture compression and optionaly an accurate DirectX compatible joystick. That means that any desktop PC will not run this program but any multimedia PC should support those recommendations.