Ever wanted to go to Mars before NASA does? Check out Orbiter Space Flight Simulator. As real as it gets it comes with many features which makes the whole experience very close to the reality. Whether you want to launch Space Shuttle Atlantis or docking it to the International Space Station (ISS) or maybe fly to the moon or why not mars, or if you are more adventurous then go to infinity and beyond.
Although Orbiter is closed source and the author updates it rarely but this doesn’t means everything has halted, as the author have made the whole environment configurable so anyone who knows how to C++ and make some 3D models can add more planets, space crafts, space stations, galaxies, add animations to them and what not.
And to make matters great its all free, yup the author and maintainer of Orbiter Martin Schweiger (Ph.D) has made it all free for everyone.
It is not a game as you wont find any space aliens or UFO’s to shoot down, and reaching mars is as difficult as for a real shuttle. What sets it apart from all others is the accurate math and orbital physics while having exceptional graphics.
There are many add-ons and plugins for Orbiter available for free online, some of the links are:
If you are downloading something make sure you download all the dependencies, one drawback is when a file is missing the Orbiter does a little CTD (Crash To Desktop), so be careful while downloading.
Key Features:
- Realistic physics. Planetary motion, gravitation effects, free space and atmospheric flight are accurately modeled.
- You can land your ship at a space port on a planet surface, or dock to an orbital station.
- High resolution planetary maps provide some nice visual effects.
- Configurable environment. Users can add planets, space ships and space stations to the existing universe, or design a completely new solar system from scratch. The Orbiter Software Development Kit contains libraries and sample C++ code for addon developers who want to write plugins.
Minimum Requirements
- 600 MHz PC or better (Pentium, Athlon, etc.)
- 256MB RAM or more
- Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP
- DirectX 7.0 or higher
- DirectX compatible 3D graphics accelerator card with at least 16MB of video RAM (32MB or more recommended) and DXT texture compression support.
- Approximately 120MB of free disk space for the minimum installation (additional high-resolution textures and addons will require more space).
- DirectX compatible joystick (optional)