On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 01:59:16PM +1000, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
Is there a good free orbital simulator for Linux?
I don't want a game like KSP but a simulation of orbits without much need for fancy graphics.
I am wondering what the orbit of a ring would be like (EG a Dyson ring) and whether it's plausible to make such a ring or whether a set of disconnected sattelites in the same orbit is required.
is there such a thing as a Dyson ring? I thought it was a Niven ring, as per Ringworld, Ringworld Engineers etc. and as (fans of) those books pointed out, rings are unstable no matter what. a full Dyson sphere is neutrally/meta stable, but no idea how you'd actually construct it in a stable manner... likely someone has thought about it though! short version is that gravity is a harsh mistress, often chaotic, and hard to do right over long timescales. do you think the solar system is stable? you are wrong. satellites? nope. but depends upon what timescales they drift/resonate. I mostly know about high N N-body codes, but I have a symplectic toy low N multi-timestep python code that I wrote somewhere. there are probably high performance (giga-year) public symplectic low N codes out there too. BTW all mine are collisionless. quite different to David Zuccaro's (intriguing - asteroid field?) collisional code. cheers, robin ObLinux: some sats probably run linux? :)