On 23.09.2016 13:59, 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.
While this is not what you are looking for xephem can calcualte and show the orbits of satelites of earth as well as orbital calculations for the planets. The graphics are not very flash, the program being now something like 26 years old, but it is designed to be accurate and be used as a professional tool. The program itself has a wide range of facilties having both text and graphical displays and can directly control a telescope. There's no debian package for it, the program only being freely downloadable for none comercial use. I have though so far have ha no difficulty at all in compiling it. I noticed (just) now though there is a post about compiling it on debian 8. There are more flashy programs around now but none are so flexible and accurate as xephem. Lindsay