Universe Sandbox

[Matt Scunthorpe]

Came across this while watching videos on youtube. It is free to download and is quite frankly a lot of fun i find.

Can change all the properties of planets and galaxys and the Sun and see how it effects everything.

Link to the program

http://universesandbox.com/

Link to the review on youtube

[Matt Scunthorpe]

Ok i had no clue that would post the actual video! Technology eh, gotta love it.

[SnakeyJ]

I like this - God in my own sandbox - look forward to playing with this tomorrow.

[Paranoidsam]

I'm downloading it with Steam now... the full version is £6.99.

[Paranoidsam]

I've been playing with it for a bit... it's very interesting. It's fun to eject planets out of the solar system... which has got me thinking.

I decided to set the velocity of some space craft to 0... as you'd expect they began to fall in to the sun, before being ejected from the solar system at incredible speeds. In just 1 week the Phoenix probe left Voyager 1 in the dust... surely we could use a similar approach to send probes to the stars. It'd still take a very long time, but we'd probably reach the nearest stars within a few decades... which is a reasonable time period for a deep space probe.

[SnakeyJ]

I've been playing with it for a bit... it's very interesting. It's fun to eject planets out of the solar system... which has got me thinking.

I decided to set the velocity of some space craft to 0... as you'd expect they began to fall in to the sun, before being ejected from the solar system at incredible speeds. In just 1 week the Phoenix probe left Voyager 1 in the dust... surely we could use a similar approach to send probes to the stars. It'd still take a very long time, but we'd probably reach the nearest stars within a few decades... which is a reasonable time period for a deep space probe.

Sounds good, though you would need enough fuel to escape earths gravity and then to break to cancel the 30Kms or so that the object/spacecraft already has from earth orbit of the sun.

Great piece of interactive software and I shall do my best to pitch this around the many schools we work with.

[Paranoidsam]

Sounds good, though you would need enough fuel to escape earths gravity and then to break to cancel the 30Kms or so that the object/spacecraft already has from earth orbit of the sun.

Great piece of interactive software and I shall do my best to pitch this around the many schools we work with.

I don't think you'd necessarily have to slow down, simply to hit the sweet spot near the sun. I'm assuming that the physics of the sim are accurate... I managed to get Stereo B up to 500km/s by using the sun as a slingshot...

[Matt Scunthorpe]

But then its also that the spacecraft would have to heavily protected against the suns heat, brightness if it had cameras etc, magnetic field etc.

[johnrt]

It looks like great fun, but the man narrating that video is possibly the most annoying human ever born