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Self-Portrait Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?

I thought I'd share with you a program I've been having fun with lately. It's called Orbiter, and it's a free space flight simulator.

It's not too hard to install and set up, and it doesn't make any changes to the registry, which means it's technically not installed and you can run it from wherever you like. There's a lot of add-ons available for it, many of which are on the Orbit Hangar Mods site. Basically, you can make it a lot more complex than it starts out as.

Since this is a space flight simulator and not a game, the learning curve can be steep. This isn't like X-Wing or Freelancer. You'll have to learn something about orbital mechanics (yes, that math stuff again), but if you dig real simulators and you've always been interested in space flight, then this might be for you.

Currently I'm having fun making add-ons for it. The graphics are a few years old, but they still look pretty nice. There's a lot of freedom for making your own add-ons, provided you know something about 3-D modeling and/or computer programming. Good luck out there!


Matt
Monday, May 18, 2009
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