2014 Mar 09

This is a QuickTime demonstration of my spacecraft simulator that I built from parts found around the home. My long term goal is to experiment with different engines, e.g. ion, VASMIR, solar sails, plan a trip to Mars and around the moons of Jupiter. The model is built in C++ and uses xml to describe the system I am testing. A bit old school, but I use xerces in a pure C++ model as well as the xml parsers in Qt and python. I also use my Cartesian Space python wrappers to make it easy to extract properties of the simulation like spacecraft speed and orbital angular momentum.

In this example I have the earth and moon with four spacecraft in geocentric orbits at several inclinations. The model is fully 3D and displayed here using OpenGL. The user can change their point of view using the same movement keys found in games like world of warcraft.