Star Trek

Has anybody here installed Orbiter? It's a very good 'Space' simulator that allows you, amongst other things to take control of a Space Shuttle and Launch from Houston, deliver satellites into orbit and dock with the ISS... all from a full scale Earth and with real time distances.

What I really love about it is the engine they use to do this, you can literally zoom out to a highly detailed, fully scaled Jupiter and then all the way back down to the ground at Houston and your launch pad, pretty flawlessly and quite packed with Visual Candy (when you have installed various mapping updates) where you can then take off in your shuttle and fly through the clouds and out into Earth orbit (with lots of camera controls so you can get some real awesome perspective shots)

Check out the website here http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~martins/orbit/orbit.html (and in the meantime if you want a really good, realistic space sim, download it and the surface packages)

The reason I bring it up is because of the great way it handles the scale of the Planetary bodies, I had great fun for instance undocking from the ISS and deorbiting back to Earth in the Shuttle, the scale is awesome and the atmospheric effects (such as re-entry burning etc) are lovely- I understand alot more time will be spent on interiors of Starships and the amount of characters who will play in the game, but is something of this scale available?

Here's a few ingame shots...

Re Entry

High Orbit over the US

First Stage Booster Detachment

Jupiter...

Docked at ISS

Night Falls

Earthrise

All real space/distance that you can traverse, stunning...

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