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David Smith
Orbital is a planetary orbit simulator for Mac OS X. It's designed for beginning physics and astronomy classes, but is also strangely fun to play with. The simulation uses an approximation of Newtonian gravity, which, while not accurate enough for planning your next shuttle launch, is plenty accurate for most other uses.
Requirements
PPC, Mac OS X 10.1.5 or later.
PPC, Mac OS X 10.1.5 or later.
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Orbital User Discussion (Write a Review)
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Orbital is a planetary orbit simulator for Mac OS X. It's designed for beginning physics and astronomy classes, but is also strangely fun to play with. The simulation uses an approximation of Newtonian gravity, which, while not accurate enough for planning your next shuttle launch, is plenty accurate for most other uses.
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But I am a little confused by the data input format. Above the mass field it shows "Mass
(100 kg)" So, for the sun do input 1.989e+30 Kg/100 = 1.989e+28 Kg? In that case if we assume the earth is moving at about 29 Km/sec and is on the X axis we should input (29/10000) Km/sec in the Y field? Or are the parenthetic text only suggestions and full scale parameters should be entered?
Because this does not seem very intuitive to me, my only real suggestion is that It would be nice if this was explained in the Read Me.
Thanks for a fun application.
Regards,
Ian
Iceland_Gyrfalcon reviewed on 12 Sep 2006
It not only is educational, but it is intriguingly fun as well.
The app runs smoothly on my PowerPC running 10.3.9 and Intel Machine running 10.4.6
This is probably one of my top 10 favorite Apps, Thank you Señor Developer.
Suggestions/Problems:
-When you close the window without quitting the app, you cannot open a new window without restarting the app.
-It'd be nice to have more preferences such as: bounce planets off screen edge, save default planet size/mass, and any other small customizable stuffs.
-It'd be cool if it was a Universal Binary.
Thanks Again!
Hammergirl reviewed on 14 Dec 2003
Do you have one for windows too? (I love macs but smart board software works better on windows so I am stuck using windows.) I will have to run a temporary feed from my mac to the smart board to try this test of orbits. It is worth it though.