Hi again. It's been quite a while since I've been active here, but some of you might recognize me as an old regular, and I still do lurk.

Outsider, the level of detail in it's background, and the level of discussion of scientific concepts in the community helped spark a love of harder science fiction in me. That spark has grown into my own grand ambition of making a space wargame that's less cinematic and more simulationist, Atomic Space Navy. That ambition is still long way off, but since some of the early work is the sort of thing I think sci-fi creators and enthusiasts might get some use out of I have made that work available for use.

Orbit Toy is a gravitational simulation that can take editable system definitions and simulate them out for hundreds or thousands of years. I've tested it against NASA data on the solar system over a century, and while I'm not sure I'd trust it for planning actual missions it does appear stable and to closely resemble reality if not exactly match it. There are a number of command line options that can be used to get interesting data out of long runs, as well.

System Builder is a tool I just released today that makes designing new systems for use in Orbit Toy far easier, with a GUI that does the hard math for you rather than hand editing position and velocity values. It comes with system files for Sol and five exoplanet systems.

I hope this doesn't come off as spammy, and that you guys get some use out of these tools. I've wanted things like them from time to time in the past, and suspect that there are some like-minded people here. If you do get use out of them, or have problems with them, or have suggestions, let me know! Both tools are pretty rough in places, and I do have plans to improve the further, so all feedback is useful.

Thanks, Siber. I'll be sure to check those out.

Looks interesting. Must give them a try. Thanks for sharing.

Some more verification on my part has revealed that the math is all right, but the camera is 'under' the solar system instead of 'over' so the systems appear flipped compared to reality. This will be fixed in the future.

Those updates I mentioned have now come to fruition. anyone who downloaded the tools at their initial posting should check out the updated tools posted today. Lots of improvements have been made to many areas. The updated tools can be found at this link.