Orbiter: The Free Spaceflight Simulator
is a diamond-hard realistic Simulation Game involving spacecraft and spaceflight in general. It was created by Cambridge tutor Martin Schweiger for educational and entertainment purposes. The simulator has been in development roughly since 2000, and the latest stable version is Orbiter 2016, released on August 30, 2016. The last version, Orbiter 2010 (Patch 1), was released exactly six years earlier.
Make no mistake, Orbiter is no fast-flyin' laser-shootin' space sim. Think of it rather as Microsoft Flight Simulator meets Planetes.
The game is freeware, so if you feel interested in it and aren't scared by a steeper learning curve, you can grab it here. In addition to this basic game pack, there are literally tons and tons of (equally freeware) fan-made mods that expand the game in virtually every way: Adding new launchers, spacecraft, spaceports and space bases, scenarios and campaigns, texture and graphic updates, even entire planets and solar systems, and new HUDs for the ship's onboard computer... They can be found here, here and here. And don't forget the XR series here!
Not to be confused with Orbitor 1.
Orbiter provides examples of:
- Absent Aliens: Unless you're counting the mods based on Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5 or other verses, which feature the ships of the various non-human species from those movies and TV shows.
- Alternate History: In some of the mods and add-ons (e.g. the Soviet Union narrowly beats the US to the first succesful Moon landing,
an Apollo Programme-derived spacecraft lands on Mars in 1985, etc.). Also, in the default scenarios Mir is still flying, and has been moved into a convenient orbit for lunar ejections. - Asteroid Miners: The 20 Minutes into the Future JMC Mining Company in scenarios involving the Delta Glider IV add-on.
- Cool Spaceplane: The entire Delta Glider class. And for some, Real Life spaceplanes, like NASA's Space Shuttle, the ill-fated Russian Buran or the never built ESA Hermes space shuttle.
- Cool Starship / Cool Spacecraft: Way too many to list...
- Game Mod: The main draw of the game. There are literally hundreds, and many of the more high-profile ones are considered by the community to be essential parts of any Orbiter install, to the point that it's just assumed as a given that any new user will have downloaded them.
- Space Plane: The program comes with a fictional single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane known as the Delta Glider (with unrealistic engine efficiency), and there are mods like the XR2 Ravenstar and XR5 Vanguard.
- Terraform: In add-ons that replace some of the default planets and moons with terraformed versions.
- Wide-Open Sandbox: And there is some ongoing talk in the sim's community to create a more persistent "sandbox spaceflight" experience by adding actual objectives for flying missions. (Right now, you just fly and land without any particular end goal but your own.)
