Space Engine 9.8.0

[Pavan Outlaw]

SpaceEngineis a realistic virtual Universe you can explore on your computer. You can travel from star to star, from galaxy to galaxy, landing on any planet, moon, or asteroid with the ability to explore its alien landscape. You can alter the speed of time and observe any celestial phenomena you please. All transitions are completely seamless, and this virtual universe has a size of billions of light-years across and contains trillions upon trillions of planetary systems. The procedural generation is based on real scientific knowledge, so SpaceEngine depicts the universe the way it is thought to be by modern science. Real celestial objects are also present if you want to visit them, including the planets and moons of our Solar system, thousands of nearby stars with newly discovered exoplanets, and thousands of galaxies that are currently known.

Click on any visible object with the mouse and hit the 'G' key to fly directly to it. Search for objects by name, search by parameters within a certain radius, browse an interactive map of the surrounding space and view a map of the current planetary system

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Amazing. I have been running SpaceEngine in the background for a while now, as I am zipping through a galaxy at 8 light years per second. It just goes on and on, and that is a mere single galaxy. Every time I find another way of impressing the vastness of it all on me.

I love SpaceEngine! It's amazing that it's mostly one person who's doing it. One minute I'm slowly traversing the surface of an alien planet, the next I'm zooming through intergalactic space at 100 Mpcs/second

I am hereby bumping this thread to pass on the exciting announcement that SE's latest patch (only available in the SE forum so far) adds engine exhaust and renders ships in interstellar space! Now we can do proper galactic voyages with cool glowing interstellar ships.

Has anyone here tried Space Engine (I'm sure some of you have:)), but it's basically this awesome Space Exploration game where you are free to explore the universe including landing on all planets (which include both the ones we know of and millions of procedural ones.) Yesterday I found a planet around twice the size of Earth with microbial life, but it had rings and loads of moons! I also found a moon of a Gas Giant that had low gravity (about 0.6g) but a thick atmosphere of 3atm, and the atmosphere was the exact same colour as Jool's atmosphere. Imagine if this game could be combined with KSP! Anyway, what awesome planets have you found?

I found a gas giant with 900+ moons and several planets with life on them that were just beautiful to "stand" on; multiple moons, multiple stars, foreign planets visible in the evening and night sky... that is just an amazing sight time after time.

Sorry for opening the new thread when there was already one. I did look to see if it was there, but I guess I didn't look back enough pages:P. Anyway, you think Earth should be called the "Blue Planet"? Well, I found a planet that is entirely blue, including the ground!

Several bright surface features (also known as faculae) were discovered on the dwarf planet Ceres by the Dawn spacecraft in 2015. The brightest cluster of spots ("Spot 5") is located in an 80-kilometer (50 mi) crater called Occator. The largest and brightest component of the cluster is in the center of the crater, with dimmer spots located towards this crater's eastern rim. Early in the orbital phase of the Dawn mission, the high albedo of these spots was speculated to be due to some kind of ...

Actually I had hoped for a bit more than that in Space Engine, but even as it is it is quite impressive.

What you see there is a symbiotic star. Basically a red giant and a white star are so close to each other that there is a mass transfer. Not visible here, sadly.

R Aquarii (R Aqr) is a variable star in the constellation Aquarius. R Aquarii is a symbiotic star believed to contain a white dwarf and a Mira-type variable in a binary system. The orbital period is approximately 44 years. The main Mira-type star is a red giant, and varies in brightness by a factor of several hundred and with a period of slightly more than a year; this variability was discovered by Karl Ludwig Harding in 1810. It has a distance of about 390 parsecs, and is one of the nearest sym...

Mons Huygens is the Moon's tallest mountain (but not its highest point, which is Selenean Summit). It is about 5,500 m (18,000 ft) high and is located in the Montes Apenninus. Adjacent to the west is Mons Ampre. The Montes Apenninus were formed by the impact that created Mare Imbrium. The mountain was named after the Dutch astronomer, mathematician and physician Christiaan Huygens.

In lunar astronomy, libration is the wagging or wavering of the Moon perceived by Earth-bound observers and caused by changes in their perspective. It permits an observer to see slightly different hemispheres of the surface at different times. It is similar in both cause and effect to the changes in the Moon's apparent size due to changes in distance. It is caused by three mechanisms detailed below, two of which cause a relatively tiny physical libration via tidal forces exerted by the Earth. Suc...

The rest of the system is pretty nice, too. There is a frigid superjupiter and a Venus type first planet with a very close moon similar to Mercury. Both glow red because they are very close to their star.

This was going to be the post about Phobos, but for some reason the picture of Mars as seen from Phobos is a lot prettier than the moon itself.

sigh

Well, another time then.

Here is Mars looking awesome:

All three planets circle an M-Dwarf Star. Second screenshot has labels so you can see which planet is which. This systems is important to these scientists because it will allow them to study with other telescopes how three planets so close to one another affect each other.

Standing on the dayside of L 98-59b, looking up at the Star L 98-59. Second screenshot standing just between daylight and night on L 98-59b looking as the Star L 98-59 rises over the horizon. Last screensot is looking up from the same spot at L 98-59d during the night-time.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star. The planet, called L 98-59b, marks the tiniest discovered by TESS to date.

Anyone who knows something about exponents knows that $e^2688$ is a huge number. This means that the fuel mass requirements for an engine with an isp of 900 (I used a theoretical number for a nuclear thermal engine) for a craft constantly accelerating at 1G for 4 weeks is astronomical (pun slightly intended).

So, would fission, fusion or ion engines be better, and which would be able to produce the thrust needed for 1G of constant acceleration for 4 weeks? Also, would these engines' fuel mass requirements be calculated with the rocket equation?

The engine needs to be able to produce 1 g for four weeks (equivalent to 23,732,352 m/s of delta-v, which is an insane amount I might add but one I will nevertheless consider). This does not mean that the general rocket equation applies; since the 1 g will be maintained for the full four weeks, as fuel is expelled, the engine must throttle down in order to keep 1 g from turning into 1.5, 2, or 10 g and accidentally turn the payload into space.

The engine needs to be accessible in under 80 years ideally, meaning that we can't use such outlandish technology such as antimatter propulsion or enormous mirror-focused lasers produced by reflecting all the light of a star onto solar sails. Things like nuclear pulse propulsion and fusion propulsion (given the recent advances in fusion and the fact that most technology we know today was invented in the last century or so) are on the table.

Lastly, although this wasn't originally stated, we may add that the engine has to actually have a high enough efficiency to get the 23,732 km/s dv with a reasonable amount of fuel. Nobody likes an engine whose fuel tanks' volumes are measured in cubic lightyears.

As you calculated in your question, an NTR engine isn't going to work. With specific impulses capping out around 900 seconds in modern times, an improvement of a couple hundred seconds that we can expect to get out of the tech isn't going to change the fact that they're not efficient enough for our purposes.

Nuclear pulse propulsion is a mechanism by which you use controlled runaway nuclear reactions to expel the fissile material from your ship at extremely high speeds (detonating nukes behind your ship to push you forward), giving a very high exhaust velocity of up to 31 km/s and therefore a specific impulse of around 3160 s. This is definitely not a huge improvement over 900 due to the tyranny of the rocket equation, but it's an improvement nonetheless. Still, according to the rearranged rocket equation you kindly provided, the fuel mass you'd have to carry with you exceeds 9 * 10^307, which is where my calculator just calls it infinity. That value is around 250 orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the Universe, so good luck getting enough fuel for that. Plus, that's just to burn the whole way; keeping a 1 g acceleration will be even harder since most burns start very low-g and only become high-g towards the end. Plus, you can't throttle them - did I mention that? Nukes don't have a "detonation strength" dial. Either you are planning out your journey start to finish and marking nukes so that they always produce the correct amount of thrust, or you're going to have issues.

Let's consider some weird ideal engine that expels propellant at the speed of light. Or maybe just 1 cm/s slower, so that we don't make the relativists angry. This engine will have a specific impulse of almost 3,000,000,000 seconds. And, according to the rearranged rocket equation, it actually works (so this is possible)! And with only 9 tons of fuel.

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