fly realistic spaceships, doing orbital maneuvers, trans-planetary injections, docking etc.

take pictures

Looks pretty! It's just fun to mess with.

Originally posted by singularity:

fly realistic spaceships, doing orbital maneuvers, trans-planetary injections, docking etc.

How do you do this? Thanks

I use mods like ISV Venture Star or Endurance. And try to perform maneuvers using experience from Orbiter sim. Too bad we cant for now use any aoutopilots for this.

Originally posted by singularity:

I use mods like ISV Venture Star or Endurance. And try to perform maneuvers using experience from Orbiter sim. Too bad we cant for now use any aoutopilots for this.

I remember Orbiter sim :)

Exploring mainly! Its a chill sim that i get on every now and then. Unlike other software, there's no combat, no missions, no story, or other types of things to do in the software like main space games. This software is focused specifically on exploration, which is the reason why i have over nearly 200 hours worth of playtime.

It's also fun to take pictures of planets, stars, and galaxies.

I remember Orbiter sim :)

I just wish we could have same functionalities in this sim too.

I remember Space Simulator. Learned so much about orbital transfers, burns, going from elliptical orbits to circular or anything else i wanted to do. It was exciting to speed up or slow down your orbit at key points, needing to point in key directions, to make it all happen.

Originally posted by Basil III:

I remember Space Simulator. Learned so much about orbital transfers, burns, going from elliptical orbits to circular or anything else i wanted to do. It was exciting to speed up or slow down your orbit at key points, needing to point in key directions, to make it all happen.

In a way, I think that to truly _feel_ space one need to understand how to travel through it.

Flying spaceships, count +1!
Also great thanks to the Orbiter sim, and more

Orbital mechanics and relative ship motion are quite decent and playable. Just with maneuver visualization, hopefully in more precise flavour, though it's for the dev tea to decide on, would boost the enjoyment quite a lot already. When playing, we often imagine orbits and transfers and stuff, rather than figure out MFD numbers, maneuver nodes is what we use to draw these imaginations within game.

Originally posted by Illuminum:

How do you do this? Thanks

First step is to get theory — read wiki, watch YouTube, look for Orbital motion basics or something like that. Starting idea is that an orbit is essentially an ellipse around the orbited body, that you can reorient in some ways, including ship thrust. Useful terms are Periapsis, Apoapsis, Eccentricity, Inclination, Mean anomaly, Orbital period, and then more yet. Then, an orbit between orbits is also an orbit — that's Hohmann transfer. Learn of it, it will also hint at that there are energy-efficient ways to change orbits. Pages from now on would hopefully have more curious hints to find and learn about.

Next step is to go practice and experiment with this info. Try out orbits. Get close to some cool planet, select and press Ctrl+F, or the keybidnd you set to follow the object. You can then spawn in a ship without it being left behind, click it to select, then press 4 to control. Visit keybindings for control, WASD + mouse and joystick are supported. You will need to accelerate it to have a proper orbit, take notice of what thrust directions affect it and how.

Practice achieving orbits, changing orbits. Transfers between ships in orbit and between celestial objects. There's keybinds to select reference body and target, first for own ship relative orbit visualization, target is for relative data. From then, escape velocities and more "eyeball-ey" transfers are worth trying.

Next the warp. Endgame, so to say, of current Space Engine sim is mastering the warp drive.

Warp drive is not Jump drive nor Hyperdrive.
It doesn't teleport your ship. It doesn't shift your ship onto rails in subspace. It lets the ship travel the whole trajectory faster, that's it. So to navigate at warp, you have to learn how to control this trajectory.
There is a warp jump though — an uncontrolled warp acceleration-deceleration.

The base rule is simple: Current around-star orbit vector * warp factor.
That's it. A modified orbit. Note that ship orientation affects warp factor through stability, observe by setting flight HUD to "Warp".

No idea as to why the orbit vector selects the direction of travel instead of the ship itself. There field itself is also relative, it's a shifting bubble, so it's us, the ship, that has to select where the bubble goes, arrrr! Point is, it's still playable enough, "Warp" mode for HUD shows relevant data and separate pink vector for warp drive. That's where the ship would go.

The game then, is to fly the ship like it's in orbit, except you have the control of immediate orbital speed, and can crank it up to superluminal. You can now aim this vector to somewhere, to travel there. Aim and use the dedicated throttle axis for warp to increase the factor. You can alter your ship's trajectory with thrusters while at warp, expect that at high factors the change would be unnoticeable. Just with regular orbits, Zoom axis is your friend, use it like a telescope to zoom. You can see where youwould go closer, notice difference from farther, the farther away you do the trajectory change — the better. It adds up over the travel time.

Is warp affected by gravity? Definitely. It's where the fun part comes.

Single central celestials, and one barycenter, all are static for the game. Everything orbiting them isn't. Expect differenes in relative velocity you'd need to correct. Expect corrections also for planets moving while you move. Gradually decrease warp factor while looking at estimated arrival time, keep it higher than 10 or more. Better safe than overshooting.

Cooler yet, if you get the hang of how orbits work, you can use gravity itself to your advantage.

Main thing is the entry/exit velocity.

Orbiting a planet that is also in orbit gives you quite some orbital velocity relative to a star. But same is for destination as well. This makes there be some perfect destination point at your destination celestial, that has the correct orbit already. In In-game object wiki you can read relevant parameters like orbital and escape velocity, for source and destination, and conclude roughly where you'd need to arrive at. You choose the timing for your orbit to be within orbital velocity v1 and escape velocity v2, then your approach direction determines inclination and ecentricity. Correct as needed.

Trick #1 – Gas giant gateways:
With their spheres of influence being just as large as their masses, gas giants give a lot of margin for an interstellar approach. They turn otherwise hyperbolic orbits into nice ellipses, just pay attention to your out-of warp velocities on said approach as you do with smaller planets. Don't even need to get in their low orbit sometimes — some of them can send you retrograde around a star, iirc.

Trick #2 – Solar system gateways
Cooler option. Become ʻOumuamua. For this, note that most often your departure and destination celestials would not be coplanar — not in same orbital plane. You can, of course, spend so much time and fuel to perform a correction, there are timewarp keybinds after all. Cooler option is to fly by two extra stars to make plane and speed corrections simultaneously!:

Begin with prep. Can do in Spectator, but if not, use Map, which is similar. Can also use object browser and look around. Turn on orbits on HUD. Pick carefully (will be hard currently, reasons are in UI design) a nearby star, conveniently enough in same plane as destination celestial's orbit. Do same for departure celestial, this time you pick the closest one to both ship and its warp vector.

Now, for warp travel, on approach to each gateway star, you pick the direction you approach from, so that you get a close elliptical orbit in same plane with next destination. Warp to gate star 1 to be coplanar with gate star 2, warp to gate star 2 to be coplanar with destination celestial.

This approach can quite literally save you up to 100% of onboard propellant, if it was tracked. Can't say the same about energy, but still. Having more than two gateway stars definitely works, and so does decreasing warp to low instead of completely shutting it down.

These tricks take practice. Hope they capture some curiosity for the sim part of Space Engine.

Originally posted by Random_Passerby:

Main thing is the entry/exit velocity.

Orbiting a planet that is also in orbit gives you quite some orbital velocity relative to a star. But same is for destination as well. This makes there be some perfect destination point at your destination celestial, that has the correct orbit already. In In-game object wiki you can read relevant parameters like orbital and escape velocity, for source and destination, and conclude roughly where you'd need to arrive at. You choose the timing for your orbit to be within orbital velocity v1 and escape velocity v2, then your approach direction determines inclination and ecentricity. Correct as needed.

Trick #1 – Gas giant gateways:
With their spheres of influence being just as large as their masses, gas giants give a lot of margin for an interstellar approach. They turn otherwise hyperbolic orbits into nice ellipses, just pay attention to your out-of warp velocities on said approach as you do with smaller planets. Don't even need to get in their low orbit sometimes — some of them can send you retrograde around a star, iirc.

Trick #2 – Solar system gateways
Cooler option. Become ʻOumuamua. For this, note that most often your departure and destination celestials would not be coplanar — not in same orbital plane. You can, of course, spend so much time and fuel to perform a correction, there are timewarp keybinds after all. Cooler option is to fly by two extra stars to make plane and speed corrections simultaneously!:

Begin with prep. Can do in Spectator, but if not, use Map, which is similar. Can also use object browser and look around. Turn on orbits on HUD. Pick carefully (will be hard currently, reasons are in UI design) a nearby star, conveniently enough in same plane as destination celestial's orbit. Do same for departure celestial, this time you pick the closest one to both ship and its warp vector.

Now, for warp travel, on approach to each gateway star, you pick the direction you approach from, so that you get a close elliptical orbit in same plane with next destination. Warp to gate star 1 to be coplanar with gate star 2, warp to gate star 2 to be coplanar with destination celestial.

This approach can quite literally save you up to 100% of onboard propellant, if it was tracked. Can't say the same about energy, but still. Having more than two gateway stars definitely works, and so does decreasing warp to low instead of completely shutting it down.

These tricks take practice. Hope they capture some curiosity for the sim part of Space Engine.

Perhaps you should make a guide lol

I really am tired from those "eyeballing" maneuvers, lol. I just want to plan end execute)