Aug 302018
 

For reasons which seem good to me I find myself in need of a good simulator of real-world planetary and stellar orbits ( this solar system along with the likes of Alpha Centauri A&B). “Universe Sandbox” seemed a good choice, so I paid my money, spent an hour trying to figure out hour to download the damn thing (do they just send you a link to a ZIP file with the packaged program? Oh, hell no, you’ve got to download and install “Steam” and sign up for a number of things… bah), and in the end it auto-installs onto the computer that downloads it… in this case, the dinky netbook, not my actual reasonably powerful useful computer. So it’s not only taking up multiple gigabytes of space on a small computer that didn’t have that many gigabytes free in the first place, it don’t run too gud what since it’s not on the best of computers. Sigh.

So, a few questions:

  1. Anybody know how to download Universe Sandbox so that it can be transferred to another computer and run offline?
  2. Anybody know of another program that will do the job of accurately showing me where planets and asteroids will be at such-and-such a date, along with where Alpha Centauri A&B will be with respect to each other at such and such a date? Obviously, something downloadable and transferable to an offline computer.
 Posted by at 6:06 pm