I’m looking for some sort of program that will tell me what the acceleration due to gravity would be due to a non-spherical object of defined shape and density. Let’s say I have designed in a CAD program… oh, let’s say a teacup, but the size of a world with the density of tungsten. And I want to know what the force of gravity would be at point X,Y, Z.
I’d think this should be available, but I couldn’t find what I’m looking for. It should be fairly straightforward… design something in CAD, and the program chops up the item into a large number of individual chunks, runs the numbers on gravity due to each, then does the vectors sums. This could be done by hand, of course, but it’d be mind-crushingly slow and dull.
Anyone know of such a thing? It would be handy for sci-fi authors who want to know what it would be like for their characters to walk along, say, the tentacle of the Jovian-mass Space Kracken, or some such.