I&P 30: February the 30th

#20

@S_TANISH
Congratulations S_Tanish, in the new parlance you accomplished the Botez Gambit.

I found my muse, that had wandered off. Dropping into my local chapter of Star Trek fan club, what did I find but my muse gussied up to be a Ferengi merchant - he was hawking faux Saurian brandy no less.

I'll have to ask @A_0123456 for some lessons. I downloaded one of those cosmos simulators. In 38 seconds I managed to blow up my first planet in an asteroid collision.

@morphyms1817 What is it called?

My Pocket Galaxy, I'm not very patient, but do plan to spend some more time on it.

@A_0123456 Its on my phone, will a decent sim app fit in a cell phone?

@morphyms1817 The best ones are often on the computer but they cost money (Universe Sandbox 2 costs $30 for example). What simulator do you have?

@A_0123456
Its called My Pocket Galaxy, after trying, it seems to be game. I thought it was a sim, $30.00 may be a good investment. I would like to mess around with some dwarf stars and planets, asteroid belts.

@morphyms1817 Universe Sandbox 2 is way better than that (I've had pocket galaxy before). Yes, it costs $30, but that's a really good game for $30. My pocket galaxy doesn't get close to matching. Universe Sandbox 2 has complex climate simulations, including thermal temperature maps, as well as planet maps and elevation, all visible and screenshottable. You can see the impact crater on a planet after an asteroid impact. You can make custom stars and deliberately make custom stats (even change the Sun's luminosity to 100000x now but still keep the Sun's radius and mass the same), or just make realistic stars of preferred size. You can make your own solar system and you can push planets to the extremes (I've broken a planet by changing the specific heat parameter before). Or, you can create a habitable solar system with life on planets (it doesn't simulate life, you can just add vegetation and city lights if you want). You can add magnetic fields to planets (although the effects aren't much other than to stop the solar wind loss). You can expand the Sun to red giant size and terraform gas giant moons.

You can collide galaxies, send black holes and neutron stars through the solar system (but no full radiation effects added yet).
You can change the orbit of a planet, even do a Holman transfer orbit (btw, you'll have to do that manually by changing speeds of the planet. this is useful with binary stars, where planets often start with a very unstable or highly eccentric orbit and you can change that.

It's called universe *sandbox*. You can do whatever you want, as long as you don't make your PC explode.

You can even send suggestions to the development team, which is very active and new versions are released every few months. There was a Universe Sandbox original version, but they moved to this one (Universe Sandbox 2), which they plan to keep going forever.

If you want to understand the power of what you can do, you can see all the simulations of all the different solar systems I've made for people (Strange Solar System imagined simulation, as well as a terraformed moon simulation which you can still see in the Moonrisers team forums).