First Men In The Moon Orbital Mechanics
I was just re-reading -- actually re-listening to a LibriVox reading of -- 'The First Men In The Moon' by H.G.Wells, written in 1900. If you haven't read it, you should.
I had that thought long ago: an original orbital mechanics game based on the gravity-shield described in that story, with the goal of navigating to the moon and other planets.
To summarize, the protagonist builds a spherical craft (made of glass!) containing gravity-shielding shutters. When fully closed, the sphere is unaffected by -- and shields -- gravity. When opened, it is pulled by gravity as normal. By selectively opening some shutters it is possible to use them as 'reverse sails' and be attracted to large objects. On earth, shields on create a gravity shadow straight up, causing a column of weightless air to create a syphon and take off like a cork popping out of a bottle.
It would make an interesting and truly original space navigation game/simulation, I think.
I don't feel particularly smart these days, and my game-framework-foo is a couple of decades out of sync. But I am tempted to sketch it out as a fast 2D game where you zoom around Lunar Lander/Asteroids style except with gravity shields. I think it could be fun even as a simulation with minimal map updates. Heck, I could write it in BASIC on my 65C02 FPGA machine.
I have to think about it some more and probably do nothing.
Jul 04 ยท 4 days ago
1 Comment
๐ undefined ยท Jul 04 at 16:56:
Interesting. Making the game play from asteroids perspective means that the round ship maps to an analog stick nicely: push it in one direction to open shields, push again to close. If an object is small, you could attract it to yourself instead of the opposite (wouldn't work in reality ofc, but who cares?), and make multiple objects hit each other this way. Alternatively, some objects' gravity might be pointed in a different direction, like whirl for example. Black holes are fun too as always
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