> If you're looking to teach physics and astronomics, Kerbal Space Project does that quite well, even though it also ignores relativity and speed of light considerations.

KSP "only" has a sphere of influence model. That's why there aren't any Lagrange points anywhere in the solar system.

Also relativity and speed of light are pretty unnecessary in a chemical-rocketry simulator.

Slight correction but Elite: Dangerous has the capability to do better flight mechanics.[1]

The game is often quite boring, but I joke with people that it makes an amazing space station docking simulator. I actually can't wait to try that with an Oculus.

[1]http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/224726/does-elite-...

Only in the barest sense, sadly: "Each ship has a top speed, this can be increased with better thrusters and power distribution, but they still cap out whether you have flight assist on or off."

I was pretty disappointed about this. The predecessor games to Elite Dangerous, Frontier and Frontier First Encounters, had a Newtonian flight model (and an optional "time acceleration" feature to artificially shorten intra-system flight time).

Rogue System looks promising as a semi-realistic combat space sim: http://imagespaceinc.com/rogsys/

Pioneer also exists as an open source Frontier remake, with the same sort of flight model and universe: http://pioneerspacesim.net/

Same, it's why i retracted my original backing. I do understand the issue they faced, since they wanted to make a multiplayer game. But they sacrificed their original fanbase on the throne of that.

realistic physics is mega boring in space games. The first elite was much more fun with arcade physics. Frontier combat was rubbish, you just yoyo'ed past each other with 5 seconds of shooting between oscillations. That's with a human pilot driving.

Realistically a space battle would be, does the evader want to evade and has more thrust? => they evade, else, the attacker approaches and both get to shoot until one is dead. There would be no real combat other than weapon size and armour plating. I don't think there would be space dogfights as the onboard computers would just be able to track each other too accurately / apply optimal game theoretic evasions given the constraints. Boring ... might as well play spreadsheets.

They are boring when the player's tools and gameplay are not adapted to a situation involving relativistic distances. In space warfare sensors, delay of signal reception, interpretation of sensor input, projection of positioning both human-based and automatic, as well as weaponry built and programmable to relate to all of these things become much more important than:

See, point, shoot.

You're assuming the goal is to teach astrophysics, rather than astronomy. If we're just trying to teach the space equivalent of geography, the physics and plot don't matter so much as the physical locations and nomenclature.

Astronomy is the study of the laws of stars, not of their names, regardless of how close "nomy" sounds to "name".

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy

Additionally Sagan was most certainly conflating it with astrophysics, as is commonly done, and evidenced by his mention of "stellar evolutionary events".

That's barely even astronomy. At the university level, astronomy coursework is basically math.

Category of "murder/capitalism" is an interesting one. Do you think that the people who wrote Elite, for example, were so steeped in the values of colonialism or piracy that they were oblivious to the murder/capitalism subtext? If not, it must be human nature, I suppose.

Not so much that he (he's made several games like that) is oblivious to it, but more that it's the most easy thing to simulate in games, and also what people expect. You can do better, as games like Untertale or KSP demonstrate. But it takes a special kind of person.

There was an old 8-bit game called The Halley Project that aimed to teach you constellations by having you navigate through the solar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Halley_Project

I think it wouldn't hurt to use actual stars and such in these games, if only to give people a sense of our astral "neighborhood".

I don't know if it would make for good gameplay though.

In my game (https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard) I consulted star maps of nearby regions of the galaxy (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/starmaps/mapindex.php) and placed systems accurately.

However, I felt that using their astronomical names/numbers would be unrealistic--if these stars ever ended up being colonized, they would be given colloquial names, so I made up my own names for most of them.

Independence War 2 - the best space simulator I have ever played