All you need is a half decent port of dosbox, and of course a copy of that beloved game 😉

Like Brian said you can do it for iPhone but only if you jail-break the device.

P.S. the phone was a Desire HD, I over-clocked it by 500 Mhz too for some extra cycles in dosbox 😉

It's incredible what phones can do these days, although my old Nokia 3310 I think, would not do so well trying to run Frontier 😆 😆

Really good frame rates there s2odan, although watch out for micrometeoroid impacts on your landing gear! 😉

OK, here's a pair of Hohmann transfers for you all to enjoy. There won't be a test. If anybody wants the maths explaining to them, I'm happy to give it a go. You might get more from this video in high res mode, so that you can see the numbers.

The frame rate's too high; my lack of computing power meant that a third of the frames were dropped completely.

Here I am showing off some Hohmann orbital transfers from the rings of Fomalhaut a to the asteroid Fomalhaut a 1, and back. I'm rather sloppy in my measurements, and I have to correct a bit, but nevertheless it's good fun.

And this video aptly demonstrates why a Newtonian flight model with gravitational effects is essential in a space sim. Great flying again Brianetta 🙂

Some may wonder, why bother with orbital transfers? You have infinite fuel and powerful thrusters to automatically correct your course.

My answer? Because you can! 😉

Just an experiment to see whether pointing a camera at the screen could overcome my computer's inability to run Pioneer and record to video at the same time,

Answer's no: it looks terrible.

...and the equally ugly follow-up:

Thought I'd try glc, which is supposedly Linux's answer to fraps. Not bad, but hangs a lot. Despite the hanging and freezing, though, I managed to fly around the city without hitting anything.

Thanks, robn, for introducing me to RecordMyDesktop, which is brilliant.

Here's something cool - an unpowered descent from low Venus orbit to the surface, to a safe (if rather battered) rough landing. It's something I've done many times now, and I thought I'd share.

Props to s20dan who first clued me in that this was possible.

That is cool! Didn't know you could do that, makes me wonder where else it might be possible out there now?

Reminds me of finding you could auto-gyro land the helicopter in Armour-Geddon (amiga game) after the engine had been shot out 😀

Inspired by all these YouTube videos going up I finally got around to recording a combat session. Ended up with one of my fastest kills.

fluffyfreak: I also have a video of an unpowered landing onto the surface of Saturn. I can upload it if people are curious.

Ziusudra: You're better than me. I just fire both missiles and run.

Saturn? Isn't that a bit odd? I know it does have a solid core, but that it has oceans of liquidified (by pressure) gas above it.

is the solid core very small and the atmosphere very very very far above it's surface or is it quite close? I am curious now!

Ah, you're thinking of Saturn as it appears in popular fiction and scientific journals. If you go there for real, in your Eagle, you'll find that it has a solid surface and that the surface pressure is bearable.

By popular request: SATURN!

Unpowered landing from orbit is officially the first extreme sport to exist in the Pioneer universe.

This does look fun, or at least until someone introduces "crush depths" 🙂

That's had a large amount of in-depth discussion on IRC tonight, believe me. (-:

Really? I must have a look at some point at the IRC. Thinking about crush depths reminded of some TV programme. Now what was it? Oh, I remember it was this!

I used a similar trick in Frontier to offload a bunch of angry Police Vipers who took offence to me in my humble little Sidewinder just because of a slight mishap with my laser on take off 😳 . Thank goodness I had fuel scoops as I had forgot to buy any hydrogen! 😆

No no no, that's baiting s2odan into rewriting the terrain render again 😆

Nice work though, we'll have to start a log of planets where people have tried / managed / thought-it'd-work-but-failed-spectacularly 😀

😆 I think we would need another new forum just to host that many! 😆

WTF you can land on Saturn? Are there any other landable gas giants?

All of them. Technically, it's a bug.

Weird...does this mean stars are landable? Brown dwarves, etc?

It would probably be easy to make it possible, but the code doesn't check for landing on anything it considers a star. Really, it only checks for things it considers as planets, which includes everything from gas giants down to asteroids. Landing on gas giants will go away after we figure out what to do instead. Maybe a deeper atmosphere where the pressure crushes you when you get too deep.

No; you'll simply collide with their surfaces.

I've been trying over and over again to land on a small star and the gravity just keeps owning me anyway. Now I can cease my efforts.