Uploaded December 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

---

Update: V 2.0 (Added Gameplay)
Name: Space Travel
Developer: Ken Thompson
Year: 1969
Simulation Available. 1 player.
Platform: GE 635
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The game itself was a simulation of the solar system to scale, with the true (scaled) orbit sizes and masses of the planets and most of the moons. However, it wasn't a general numerical simulation; instead, the bodies ran on circular tracks at scaled speed in a plane.
All the bodies had gravity, but they acted only on the rocket ship, and only the locally strongest-attracting body acted on the ship. In the simulation, the internal origin for the coordinate system of the computation was at the center of this strongest attractor. This was important for keeping some vague numerical stability in the calculations (with at best single-precision, software floating-point), but did lead to some anomalies.
For controls, there were several buttons: jet forward, jet back, turn left, turn right; go up, scale on the display, go downscale. The acceleration of the ship was fixed, but it scaled with the display scale--it was thus fixed in terms of pixels/sec/sec. Normally the ship was in the center of the screen and always pointed up; the display showed the plan view of the solar system so that the "rotate" controls rotated the solar system around you on the display.
No relativity; scale up enough and you travel to Pluto in a few seconds. But don't scale up too much, or you might not find the Solar System again without restarting.
The object of the game was simply to fly around, get into orbits, and land. "Land" meant to cross the surface with a small enough speed.
Playing with orbits was fun; how you accelerate to change the size of the orbit and circularize it isn't very intuitive. One of the variations was to change the display coordinate system so that it rotated with the nearest body. I.e., if you were orbiting Mercury, the ship and Mercury would always lie on a horizontal line. It was also amusing to crank up the gravity (really, change the timescale) so that landing was just barely possible
_________________________________________________________________________
Comment: UNIX application, game that spurred the development of the Unix operating system
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As always you can play and download the C: version of the game here:
github.com/mohd-akram/st?tab=readme-ov-file
you can play an online version here:
https://akr.am/st
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More info here:
bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/spacetravel.html

Song:
California Wind - Bruno E..mp3