There are some orbital mechanics problems. You can't "steer" in orbit. Shoving down at any sane rate results in going up half an orbit later. The best place to blow it up would be in front of it. A couple hundred m/s is all it takes in some cases.
There's a free windows only game called Orbiter under continuous (ish) development since early 2000s. Its informative about the weird truths of orbital dynamics. Several years ago I went thru a phase of flying between Jupiters moons for fun.
There's probably a startup idea in creating what amounts to a E6B for orbital mechanics. The problem is making it elegant and easy to use. Anybody can open matlab/octave/mathematica/whatever and say "just enter a bunch of equations". I'm not sure the MFDs in orbiter are the wave of the future either. And its easy to get sucked into the trap of making it too simple for the .edu market such that it can't actually simulate anything. Its a hard problem. Maybe more for a PHD project because I'm mystified how to monetize.
There's a free windows only game called Orbiter under continuous (ish) development since early 2000s. Its informative about the weird truths of orbital dynamics. Several years ago I went thru a phase of flying between Jupiters moons for fun.
There's probably a startup idea in creating what amounts to a E6B for orbital mechanics. The problem is making it elegant and easy to use. Anybody can open matlab/octave/mathematica/whatever and say "just enter a bunch of equations". I'm not sure the MFDs in orbiter are the wave of the future either. And its easy to get sucked into the trap of making it too simple for the .edu market such that it can't actually simulate anything. Its a hard problem. Maybe more for a PHD project because I'm mystified how to monetize.