Sort of. KSP teaches you rocket building and how precious fuel is. You need to invest a lot of time to get to the stage where you transfer between planets. You also can't just pick up the resident star, give it a whack, and see what happens to the solar system (because it's all two-body mechanics).
That's what I wanted to learn about: orbital mechanics, but as a game. I could not find anything online so I built it myself. The UX is bad, I've been meaning to improve it but you know how it goes. Apologies in advance if the interface is beyond comprehension: it's not you, it's me.
Use arrow keys to control the space craft that looks oddly similar to the letter "A". You're orbiting Earth (denoted with E) and there is also the international space station roaming around, as well as the moon if you scroll to zoom out.
Try getting near the ISS or even the moon! It's tricky if you're doing this for the first time.
For me, this really helped to get a feel for orbital mechanics. I never played KSP more than a few minutes on a friend's PC, but based on Juno:NewOrigins (simplerockets2) being rather similar, I don't really enjoy the engine building aspect or the aspect of constantly being out of fuel. It's more realistic obviously, but spacecraft design wasn't my goal. I wanted to understand how things in orbits affect each other and this lets you do that.
You can also take control of the earth in the "bodies" menu. Set engine thrust to some giganewtons or whatever and fly the earth to a new place :). Or try some of the scenarios in the menu. Also note the simulation speed on the top left, otherwise getting to e.g. the moon takes a while.
That's what I wanted to learn about: orbital mechanics, but as a game. I could not find anything online so I built it myself. The UX is bad, I've been meaning to improve it but you know how it goes. Apologies in advance if the interface is beyond comprehension: it's not you, it's me.
Default 3-body demo: https://lucgommans.nl/p/badgravity/
Earth orbit: https://lucgommans.nl/p/badgravity/#b64params=eyJ0aW1lcGVyc3...
Use arrow keys to control the space craft that looks oddly similar to the letter "A". You're orbiting Earth (denoted with E) and there is also the international space station roaming around, as well as the moon if you scroll to zoom out.
Try getting near the ISS or even the moon! It's tricky if you're doing this for the first time.
For me, this really helped to get a feel for orbital mechanics. I never played KSP more than a few minutes on a friend's PC, but based on Juno:NewOrigins (simplerockets2) being rather similar, I don't really enjoy the engine building aspect or the aspect of constantly being out of fuel. It's more realistic obviously, but spacecraft design wasn't my goal. I wanted to understand how things in orbits affect each other and this lets you do that.
You can also take control of the earth in the "bodies" menu. Set engine thrust to some giganewtons or whatever and fly the earth to a new place :). Or try some of the scenarios in the menu. Also note the simulation speed on the top left, otherwise getting to e.g. the moon takes a while.