I spent a long time playing with the sim. Nice work.

Most of the random data sets that I ran ended up with a two body system, where the third body was flung far into space never to return. However, some of these were misleading. I had one running for 15 minutes at 5x, and the third body did eventually return.

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jgchaos 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It might be fun to add some kind of visualization showing when a body has enough energy to potentially escape the system.

	▲	pylotlight 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Question, can you mathmatically plot a trajectory across time X and energy required to see when it's met and how long it would take given a start position or something? Or is the simulation so complex that you can never project. Oh never mind I see answers to this elsewhere here, cheers.

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lutusp 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> However, some of these were misleading. I had one running for 15 minutes at 5x, and the third body did eventually return.

That's not misleading. Real three-body orbital systems show this same behavior. Consider that such a system must obey energy conservation, so only a few extreme edge cases lose one of its members permanently (not impossible, just unlikely).

Ironically, because computer simulators are based on numerical DE solvers, they sometimes show outcomes that a real orbital system wouldn't/couldn't.

	▲	moi2388 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t understand. How would energy not be conserved if one flew away? It’s not in the system, but it’s still out there?