So what exactly is this ?

[Gunsaremagic]

Yeah you can look at planets in our solar system but is it actually a game ?
But what is the sandbox part what do you do for fun? blow up planets? That would get boring after doing it for a few times i can’t imagine people doing this for hours and hours Is it like kerbal space program maybe ? Or something else? Is it just for educational use?

[pete0714]

It's a simulator. You can certainly blow up planets, or replace the Sun with Betelgeuse or a black hole, or create your own planets or systems, change parameters, physics and chemical makeups. It is educational as well as fun to do basically whatever you want.

[Gunsaremagic]

Originally posted by pete0714:

It's a simulator. You can certainly blow up planets, or replace the Sun with Betelgeuse or a black hole, or create your own planets or systems, change parameters, physics and chemical makeups. It is educational as well as fun to do basically whatever you want.

I guess its not for me then i just cant see myself messing with this for more than an hour smashing space rocks into each other i do love sandbox god games like Feed And Grow Fish/populous/black and white/worldbox/Tidal Tribe but in this one i don't know what i could do for fun in this

[pete0714]

Originally posted by Gunsaremagic:

Originally posted by pete0714:

It's a simulator. You can certainly blow up planets, or replace the Sun with Betelgeuse or a black hole, or create your own planets or systems, change parameters, physics and chemical makeups. It is educational as well as fun to do basically whatever you want.

I guess its not for me then i just cant see myself messing with this for more than an hour smashing space rocks into each other i do love sandbox god games like Feed And Grow Fish/populous/black and white/worldbox/Tidal Tribe but in this one i don't know what i could do for fun in this

So much you can do if it is your interest to do so, but no judgement if that is not your thing. Just know it's a pretty darn good simulator if you ever need one, and the developers are still working on it while humbly calling it an EA game for 7+ years (I think they are well past that level, but they are perfectionists I think).

[Defective Dopamine Pez Dispenser]

The sandbox element stems from the simulation. You can create stars, planets, or other bodies. You can place a star in orbit around a black hole and see what happens as you adjust their mass or composition, generating enormous accretion discs. You can alter the composition of planets and see how they change visually or in diameter. You can try something crazy like putting a black hole next to the solar system and then causing it to explode, just to see what happens. You can watch galaxy collisions. You can create stars larger and more massive than any we know of, then collide them. Etc. etc.

At the end of the day, it's a very user-friendly n-body simulator with some pleasing visual effects (which aren't always accurate, but it's still a game after all) that allows a lot of emergent experimentation. It's still abstract and imprecise enough to to not be entirely realistic (e.g. it doesn't have a super deep chemistry model, doesn't model relativistic effects, etc.) but it's a lot of fun for those who find it enjoyable to mess around with parameters and see what happens as a result.

If what you're asking is whether it has a game layer to it, like the god games you alluded to, or like Kerbal where the goal is to use the orbital mechanics and propulsion etc. to achieve liftoff and then ultimately complete some sort of mission objective, then no. It's a freeform sim. A universe in a toy box for people to play with.