Guide to Special Relativistic Flight Simulators

Guide to Guides to Relativistic Flight Simulator Sites

Possibly the best starting point for non-crank websites is (or used to be - June 2007) Chris Hillman's Relativity on the World Wide Web. There are what appear to be stolen copies of Hillman's page out there, which Google may find for you. Ah well.
David Porthouse provides an excellent set of Relativistic Flight Simulation Links.
If you do 3D computer graphics, maybe you already know that quaternions offer the coolest way to program 3D rotations. Did you know that the best way implement Lorentz transformations is as complex quaternions? Discover this and more amazing mathematics in How to Program Lorentz Transformations on a Computer (version of 11 Feb 2001; gzip'd PostScript, 204K).

Guide to Special Relativistic Flight Simulator Sites

Taking over as the best site is Ute Kraus and Corvin Zahn's Space Time Travel.
John Walker's C-Ship is one of the most clearly written and presented sites, and well worth reading through for the excellent explanations. Sadly, John Walker's movies are wrong in one important way.
One of the best movies, although rather large (4MB), is the UCLA supercomputer group's LA flyover. Note that, as with several other movies, this one lacks colour shifts, presumably in the interests of simplicity and clarity.
Daniel Weiskopf's special relativistic gallery shows several relativistic fly-bys. The one of Saturn is especially nice.
Norbert Dragon and Nicolai Mokros' View of Stonhenge has clear physical descriptions and simple pictures, again without colour shifts.
Andrew Howard's relativistic ray-tracing site has some nice straightforward graphics, once again without colour shifts.
Steve Van Devender's relativistic starflight site has correct if rather primitive graphics.
Antony Searle's BackLight movies are graphically stunning and undoubtedly correct, but the presentation is confusing, and the choice of movies could be improved. One of the better movies (if you have an mpeg player) is the Mercator which however mixes up the relativistic distortion with the fish-eye distortion that comes from the Mercator Projection of the sphere.
Daniel Richard G.'s Light Speed! does a snazzy job. It offers many options you can turn on or off, including colour shifts. Requires OpenGL.
Adam Auton's Warp is an interactive simulator with many options, and a nice tutorial. Requires Windows and OpenGL.

What's Wrong?

By comparing to simulations from other sites, determine what is wrong with John Walker's C-ship movie.

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