[throwawayben]

surprisingly there is a very similar precedent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiter_(simulator)

something about space fight simulators perhaps

[orbital-decay]

Orbiter itself is very barebones, though. Most of the content is in community addons.

[Suzuran]

And the community addons may as well not exist because nobody bothers to look for them or read the instructions for installing them.

(I may be biased though, I was an Orbiter addon project maintainer for many years)

[T-A]

Maybe not surprising at all. The author open-sourced Orbiter in 2021 [1]. It's MIT [2], so anyone can pick up from where he left off and create a commercial version:

[1] https://www.orbiter-forum.com/threads/orbiter-is-now-open-so...

[2] https://github.com/orbitersim/orbiter/blob/main/LICENSE

[Suzuran]

DocMart hasn't abandoned it, it's still under active development. Open-sourcing it was to get more people involved because he couldn't do everything solo anymore.

[Intralexical]

X-Plane's mostly made by one guy too, isn't it?

The computational modeling of airfoils they do in it always sounded amazing.