StereoLander
Your basic Mars lander in stereogram animation.
HobbySpace
Java
   StereoLander
 

If you were using a Java-enabled browser, you would see Clark's stereogram maker instead of this paragraph.
Click on button to open the StereoLander program.
 
  Stereolander is a very simple spacecraft landing program (with the gravity set as on Mars) but with the added feature of stereogram animation:  
 
 

In the stereogram you will see an oblong object in the center that represents the spacecraft. The goal of the program is to land it safely on the bottom plane with out breaking it in two.

The velocity must be less than +/-10 units when the altitude reaches 0. You control the rate of fuel consumption. You can add or subtract fuel in increments of 1 and 10 units.

To the left of the spacecraft you will see a horizontal bar whose width is proportional to the amount of fuel remaining.

The fuel rate can be controlled by the buttons or from the keyboard:

  • Uppercase "L" => +10
  • Lowercase "l" => +1
  • Uppercase "K" => -10
  • Lowercase "k" => -1

The landing can be restarted and paused from the buttons or from the keyboard:

  • r => restart
  • p => pause/resume

The craft takes about 12 seconds to fall if no adjustments made to the fuel rate. If it runs noticeably slower on your machine, you can try reducing the width and height of the display window to get some speedup. (Note that newer Java interpreters run faster as a program repeats operations. So run the program at least a couple of times before adjusting the display size.)