Sun

Sun
Base Data
Radius	34785000.0 meters
Gravity	274.0 m/s2
Timewarp Height	500000.0 meters
Color	G2V type star
Atmospheric Data
Atmospheric height	500 kilometers
Curve	13
Upper atmosphere	150 km
Orbit Data
SOI radius	Unknown, possibly infinite

The Sun is the star which Earth and all the planets in the solar system orbit. In-game, the Sun has five celestial bodies orbiting it, also known as the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter.

The real-life Sun is an energy source for spacecraft using solar panels. The energy from the sun is absorbed by the solar panel, which generates power for the spacecraft. This doesn't happen in-game as its electric system is disabled.

When near the sun, there is an extremely bright light that makes the spacecraft difficult to identify.

The sphere of influence of the Sun is infinite, which indicates it is currently impossible to escape the Sun's gravitational influence. It is possible to reach escape velocity, but bugs mentioned below may occur.

Atmosphere

A rocket close to the sun

The Sun's atmosphere, or corona, is visible when zooming out from physics view, even when you're far away from it. It extends up to around 800,000 kilometers; the "true" atmosphere starts at 300 km above the surface. It is dense like the Earth's atmosphere.

Getting too close to the sun can make the rocket melt in a fraction of a second, as shown to the picture on the left.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe, launched back in 2018, managed to "touch" the Sun back in late 2021.

Solar system

The Spaceflight Simulator solar system

The Sun has 5 bodies orbiting it in-game, called Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter. But in real life, the Sun also has hundreds of thousands of asteroids, meteoroids, comets, as well as space probes orbiting it all the time.

Jupiter is the largest, while Mercury is the smallest. Earth, Mars and Jupiter have moons, while Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter have atmospheres of their own. Europa has its "atmosphere", but it is only a texture as it doesn't have any physical properties.

Terrain

The sun has no solid surface, so rockets would sink down to the inner layers of the sun (if you somehow found a way to land on the sun without melting). When a rocket tries to touch the sun (even the outer layers of its corona), the rocket will, and certainly will melt. The same behavior is shared by Jupiter.

Bugs

• If a rocket travels more than 1.78E+310 meters away from the Sun, it will hit an invisible wall that pushes your rocket back every frame. If the rocket is traveling fast enough to get past that wall the game crashes. This happens due to the 64-bit double variable's value (which is used by the game to determine a rocket's position) limitations.
• It is possible for a rocket to get stuck inside the Sun.
• If your rocket flies into the Sun at extreme speeds, it may teleport it to nowhere, or the core of the Sun.

Trivia

• It is the only star in Spaceflight Simulator, making interstellar missions impossible.
• The Sun can be commonly known to scientists as Sol.
• The Sun can emit solar flares.
• The bodies that orbit the sun are the 8 planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune), asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, space probes and all sorts of space debris, either natural or artificial.
• In the game, the sun's atmosphere has the same density as the earth's atmosphere does. But in real life, it is much, much thinner.
• The sun has a plasma surface. It is located in the upper layers of the photosphere, or the sun's outer shell from which light is radiated.
• In about six billion years, the Sun will become a red giant, swallowing Mercury, Venus, and Earth whole.
• The temperature of the sun's surface is 5777 kelvin (about the temperature of Earth's core); but in the Sun's core, they reach into a sweltering 15 million kelvin.
• Light from the sun cannot reach an object beyond 1200 astronomical units.
• By setting the Sun's gravity to billions of m/s², falling into the sun will slingshot you into a trajectory leaving the sun but the height says “Escape”