The air is thick enough that using a rocket to decelerate (like the NASA moon lander) is impractical because a rocket plume is unstable at the airspeeds involved.
However, the air is also too thin to rely on aerodynamic drag effects to slow down a heavy spacecraft (as in the space shuttle...
I'm not really worried about how I will eventually implement the camera view... my concept of it right now is to simply attach the camera to a physics object that is translating/rotating through the world's coordinate system (or anywhere else). I've done this in the past and probably would do it...
I am just playing around with physics simulation in c++... and my latest obsession is simulating rigid body motion (specifically rotation) with no external torque, for now. The equations of motion in question are the 'Euler equations' which relate the angular acceleration (omega-dot) around any...