> However, some of these were misleading. I had one running for 15 minutes at 5x, and the third body did eventually return.
That's not misleading. Real three-body orbital systems show this same behavior. Consider that such a system must obey energy conservation, so only a few extreme edge cases lose one of its members permanently (not impossible, just unlikely).
Ironically, because computer simulators are based on numerical DE solvers, they sometimes show outcomes that a real orbital system wouldn't/couldn't.
I don’t understand. How would energy not be conserved if one flew away? It’s not in the system, but it’s still out there?
I'm just saying that, because of energy conservation, an escaping member would need to permanently carry away more than 1/3 of the system energy (for equal-mass satellites). This is possible but unlikely.