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Solar system simulator

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Last post

Fri, 2012-11-09 09:05

Revinor

Solar system simulator

This is in no way critical, but I'm playing with idea of using real planet positions/calendar for the game, instead of relying on averages. Do you know any solar system simulator/visualizer which would produce the distance tables between various planets for any date in future? I have found quite a few producing pretty bad diagrams, or nice not-to-scale planet visualizations, but nothing giving straight AU/km distances between the points in space. Ideal version would include table with distances, linear and logarithmic distance renders of orbits and be runnable on tablet ;), but I'm glad to find anything less as long as it is usable.

Fri, 2012-11-09 12:30

Limited Reagent Limited Reagent's picture

My group is full of science

My group is full of science geeks so we also are really into using real distances for our game. I use wolfram alpha. If you type in, for example, "distance from titan to mars november 9 2312" it gives you the distance -- 11.55 AU. If you replace "distance" with "light minutes" it gives you how long it takes light (96.05 minutes in this case) which is handy for farcasting and communication lag. You could probably get it to produce tables and visualizations if you delved into the syntax more. I also sometimes like to use this site: http://www.faustweb.net/solaris/ for a rough visual.

Sat, 2012-11-10 14:56

OneTrikPony OneTrikPony's picture

this is a good online

this is a good online orrery http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar I like 2119 cause jupiter is comming up on saturn which should make things stressfull about every 11 years. :)

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Mea Culpa: My mode of speech can make others feel uninvited to argue or participate. This is the EXACT opposite of what I intend when I post.

Tue, 2012-12-11 19:37

KevinWI

Bumping this one!

Bumping this one! Thanks to Limited Reagent for suggesting Wolfram Alpha. It's really amazing. It even works from moons to planets, like "Ganymede to Mars" but, it seems to have a problem with moon to moon! For example, "Io to Ganymede" won't work. Because Wolfram Alpha has gotten me on a kick of using real life distances, is there any workaround to this, or something tool I can use?

Tue, 2013-01-08 07:27

Revinor

Nice porkchop plot generator

Not sure if it was already pointed in other threads, but I have found usable porkchop plot generator. http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=6889&page=6 It allows importing custom asteroids/planets, but I think it won't work for moons/Lagrange points - just for things orbiting the Sun. You might need to install ocx library from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896559 to get it working. There is even a way to output the route to Orbiter TransX, if somebody is into user unfriendly open source symulators...