Two things - asteroid belt and gravity

[Amoeba]

First of all, hi, new here.

One thing that surprised me was there was very little - if any - information on the asteroid belt regarding Celestia, not even any questions on the forum asking why we don't have one in Celestia. Is it because the asteroid belt is not visible in reality? Or are there other reasons. I couldn't find an addon that provides it. I'd imagine giving the sun a ring would make it look too smooth

Also, gravitational effects. I know there is an addon that gives the observer effects related with gravity. I'm just wondering, would gravitational effects on all objects be too much strain on computer resources - even on powerful computers? I have a fictional solar system and I don't know how to simulate the effects of gravity each of the objects would have on one another, since Celestia doesn't do it automatically, and I'm not too smart about these things.

[Hungry4info]

There are thousands of catalogued asteroids in the asteroid belt. One needs to determine how many asteroids to include in the default downloaded version of Celestia. Just the important ones? Or thousands of them down to a certain radius? If you do the later, you inflate the size of the download, perhaps needlessly.

But this is what add-ons are for. Some here have produced scripts that will make as many asteroids as you want (from real asteroid orbits). I used to have thousands of asteroids in my version of Celestia. Darned thing took 10 minutes to read the .ssc file.

There's a script to simulate the gravitational influence of massive bodies in Celestia on the motherlode (www.celestiamotherlode.net). It's an old script, I would be surprised if it still works. You might consider using a programme like Gravity Simulator, which you can download for free. It does not render things as aesthetically pleasing as Celestia does, however.

[Fenerit]

First of all, hi, new here.

One thing that surprised me was there was very little - if any - information on the asteroid belt regarding Celestia, not even any questions on the forum asking why we don't have one in Celestia. Is it because the asteroid belt is not visible in reality? Or are there other reasons. I couldn't find an addon that provides it. I'd imagine giving the sun a ring would make it look too smooth
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Asteroid belt is shipped within LUATOOLS Celestia's utility

http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=13162
Note: read deeply that thread since there are several improved versions of the LUATOOLS. If you don't like the LUATOOLS, the asteroid belt anyhow can be separed from and set as usually add-ons did. Such asteroid belt is made by 3D CMOD points model and doesn't place lots of asteroids meshes through SSC directives.