Celestia Forums

Hi, I'm making a copy of the Solar System, to put into orbit around and re-aligned with Delta Trianguli (for personal enjoyment).

I don't know if Celestia versions before 1.6.0 have this ability, but I managed to get all the primary objects' orbits to align with Delta Tri's local ecliptic, while preserving the CustomOrbit and CustomRotation declarations at the same time (therefore eliminating the time-consuming need to manually uncomment all of the EllipticalOrbit definitions and rotation properties), using the following Reference Frame:



A side effect of this is that everything with this Reference Frame will rotate with the system's barycenter, so to compensate, I added this to the barycenter definition in the system's STC file:



Which basically aligns the barycenter (and everything locked to it with the Reference Frame I presented above) to the orbital plane of the stars.

While just about everything in the Solar System aligns neatly, after deleting the unneeded reference frames, I'm having trouble getting Pluto and its moons' orbits to orient properly with respect to the new ecliptic (Delta Tri's ecliptic), to match the real life Pluto system's orientation with respect to our ecliptic, if I'm making any sense.

Can anyone help?

EDIT: I went through the system, and I realized that the Reference Frames in the first code box are not working with the rotational properties of BOTH planets AND moons. While the orbits are correct, the rotational axes are not! My frustrations are through the roof here! Everything I can think of isn't working! Hours and hours with the Pluto system is irritating enough, but jeez....

EDIT 2: Interestingly, Earth and the Moon are the only ones properly aligned using just the code I provided, with the exception of the Reference Frame declarations having been removed from the Moon's definitions.

Ok, fiddling around with it, I managed to get the Pluto system into a proper orientation by typing in this for both Pluto and Charon:



And just the orbit frame for Nix and Hydra.

However, when I tried applying the MeanEquator declaration I used to the BodyFrame of, say, Venus, meaning the code would've been this:



the orientation of the body wound up being locked to the Earth's (Sol) ecliptic instead.

One thing though, with the Reference Frames I had attempted to use as a universal default, which is the one I provided in the OP, I noticed Venus was close to having the proper orientation, being locked to Delta Tri's ecliptic. I looked at solarsys.ssc, and realized Venus' BodyFrame was the EquatorJ2000 frame, meaning it was locked to the Earth's (Sol) equatorial frame, meaning all I need to do is find a way to tilt the Delta Tri Venus' BodyFrame, which is otherwise properly aligned, to match the Delta Tri Earth's new equatorial orientation, although everything I came up with didn't work.

And yes, I'm using Celestia 1.6.1.