Colonised Moon... and a pesky Meridian

[eburacum45]

Hi...

For illustration purposes I have used the moonhi texture (created by Jens) to show the positions of various colonies on the moon in the year 300 After Tranquillity (300 AT);

It is shown here at the bottom of the page...
http://www.siderealgames.com/cgi-bin/Bl ... 1067601941

the trouble is, when I view the moon in the Celestia program it has a prominent meridian line at zero longitude...
I have had to paint it out in this image.
is there any way of getting rid of this?

[Guest]

I apologise for the rough quality of this image, but I am opsting it to show the meridian line I keep getting;
it is definitely not the texture, as the join is at 180 degrees from this location.


as well as this, specular reflection and bumpmaps don't work for me yet;
however I am having great fun with the program; and hopefully things will improve as I get more used to it.

[Guest]

Oh by the way the line on the right of the picture is the meridian; the line on the bottom of the picture is the Equatorial Mass Driver, and is supposed to be there.

[eburacum45]

Tries to log in again; successfully this time.

[granthutchison]

Sorry, still can't reproduce this effect - my Moon is meridian-free using both the current realistic texture by Jens and the previous shaded-relief texture you've apparently edited for your lunar colonies. (I've specifically zoomed in on the area around zero lat zero lon that you show.)
Maybe some more detail on your system and Celestia version? Perhaps someone else can reproduce the problem.

Grant

[Don. Edwards]

The seem might be in his bumpmap. I have seen this ocasionaly when working on a bumpmap. So try cycleing through the the rendering options and see if it goes away.

Don. Edwards

[Darryl Roy]

There IS a one-pixel wide coverage gap at the 0 meridian in the commonly used Clementine greyscale basemap. This isn't visible at the poles (if you are aligning your textures while zooming in at the northern or southern extremities). Its possible that some texture authors scaling
down this source image haven't caught this (its only really visible at a
200% zoom).

Finding it started my personal odyssey of completely remaking my own
16k Moon texture (2 1/2 times, now), which can be seen in the 16k Moon
texture thread, and for which I still looking for a file host.

[Darryl Roy]

You don't really need that much length for a mass driver - a 1 (earth) G
accelleration for a little over 1 minute suffices to achieve lunar escape velocity.

The lunar rotation is too slow to provide much energy advantage to equatorial launches, although a mass driver in the plane of the eccliptic (not quite the equator) WOULD permit launches to any major destination in the solar system, at least once each lunar rotation. If you invested in multiple mass drivers, or wrapping the mass driver around the globe (again, in the eccliptic plane), then you wouldn't even need to wait till the moon was facing the right direction. It could double as a maglev transport line and path for electrical transmission lines (from farside solar farms).

At any rate, except where it cuts through mountains/crater walls (one use for the nuclear stockpile), it wouldn't exactly be very visible from orbit, at least not in a 8k/16k texture pixel size (1300 m/pixel or 660 m/pixel)

I'm presently working on a detailed base for south polar Shackleton crater in the Orbiter simulator, simulating an earlier stage of lunar colonization, and was planning on including a WORKING mass driver
running up one of the crater walls as well - ice trapped in the lunar regolith at polar craters may be the most convenient source of volatiles in the inner solar system. In the next 100-150 years, I suspect most space
ventures can afford a 28 (14 if it runs up the opposite crater wall) delay
till they get their water/oxygen/hydrogen...

[Guest]

Thanks to everyone;
yes; the ecliptic makes more sense- I''l have to try to work out where that is on the Moon.
The Lunar massdriver itself is practically invisible in reality, from orbit; the regio surrounding it is a wide field of photovoltaic energy collectors, which (I anticipate) will occur in many places on the colonised Moon.

Eventually the Moon will be covered with a partial worldhouse roof, and have large areas of Earthlike environment available for recreational and agricultural use. But that is a project for another day as well.

[granthutchison]

The moon's equator is in the ecliptic plane, on average, although it librates a degree or so either side of it.

Grant