Celestia Forums

I know how to travel toward a destination; you select it, center it, and then accelerate toward it at your speed of choice. What I think would be way cool, is if you could watch the spacecraft of your choice travel toward your selected destination, from behind. I know there's a way, but I need help. Thanks in advance for any tips.

Hi guest.

I understand what you mean , and I agree should be cool. But first of all in Celestia you are not driving a spacecraft.

The entity that gives the views in Celestia is called observer, and you have to think to it like a virtual camera that has no phisical limitations.

Fridger (T00Fri) has given a very beautiful and scientifical description of observer in one of the last threads.

You can operate with the observer (rotate, accelerate, move closer etc.) but actually (if I'm wrong please correct me) you cannot view it from the "outside".

I've proposed something similar some time ago and I've called this feature 3rd person view.

In the feature requests list in my website there are two requests about this argument that I've planned to submit to the development team and forum attention.
- External camera.
- Schematic view.

I hope to being able to complete those requests soon because are somewhat complex and will need a lot of description.

Bye - Paolo

If you want to follow a spacecraft that has a pre-defined trajectory, like Galileo, the appropriate command is "Chase". The viewpoint's orientation will be in relation to the direction that the selected object is travelling. In other words, you can travel along behind the spacecraft and watch both it and what's in front of it.

As part of our work writing activities for school kids for NASA, Don and Jack and I have come up with a "Celestia" spaceship. It is modeled after the Orion space plane that first appeared in the movie 2001, a Space Odyssey. It is quite good and has the "Celestia 1" stenciled on its wing.

You can place it into space anywhere you wish with an ssc file and then simply select it and go to it. It will be in front of you and you can imagine yourself inside it, following along from the outside. As Selden said above, you can also "Chase" it as it flies somewhere. The path does not have to be orbital. You can place it on a straight line path using an xyz file. Obviously, this goes just so far. If you wish to journey to somewhere in space and start your spaceship control going with the [A] key, you cannot "see" yourself on that journey from the outside with this technique. However, ....

You can download the Celestia 1 from my website at the link below, or click here.

http://www.fsgregs.org/celestia/files/Celestia1.zip

Enjoy.

Frank