Celestia Forums

Hello,
I is it possible to scale down the solar system distances such that the planets appear closer together ?

Yes.

See http://www.ara-frasso-sabino.org/andrea_celestia.htm

Hi Belle

Something similar is contained in my feature request about schematic view.

I hope that the implementation will be considered sooner or later.

Bye - Paolo

Thank you selden and Paolo,

Selden, that solar system link does not scale down the solar system distances, it enlarges the planets. Not quite the same thing.

Interesting ideas Paolo but as you say similar but not what I was asking.

Surely the end result is the same, whether you scale up the planets or scale down the distances between them?
But if for some reason you really need to change the distances, you can edit them by opening solarsys.ssc in a text editor and entering a new semimajor axis value for each planet.

Grant

Just make sure you:

*** copy the original file ***

to somewhere safe before you modify it, since Celestia is distributed as a self-extracting EXE instead of a ZIP.

Grant, may be scaling up the planets is the same as scaling down the distances between them I'm not sure Just thinking about it scrambles my brain !!!
However, in that link selden gave the solarsys.ssc does not scale the Sun, so it all looks most peculiar and the moons orbit is now (I assume) inside the earth

Thanks for the info on trying it for myself, I will give it a go.

Belle

Grant,
Changing the semimajor axis value for each planet doen't seem to change the distances between them

Belle

Remember:

The planets are at great distances one from the other in reality (relative to its size). You may need to reduce greatly the axis and touch the sizes to achieve 'visual' effects.

Belle wrote:Changing the semimajor axis value for each planet doen't seem to change the distances between them

Sorry, I should have said that you need to comment out the CustomOrbit definition for each planet in order to force Celestia to use the EllipticalOrbit definitions instead.
For instance, you should change:toThis tells Celestia to ignore that line.
(Hope you've kept that back-up file ...)

Grant

Thanks Grant, I'll give it another go.

Oh... and I have a backup of my backup !

That did the trick Grant ....... thanks !