Celestia Forums

I read about the space elevator again today and that the platform will float at around 36.000 km distance from the earth's surface. So I loaded Celestia and wanted to check the view at the planet from that distance but something seems to be wrong. If I set it to 36.000 the program goes up to 42.377 km which is quite a bit off. Looks like every value above 19.134 km results in a wrong distance. I hope it's going to be fixed.

Way to go, Celestia rocks!

I can't reproduce this. When I use Goto Object I hit 36km on the nose in 1.3.1pre11.
What version of Celestia are you using? What operating system? How are you setting your altitude?

Grant

Oh, I get it. 19.134 km is the maximum altitude value. Exceeding this value results in the display of the distance to the planets center, which is why exactly 6.378 km (earth's radius) is added. Never mind then, 19.134 is and odd number in my opinion, though.

Ah. You're using a point as a thousands separator - I read 36km when you wrote 36 thousand km. Not a style I've run into before - where are you from, if you don't mind me asking?

BTW, 19134km is exactly three Earth radii, so it's not such an odd choice.

Grant

Austria, common writing here.

Thanks for the pre11 info, just updated to this version and everythings fine now, had an older 1.3.1 version which had this thing messed up.

General european writing I would say.

Yes, Chris changed the Altitude / Distance combination display to be ONLY Distance, in one of the more recent pre releases.

maxim wrote:General european writing I would say.

Interesting. I could have sworn that, long ago, when I learned German, I was told that the thousands separator was a space. Same in French. But maybe I'm getting confused with the Syst?me International convention.

Grant

Just as a matter of interest, how do you guys represent a number with a decimal point? Is it with a comma "," ?

regards
TERRIER

maxim wrote:General european writing I would say.

Yes, the same here in Spain.

TERRIER wrote:Just as a matter of interest, how do you guys represent a number with a decimal point? Is it with a comma "," ?

Exactly that, we use a comma. It is slightly annoying when all the keyboards come with a point in the numeric keypad, and the tools you use (Visual Foxpro, for example) insist in that you have to type a comma for achieving the decimal digits. I am forced to install a small utility (only in windows, of course, Linux is customizable) to have a comma in that place. But it leads to other problems, as I'm discovering currently.

Howdy Javier,

Have you tried:

* Start button
* Settings
* Control Panel
* Regional and Language Options (displays a dialog box)
* Regional Options tab
* Click Customize button
* Enter the characters for decimal, etc.

-Don G.

granthutchison wrote:I could have sworn that, long ago, when I learned German, I was told that the thousands separator was a space.

Well it's possible to use the space for better reading in common text. But sientifical correct is the point separator:

(EU)123.456,789 :== (USA)123,456.789

Funny enought there are other 'exchanges':
(EU-Keyboard)Z :== (USA-Keyboard)Y
(EU-Keyboard)Y :== (USA-Keyboard)Z

So using 'A' & 'Z' for convenient control on US-Keyboards causes Europeans to make a 'long hand'