Request: Orbital periods?
Posted: 07.01.2004, 07:44
Something that's always bugged me about Celestia is that there's no option (at least that I'm aware of ) to get the program to calculate the orbital period of an object.
Would it be remotely possible to add this function to it? Perhaps it could be dependent on entering a 'mass' value for the central object - if that's there, then it will calculate the orbital period of the objects orbiting it automatically - otherwise it'll leave that as manual input (and there could also be a way to override it in the ssc for specific objects if you wanted to do that).
You certainly don't need to go all the way and add actual gravity effects or anything else (though I guess it might not hurt to add a 'surface gravity' item to the scientific info, calculated from the mass and radius) - this would just be so that one didn't have to keep calculating the orbital periods by hand whenever one is constructing new systems.
Or is there an automated way to do this in Celestia already?
Would it be remotely possible to add this function to it? Perhaps it could be dependent on entering a 'mass' value for the central object - if that's there, then it will calculate the orbital period of the objects orbiting it automatically - otherwise it'll leave that as manual input (and there could also be a way to override it in the ssc for specific objects if you wanted to do that).
You certainly don't need to go all the way and add actual gravity effects or anything else (though I guess it might not hurt to add a 'surface gravity' item to the scientific info, calculated from the mass and radius) - this would just be so that one didn't have to keep calculating the orbital periods by hand whenever one is constructing new systems.
Or is there an automated way to do this in Celestia already?