Celestia Forums

I'm planning on making an addon that represents all the known elements. I don't know if anyone would be interested though, and if no one is interested then I won't send it to the Motherlode. But whether anyone is interested or not, I'd like to know if Celestia will accept a 118 planet solar system with an incredible number of moons. If they're big, that won't work but if they're small will it work? And how small should they be? I already know how it's gonna work though. All bodies will be on exactly the same plane, so if viewed from overhead you can see the orbits and the electrons going around (which will be going around the nucleus every 1 second, maybe longer, I envisioned this with my pencil). I might need to know how to set where the electrons will be because the first 2 electrons for example, will be in the same orbital path, so I don't want them intersecting each other. And is there any way to have the program display your own notes about a planet? Like for Einsteinium show it's radioactive, or show Helium's a noble gas.


So what do ya'll think?

Well if you go look at http://www.webelements.com then for each element you'll see a diagram of their electron shells. You can get to that in the column on the left, it's the first entry in "Electronic Properties", called "Electronic Configuration".

I guess you could texture the "planets" corresponding to each element according to their native forms - "Gold" would be a gold metallic surface, "Lead" would be a dull grey metallic surface etc. It'd be an interesting educational project I think (especially for you as you're making it, there's lots of fascinating things to learn about the elements). Maybe you could just do the electrons as little blue spheres or something.

(Incidentally, there's a link to something called "the Orbitron" there that is also rather fascinating (although it's not something you can show in Celestia): http://winter.group.shef.ac.uk/orbitron/ )

Malenfant wrote:I guess you could texture the "planets" corresponding to each element according to their native forms - "Gold" would be a gold metallic surface, "Lead" would be a dull grey metallic surface etc. It'd be an interesting educational project I think (especially for you as you're making it, there's lots of fascinating things to learn about the elements). Maybe you could just do the electrons as little blue spheres or something.

That's a good idea for planet colors. I was originally gonna have them be color-coded (like have all the noble gases be light-blue), but that's better and would make it more interesting. I also like the color blue so the electrons probably will be blue with a "-" on them.

I think I know how I'm going to display the information. On the planet textures I'm just gonna type some text onto the texture that tells a little about the element.

Elsewhere on these boards IIRC there's a patch to add local infotext to Celestia via the InfoURL, maybe you could use that to display the info?

Is there anything wrong with these codes? Because for some reason Celestia won't start up now (either due to these or the fact that the computers at my home are EVIL ).

The first code is almost identical to the code for a star found in the add-on help http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/addon-intro.html



This one below started out as one from the site above but I added stuff to it.



Is there any fault to these? And how do I set how far away a element will be from a star or how far an electron will be from an element? I would look at that other add-on I was looking on but that's on my computer and it not working right. (its evil too )

Should I include elements Uus (Ununseptium) and Uuo (Ununoctium) in this add-on? Since due to the info provided at http://www.webelements.com/ elements 117 & 118 were never really made.

Superficially they look OK to me. You don't need the lines that start with a #, of course, they're comments. You might change them to actually describe what you've created.

Sometimes Celestia has problems if the last line doesn't end in a line terminator (CarriageReturn, LineFeed). Type an enter a couple of times so that there are a couple of blank lines at the end of the file.

It shouldn't be a problem, but just so you can see what's happening, I'd suggest using non-zero SemiMajorAxis values for your initial attempts.

I'd suggest using values that are proportional to energy levels.

Which elements you include is up to you, so long as appropriate information is available to whoever views the Addon.

I think it sounds like a neat idea. I would definately download it and check it out. I'd just be a tiny bit worried about all that stuff going on owning my PC.

Ok, maybe it's some other downloads that are making Celestia not load. Or maybe when I looked at the other .ssc and .stc files for help I accidentaly messed something up...

I think that having proportional distances between the energy levels and the nucleii is a good idea. I just need to find out how far each energy level is from the nucleus, the diameter of a hydrogen (or maybe the diameter of a nucleus of an element in period 7), and how to change how far a moon is from a planet. Do I have to do something like

to set the distance? I'm guessing if so then distance from a moon to a planet would be in km.

Hopefully even though there will be tons of different objects, the fact that they're small and have incredibly simple textures (only 1 color per nucleus and 2 colors per electron), there won't be too much ownage.

I also have a question about the stars. How do I change the radii of the star? Do I just do

SemiMajorAxis specifies how far a moon is from its planet in km.

Radius is in km, too.

You probably should spend some time reading the SSC documentation on the Motherlode.

Whoops...ok. thanks selden.

Ok, got everything that I need before I can finish. I just need to look at a previous posting to find out why the heck I'm having problems with getting the textures to appear on the planets again.

Unless this has been fixed in a previous version I always had issues with lines of comment tags in ssc and stc files.... Try taking them out and leave one # per line and see if that fixes the problem... Also make sure you leave 1 space atleast between the # and the actual comment text

eg:
# This is a comment