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EDIT: After some more thinking it through, it turns out that this question makes no sense whatsoever (see my next post). I'm still leaving it here for posterity. In the end, it's just another case of "you don't get how orbits work!". So, I wanted to write a simple limiter for my game, when...

So here's a question that's hopelessly above my math paygrade but that would be cool to know more exactly than multiplying my thumb with Pi... Let's assume a fictional spacecraft, built on the moon. I'm saying this because it's a hybrid Aluminium/LOX rocket, and those wouldn't make much sense...

Imagine you have two objects. One on a circular orbit, one on an eccentric orbit that intercepts the circular one. The properties of both orbits, the positions, as well as the true anomaly of the intersection point in both orbits are all known. What I need to calculate is if the two objects ever...

So, I'm currently devising a very simple trajectory solver for my game. The difficulty is that the game should actually calculate trajectories and maneuvers based on the character's skill, which is a bit more tough than just giving the a player a couple of sliders to fiddle with their DV...

Quite a fascinating article: https://phys.org/news/2024-09-earth-million-years.html Basically, the impacts from the Ordovician impact spike are not distributed randomly enough and suggest the impactors came from a common orbit. One reasonable explanation is a ring system created by an asteroid...

About 2 days ago, I started having issues with loading the forum. Specifically, I would sometimes get held up by cloudflare, telling be there's been a "host error". The error apparently being status 521 (webserver is down). I can usually refresh and get the forum loaded, and the whole thing...

Some time ago I started making a game. Then the game didn't come together the way I wanted, so I made a new game. Then,... No wait, this isn't a monty python routine. The second attempt actually produced a result that I'm publishing. Just a proof of concept, far from an actually finished game...

This is a very basic question about algebra, but it's been... quite a while, and my education sucks anyways. Googling didn't really yield anything, I'm probably not looking for the right terms. So to illustrate, let's say I have a fraction with X on both sides, and I have the ratio, for example...

It's been a while since I played with special relativity, I seem to have forgotten most of it. And right now, I'm having a problem that has acceleration thrown in, and it's doing weird things to my brain. The first question - constant acceleration. Let's assume a spacecraft constantly...

Right now, mesh groups in Orbiter are limited to something like 65000+ vertices per group. I assume that the exact number is 65535 and that this is because the meshgroups are indexed with an unsigned short, or potentially with a signed int. I don't know, I haven't looked at the code yet. This...

We have quite a few really cool spaceplanes with decent simulations. The XR-series most of all, but also the DG IV, the starliner, and there might be some I've missed. We have nothing comparable for purely orbital operations like transfers. There's the dragonfly, which has electric and...

This is probably a dumb question, but I can't find the answer by googling. If a^x = b, and I have a and b, what's the operation to find x? (I assume there is one?)

Trying to get some stuff from Blender to Orbiter, and mostly failing spectacularly. As far as I can see, there are 2 tools: The one from vlad, which sounds excellent from the description, but is out of date and not compatible with Blender 2.8+ if I gathered that correctly...

So I was fooling around with some stuff, and I accidentally discovered a scaling rule when messing with one of my functions. This is not me wanting to toot my horn, I'm sure the rule is well understood for a couple hundred years, I just want to know if I can make my life easier and cut out some...

I am wondering a bit about how an "industrialised earth orbit" is sometimes portrayed, and I thought it would be cool to have a discussion about it here. What I don't want to discuss is how we get there. There's plenty of models around, all with their own issues, but for this I really want to...

I'm looking for a curve that's roughly shaped like this: Sigmoid alone won't do the trick because I need two bends in the same direction (and also lying on its side, but that part would probably be doable). I'm trying to concoct something together, but I suck at this stuff...

Pretty straight-forward question to which my google-fu somehow won't spit out an answer: If I have the inclination of two objects, as well as the longitude of the ascending node, how do I calculate their relative inclination? Do I have to go through all the rotation shenanigans or is there a...

I just realised with some surprise that we don't have a sub-forum for speculative spaceflight discussions that are not directly math- or astronomy related, so I'm posting this here. I'm wondering about transfer stations. They are often mentioned whenever the talk is about "space ports" or a...

I just learned Freeman Dyson, among SF-fans perhaps best known as the inventor of the concept of the dyson swarm and dyson sphere, and among scientists for so many significant contributions it's difficult to come up with a comprehensive list, has passed two days ago, on the 28th, aged 96...

Important Note: This is a developer resource to be used in add-on creation, not a playable add-on in and of itself The rather large-ish table that IMS2 has become continues to drop some morsels, this is another one of them. Granted, I don't see this one getting much use, since it's only...