Idea Addon Idea for Alpha Centauri.

Kyle

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Hello, this might be in the wrong section so bear with me.
I was reading about Alpha Centauri A and B and Proxima Centauri and I had this idea. What if we make an attempt at an addon were you can go from our Sun to Alpha Centauri. I know Orbiter is incapable ATM for interstellar Travel but why Don't we make it like a very large planet orbiting extremely far out from the sun with an extremely slow orbital period and Centauri B and Proxima moons of that planet with Sun textures? The only forseeable problem is, lighting from the Sun which will cause the opposite side of the Centauri system to be in Dark. Its an idea, but I think we can make a shot at it.
Any thoughts?
 

insane_alien

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its been done. the problem is that at those distances docking becomes impossible due to the inaccuracy of the position at those distances. you just jitter around all over the place. planets would be the same.
 

Artlav

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Was done before, and certainly doable.
Things will get shaky due to FPU precision limit at that distance, unfortunately.
And, no light from the big planet.
 

Kyle

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Was done before, and certainly doable.
Things will get shaky due to FPU precision limit at that distance, unfortunately.
And, no light from the big planet.

Anyway possible for us all to get together and create a perfected version?
The doable must be done. :)
 

Andy44

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Even if it worked right, it would only work if you never switched between spacecraft and remained in the one heading out, because Orbiter does not model relativistic effects. Thus if you are several years along in your trip, the Orbit MFD will report unrealistic positions for all the planets in both systems, as well as any orbiting vehicle.

Any realistic travel to Centauri would take place at relativistic speeds, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the crew is going to want to live long enough to get there, and that the spacecraft hardware itself will get old, too.
 

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Random thought:

Maybe we can fake it by changing the reference at the half-way point.

The Sun becomes Alpha Centauri A and we update the position of our spacecraft so that it's new position relative to the Sun becomes the old position relative to Alpha Centauri A. Trouble is I don't think the API can create and destroy planets at run-time.

That could obviously be worked around by saving the scenario, processing the scenario to replace the solar system and translate the spacecraft position, finally restart the simulation with the new scenario. But that's been done before too.
 

Zachstar

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How about just accepting adding in stuff that has "jumped" or "warped" or whatever to the system and not have to worry about the problems (Like lack of light for instance)

I figure that the way Humanity will develop FTL travel will be a form of "Jumping" anyway. So stuff will just "appear" in the target system.
 

Andy44

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How about just accepting adding in stuff that has "jumped" or "warped" or whatever to the system and not have to worry about the problems (Like lack of light for instance)

I figure that the way Humanity will develop FTL travel will be a form of "Jumping" anyway. So stuff will just "appear" in the target system.

That's also been done before in Orbiter.

About FTL drives, there is a Warp Drive MFD and a Jump Drive MFD that will give you either Star Trek-style or BSG-style FTL effects, but it's all magic, handwavium made up to allow writers to make interesting sci fi stories. To date no one has come up with a serious idea for any kind of FTL travel method. It would be just as realistic to say that magic will work, at this point.

It's just wishful thinking. Which is fine, of course, no harm in daydreaming. But I prefer a physics-based simulation. Dr. Schweiger has talked about building a seperate space sim that would simulate relativity, but it would have to be different from Orbiter, in that you would be restricted to just one vessel for the entire scenario chain, since it would be observer-based. No switching back to vessels you left behind orbiting Earth; that would cause a temporal paradox.
 

Linguofreak

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That's also been done before in Orbiter.

About FTL drives, there is a Warp Drive MFD and a Jump Drive MFD that will give you either Star Trek-style or BSG-style FTL effects, but it's all magic, handwavium made up to allow writers to make interesting sci fi stories. To date no one has come up with a serious idea for any kind of FTL travel method. It would be just as realistic to say that magic will work, at this point.

It's just wishful thinking. Which is fine, of course, no harm in daydreaming. But I prefer a physics-based simulation. Dr. Schweiger has talked about building a seperate space sim that would simulate relativity, but it would have to be different from Orbiter, in that you would be restricted to just one vessel for the entire scenario chain, since it would be observer-based. No switching back to vessels you left behind orbiting Earth; that would cause a temporal paradox.

Switching between vessels could be managed without paradoxes. You just need to make sure that you have one central frame of reference that you use to define simultaneity for the purposes of switching vessels, or at least a very particular set of rules for determining what frames of reference are valid.

One switch will only create a temporal paradox if the simulator is explicitly programmed to allow it. Two switches will create a paradox if the simulator always uses the reference frame of the current vessel for its calculations, and the user uses certain combinations of maneuvers and switches. But if you use a consistent frame of reference for calculations, and translate the results into the current vessel's frame of reference for display, and if you always perform vessel switches with respect to the computational frame of reference, you'll never run into a paradox.

For FTL, similar rules apply. You can get a wormhole network without temporal paradoxes if you follow certain rules, and the same with jump drives or warp drives.

Plus, you can write the simulator to handle temporal paradoxes gracefully. In fact, it's already possible to set up temporal paradoxes in Orbiter with the use of the scenario editor, and it doesn't crash the sim.
 
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