General Question Need intro/tutorial information on reference frames

[dmurley]

Being new to Orbiter, I need intro/tutorial information on the different frames of reference and when they are used. If someone can point me in the right direction I would be grateful.Thanks.

 

[jedidia]

I am not sure by what you mean with "reference frames". Could you try to explain a bit better? In general, a reference frame is just "the point of view of the observer".

 

[dmurley]

I think (but I'm not sure) that the reference frames I see mentioned (local, global, ecliptic) are coordinate systems of some type, and I need to understand where the origin is located and how the x, y, and z axes are oriented in each system.

 

[jedidia]

Not sure about ecliptic, never used it. local is vessel-local relative, i.e. your vessel is at 0 0 0 of the coordinate system and facing towards 0 0 1.

Global is the "root" coordinate system of the engine. 0 0 0 is the barrycenter of the system (inside the sun, but usually not the exact position of the sun), and the origin of the orientation is pretty much irrelevant.

There's functions like localToGlobal and globalToLocal in the SDK to convert between the two. Assuming this *is* an SDK/Programing question, which you never mention, but I can't quite imagine what non-programing related thing you might need to convert between the coordinate systems for. You certainly don't need to understand them in order to fly, the MFD projections are more important there.

 

[Marijn]

Do you have IMFD installed? It's Map Program will help you I think. I used it to get a better understanding of these reference frames. You can use the Scenario Editor to see your X, Y and Z values. By eyeballing the Map Program, you can figure out what axes are for x, y and z.

 

[dmurley]

This is a Lua programming question (sorry I didn't mention this before - I didn't realize that it might affect the answer). Thanks to all that have responded.