Idea Protoplanetary System

[Frogisis]

Not sure how feasible this would be in Orbiter's engine, but it might be fun to fly around a system still in the process of forming, filled with asteroids, comets, and molten protoplanets.

I've been able to install all the moons, asteroids, comets (even the probe-specific comets), and Kuiper Belt objects, (236 bodies total) into a single instance of the Sol system with only minor slowdown and then only when the screen is full of moons around a gas giant, so I think it could be done.

If someone wanted to crunch the numbers it would be pretty interesting to have examples of all the kinds of stable and unstable orbits scientists believe would appear at the time - Some of the protoplanets could be on super-long trajectories simulating ejection from the system, a gas giant could be migrating inward, etc... Most of the asteroids and comets could of course be clones so the modeler(s) don't go crazy... I haven't tried any of the nebula addons, but rings of dust around the star between the protoplanets, if they're possible, could be neat, too.

Anyway, it's just a thought. Might be a cool change of pace, especially for sci-fi kinds of ships you could pretend are visiting the Sol system billions of years ago.

 

[edsupagood]

This really sounds like a fascinating idea! It would be very exciting to fly around in a system like that.

 

[Rtyh-12]

Well, you can write a program to generate config files and textures for the asteroids and comets, and maybe even meshes so things don't all look the same. Planetary textures can be made to look molten (by abusing the night lights, so they shine in the dark, you don't really need it on the light side). The biggest problem would be that Orbiter's config files, by default, are static. They do not update, so even an asteroid flying past a gas giant is completely unaffected. There is a setting in the config file that allows the body to be affected by gravity, but it would probably [semi-educated guess] cause huge slowdowns.[/semi-educated guess]

But perhaps the bigger problem would be that such a system wouldn't really be very exciting to fly through at all. A few hundreds of protoplanets, a few thousands of asteroids and comets... what are the odds of colliding with, or even coming within sight of, an object? It would probably happen more often in reality, but then you'd need to simulate billions of objects, and you'd need more than a 3 GHz CPU for that

 

[Frogisis]

Yeah, I think you'd have to take a lot of artistic license to make it interesting. Instead of being a dynamically forming solar system, it'd have to be something more like a "snapshot" of one specific era. I mean, presumably in real life all these changes in the configuration of the system would take much longer than your typical Orbiter session, so you wouldn't even see much change, anyway.

Instead of simulating a wide belt of detritus, you could concentrate on specific "zones" or "points of interest" where bodies would be at a more interesting level of density and activity.

Night lights are definitely a must. I've always wanted to see more use of those, like creating city-covered sci-fi planets or Jupiter Brains.

Not sure if this would be possible, but an interesting object in this system might be a malformed planetoid or two, blasted into disarray by a giant impact like the one that created the moon, and surrounded by debris and new, slowly coalescing body. They'd both have to be specific meshes instead of the standard sphere, and I don't know what the size limit is on those, but I think it'd be pretty amazing to fly around.

 

[Rtyh-12]

Not sure if this would be possible, but an interesting object in this system might be a malformed planetoid or two, blasted into disarray by a giant impact like the one that created the moon, and surrounded by debris and new, slowly coalescing body.

Well, you could do that, but it would still be static. The body would be molten and with a huge crater one billion years later, while the 'moons' would pass right through each other (they might interact gravitationally, but they wouldn't collide). And, while the protoplanetary system as a whole wouldn't change too much during normal Orbiter sessions, the protoplanet-many moons would change much faster. It would be interesting indeed to fly through such a system, but it's not possible yet in Orbiter.

 

[Frogisis]

Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest it would be anything but cosmetic. You'd have to do a lot of pretending, which might make it a little too "pulp" for the kind of people who'd be interested in the first place, but at least it'd make for a lot of neat promotional screenshots.

Ditto any number of speculative megastructures, assuming they could be implemented. Imagine looking across the system to see a half-built Dyson Shell...
(Edit: Maybe the sections could be invisible "planets" in the system, with any actionable surface features of the megastructure as the tops of incredibly tall invisible towers.)

 

[jedidia]

but it would probably [semi-educated guess] cause huge slowdowns.[/semi-educated guess]

I don't think it should cause too much slowdown. I can't see the few vector additions takig up significantly more cycles than solving the propagation. It usually isn't recommended for planetary bodies because it gets heavily unstable after longer periods of time and time accel can cause some weird stuff, but in this case this might actually be what you want...