Re: Orbit calculations

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Mar 08 2001 - 17:51:17 MST


Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se> writes:

> Spike Jones <spike66@attglobal.net> writes:
>
> > Get STK, satellite tool kit. Its an affordable piece of software
> > and pretty straightforward to use. Better yet, the equations
> > themselves are not that complicated if you want to set up a
> > spreadsheet. Do it piecewise in excel, which you already have.
>
> Thanks! I'm already trying out something in Matlab, but I am having
> some trouble getting the root finder work with an ugly
> function... most likely something that will go away with some work.

Ah! Got it! I now have a plot of necessary deltavees as a function of
launch date, and it looks good (i.e. it fools me at least). The range
seems to fit with real data, so this is close enough for roleplaying
purposes. Hmm, maybe reading up on celestial mechanics, astronomical
coordinate systems, downloading NASA data and doing numerical root
finding is a bit too tricky for the average roleplaying game? :-)

While I'm still at it, what about calculating orbits for solar sails?
 

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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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