Ecentricity

[Gilbz]

Hey there,

first things 1st, my 1st post wooooo  , ok ive got that out of my system (pun not intended)

ok so i recently bought steam version of Universe Sandbox, startup errors aside... Would anyone be kind enough to tell me wether I can freeze the ecentricity of the orbit of planets? I am working on a little (quie big) projcet (not telling what going to be a suprise ) and i can do everything fine but i leave a bit of the simulation running for about 5 minutes real time and i find that the planets have now got eliptical orbits instead of nice circular ones  that are well... required. I love the dynamicness of the sandbox but for this i really dont need eliptical orbits.

Something that may help and should give away what im doing. The one thing that might be affecting it is other starts, I am bulding several solar systems each within thier own cluser, up to four in each cluster, 16 clusters BTW . so could the star's gravity be pulling them off? I discounted this after the eliptical orbits were actually facing away from the other system, so i am a tad confused.


So to sumarize my point, is there a way i can freeze ecentricity?

thanks in advance
Gilbz

Chow

[Dan Dixon]

If the orbits of the planets are changing it's probably because of the mass of the other planets.

If you have a single star with mass, and make all of the planets massless. The planet orbits will be far more stable.
(although that's probably not what you want)

The other solution is to place everything much further apart (like our solar system).

There's currently no way to lock the eccentricity, interesting idea though.

Does that help? If you want to email me your simulation I can take a look.

[Gilbz]

Thanks that did help, they are much more stable now , once I am done would you be kind enough to look at the system I created, as a short run down (I might as well make it known) I am intending (have got 4 systems so far) to recreate the universe out the popular game series Mass Effect, so that would be reason I needed complelty stable orbits as i didnt want them eventyually going rouge and enetering another system and causing Chaos, though I think i may have overspaced the sysetms at the moment. anyways I'm droning on 

Yeah.. so thanks for the help man