Child -> Parent trajectories & Binary Parents

[Ramierez]

I was wondering if it would be possible to have child objects show their projected orbit in relation to their parent rather than absolute space.  Easiest example would be the Earth/Moon...while I know that their true trajectories through space would form a helix as they trade places being closer to the sun with the moon overtaking the Earth and then falling behind, it's usually shown with the Earth's relative motion to the sun, and the moon's relative motion to the Earth.  It could be an option on the child object's menu that creates the circle of a complete orbit around the parent based on its current properties.  So on an erratic or unstable orbit, the 'O' would seem to shrink and expand.

My other question is if it is possible to have a child planet or moon shown it's orbital information in relation to a binary parent setup.

Example - I have a binary star system with each star 10 AU apart from each other with the same mass...so very stable really.  I place a Saturn-sized planet out at 100 AU and it falls into an orbit that goes around both stars and this is to be expected.  However, the orbital information shown has to pick one parent or the other and so is either incorrect or shows nothing at all.

Another Binary question is...if you have 2 stars in a close orbit, the habital zones don't seem to take this into account and just show the individual zones for that particular star as if the other did not exist.  I'm fairly certain that if you had 2 sun-like stars in a tight orbit around each other, the habital zone should be a bit further out than just 1 AU from their barycenter and at the Earth's current distance, it would get cooked.

Perhaps the system could do a binary name when the barycenter of 2 oribitting objects falls in empty space to use for objects too far out to be directly influenced by one over the other. (so if you have Sol A and Sol B, and object orbitting the binary and not an individual would say it's orbitting "Sol A-Sol B" and give the orbital information for the barycenter and it's path around it. Also the habital zone would then be calculated based on the binary system as well and not just each star by itself...and so forth.

[Joshimitsu91]

Some good ideas here, i'd imagine some of it would be difficult/time consuming to implement, but i think the creator is always updating and improving/adding new features. So we may see this introduced at a later date i guess.

[Dan Dixon]

I have no time frame for you, but these are both things I want to implement in a free update to version 2 at some point in the future.

These are totally great ideas. Modifying the habitable zone to work with 2 stars is probably a lower priority, but clearly these are issues that should be addressed.

[Ramierez]

Thanks Dan.

The Habital zone was merely an additional thought since I mentioned the other things regarding Binary stars.  I haven't played for long, but so far it seems like the HZ is mostly calculated by luminosity.  I guess it could get pretty complicated for different types of binaries and higher.

I think this and being able to have protoplanetary disks (I like watching how things progress and tweaking more than actually manually placing each item) are the 2 main areas I've thought the most about.

Other than those...a timescale slider with reference ticks (so you can 'go back in time') and I'd think this is about as perfect as it gets   Perhaps configurable to either not create ticks at all, every X amount of sim time (1 yr, etc), for every new body/ring, and so forth.  With that could include at least an 'undo' restore point to revert just before the last change made to the sim.

[Dan Dixon]

Good ideas. Thanks for sharing them. I hope to implement something similar in a future update.