Since no one seems to want to say it, I will:
Vladimir Romanyuk,
Thanks. This is trully a masterpiece. I've seen how SE has developed for more than 4 years now. There have been moments that I thought you would encounter such big difficoulties to continue (coding challenges or life challenges since you were working on this and in you job at the same time when I arrived to this community) that I really believed the project would stagnate and never continue. I really though many times you would reach conformity with your work even if it wasn't perfect in some visual aspect.
But you have beaten all expectations. You are a coding master. I'm glad this exists because it has made me wonder about the universe in a new way and with new tools. No planetarium software, no space-sim has reached this heights (maybe there are unfrequent single features that can be better ilustrated on other programs), and all of this you have made it yourself, and olny yourself, from scrath, for free, for all of us. I have no words for this, is a great life goal that you are accomplishing without any doubt.
What I apreciate the most of SE is the inmense accuracy and realism behind every idea. Just an astrophysicist like you could have done that, just a scientific mind could have had the care to show the real universe, not the one we see in the documentaries and not the one we see in videogames.
Now I'm sure this project will go on for many more years, and you are going to create something that is going to change many people lifes as it has done with me. Thank you one more time.
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And now some other things:
- First of all thanks for the perfect explanation, there is no better synthesis of what are current orbital theories in the vast expanse of internet and also congratulations for been able to include this amazing feature in SE without any FPS drop. You beast!
- In the post you said that there is no perturbation model for the asteroids for example. We can't make an orbital integrator for the game that could operate in real time for sure but could we try to integrate in a separate program the orbits for all asteroids and then generate a file that we could download for SE so we could see the changes over millenia? I understand that this would require a lot of time, a lot of memory and doing a work that is more profitable from a scientific viewpoint than a plantarium software aproach but maybe... I'm just asking.
- What are going to be your plans for rotational models of planets? I mean, for example, are we going to see Milankovich Cycles? true polar wander? precession of the equinoxes? nutation? Could those new degrees of freedom be implemented procedurally for other planetary systems?
- Could we have tumbling asteroids? Or to say; non-principal axis rotators and erratic rotators? For example like the smaller moons of Pluto or some asteroids that have experienced recent collisions? Could that be implemented procedurally?
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- Can we have an oficial addon in the future with the most accurate ephemerids? If I understood correctly, you took several terms of a fourier series that has been calculated from orbital integrators for many objects but you didn't included all the smaller terms that would make the addition quite huge in terms of memory. I really want to see how the solar system changes in periods over 10.000 years or further knowing it's accurate.
- Could we have in the near future included in SE the actual orbits of some space missions? For example I would love to see Cassini's intricate orbital path and see the historic flybys. With the accuracy that SE has archived for the different moons righ now that would be a really awesome experience. It would be great also to see the trajectory for New Horizons for example and get to see in advance the next flyby target.
- Finally, even If I know this is probably imposible, could there be some sort of orbital integrator in-game that with the accuracy that a real-time calculation allows could make perturbation models for procedural systems also? It would be great to see precession of the orbits of procedural exomoons or changes in accentricity in the orbits of some planets due to resonant features (but I know this would get SE in the realms of the Universe Sandbox capabilities, something you aren't currently engaging on)