Recent content by Chetic

Okay, forget what I said. I've managed to calculate the eccentricity vector, which now always points towards apoapsis (with the length of the eccentricity of the orbit). How do I calculate the semi major axis? Or something else that gives me the rest of the information I need to draw the...

I'm going to try running the simulation 5 steps ahead, collecting positions, and solve for a conic section.

Sorry, I didn't realize. I'm simulating the orbit of bodies based on position and velocity vectors. The only orbit that's really interesting is the player's. The player will want to have an idea of where he is going. All I really need is how to calculate the ellipse of a two-body system. The...

How do you approximate the ellipse of an object's orbit using Newton's law of universal gravitation? I'm working on a 2D space game and that's pretty much the only physics I use, so no other forces to consider.

Actually, I think the best way might be to solve for vectors representing periapsis and apoapsis (the highest and the lowest points of orbit). I have wiki'd myself crazy trying to find some formula for this. Can anybody give me a hint? Edit: Forgot to mention my problem; I can only find...

You know how orbits are made of ellipses and ellipses are made out of two foci? I'm trying to find a formula where I can extract the position of the other focus point, relative to (0,0). By the other focus point I mean the one that's generally out in space. Very much like how the...

Hah! It works! Now the problem turned out to be that my vectors were rotated incorrectly, but your answer helped me realize what wasn't wrong so thank you very much! Here's a li'l pic of it at the moment: http://img814.imageshack.us/img814/3983/gasim.png"

I'm toying with the idea of making a little 2D space orbiter game so I've implemented Newton's universal gravity law into this little app. It works really well, even. The problem I'm having is when I want to create an asteroid-belt. I spawn little asteroids randomly around an area around the...