I've been taking a look through the Curtis book you mentioned. It's a good resource and much more useful than the paper I started out with. Thank you for that.
I was afraid this was the case, but I didn't have the background or mathematical skill to prove it. I'm glad you told me this. Even if...
I know the units look messy, but this is because the output file here is used as an input for the Space Engine program, which takes a very specific format to render objects. The real calculations are simpler than this, and then converted into a form Space Engine will accept. The original units...
I certainly don't mind going over the basics. The subtraction of the parent's position and velocity is meaningful because the position of the parent object in the simulation is not always at the center of the simulation grid. For example, a star could have position (100,000, 0, 0) and the orbit...
Right, this is just a check to see if the current object is at the top of the hierarchy, which means it wouldn't have an orbit. Root is a pointer to the top-most object. Lines 3-4 recursively call the function so that orbits are calculated from the bottom-up.
I probably could have left that...
I want to make sure I'm understanding you right, so please bear with me if I ask a dumb question. It seems to me that in the paper, mu is defined as mass multiplied by G, not divided by G. This would cancel out the kg in the denominator of the units, and I believe the eccentricity equation...
In my heart, I knew none of these would work. But I also wasn't sure where to start looking for a solution, so I was a bit desperate. Thank you for your advice and, if you could find those links that might help me, I would greatly appreciate it.
Homework Statement:: I'm working on a personal project to convert objects from a simulation using state vectors for position and velocity to Keplerian orbital elements (semimajor axis, eccentricity, argument of periapsis, etc.). However, the equations I am using do not calculate the...