Need help with space simulations? Join the discussion here!

  • Thread starter Thread starter whartung
  • Start date Start date
whartung
Messages
13
Reaction score
7
How did you find PF?
Google
I was looking at a post of mine on Stack Overflow, and realized that it was 11 years old.

11 years old, something I was interested in, and am still interested in, but something I don't have a solution for.

I've been spending the past month, off and on, on what I would have thought wasn't an insurmountable problem. But it's a month later, and here we are.

I posted a recent question on SO, and it was almost immediately closed (but thankfully not before someone answered it). But it told me that they weren't interested in the kinds of questions I was asking. It's also a lousy place for discussion, which is what I'm really needing. I need to "talk" to "someone" about what I'm struggling with.

Fundamentally, it looks like my problems may involve differential equations, but I simply don't have that kind of math background. Keywords I've stumbled upon are "Lambert's Problem", "Two value boundary problems", etc. I know what a derivative is, I don't know what the chain rule is (don't know that I care, if my calculator can give me the derivative of an equation, do I care how it's done?). But it's all unapplied vocabulary.

What I'm trying to do is simply "space" stuff, for gaming. Not even a video game, but tabletop. To make things "look right". To answer ballpark questions. I just did a sample simulation on the effect of gravity for a ship I was moving, and found that, yea, there was some impact (of course there is), but not enough to matter for my purposes. I'm not NASA, it's a game. Of course, my sim can be wrong, so there's that as well.

So, I'm badly, and incompletely self taught. Latching on to the little bits I need to move my problem forward rather than trying to be a generalist in any field. Looking at simulation techniques, and problem solving for my simple ("simple") space mechanic problems. I know there's as combination of flat math solutions, but also optimization problems (which is a software thing, not a physics thing). I just want my ship courses to be plotted, which is turning out easier said than done.

Hopefully I can find some common ground for discussion here.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Hello and :welcome:!

Have fun and stay curious!
 
Hello everyone, I was advised to join this community while seeking guidance on how to navigate the academic world as an independent researcher. My name is Omar, and I'm based in Groningen The Netherlands. My formal physics education ended after high school, but I have dedicated the last several years to developing a theoretical framework from first principles. My work focuses on a topological field theory (which I call Swirl-String Theory) that models particles as knotted vortex...
Back
Top