NB Astronomy 301 *SPOILERS*

I posted these in a Dev+ but wanted to include them here also to be thorough. I wanted to find a way to retain all the important aspects of what I believe was originally intended for the astronomy system, but still have an actual 792 year alignment. What I came up with was simulating a spinning New Britannia. So I recreated two new simulations.

The first one here is how the system would be depicted in-game. You'll see the planets move MUCH slower.. but New Britannia now spins brining every planet across the sky every day regardless of how long their actual orbit is. So long as planets are more easily observed during the day I think this can be an ideal solution.

Changes for this simulation.. I've added an indicator to show what is actually in view at any given time.. and placed a Novia map on New Britannia. The sun is stationary. And I've colored the names of the constellations to be representative of seasons although it is not meant to be accurate. I have also put the constellation order back to the way it is now. The reason for this is that now that New Britannia is spinning.. it will appear in game as if they are moving in the other direction as you'll see in the 2nd sim.



It's pretty hard to tell because everything is moving so far.. but the relative speeds of the planetary orbits vs the constellation orbits are consistent with the orrey model.

What is noteworthy here.. is the drastic change in 'event' frequency and duration. All planets are observable throughout the year regardless of their orbital duration provided that they are made a little more visible during the day.. and every planet crosses their respective constellation once every year.. but these alignments last for a full Earth day rather than only a few minutes several times a day or week. This would make it much easier to enjoy whatever bonuses may be bestowed by any given 'event'.

Also I've had to slow down this sim to make it easier to observe.. with the NB rotation all orbital speeds appear doubled.. so this sim is actually only 6 months rather than the usual year.

 

First off, WOW, seeing these simulations is truly fantastic and you've done a great job on all of them Bowen. The fact that you've come up with many different versions shows me that you truly understand that there are multiple ways this system could be set up. I'm confident you will figure this all out eventually... or someone else will by using your data you are collecting. E

OK, so this first iteration of your simulation was very interesting. I noticed that there were several multi-planet alignments, and specifically noticed the 7-planet alignments happened 4 times during the video and precisely at a fixed (time) difference apart: 1:04, 2:08, 3:12, and 4:16 (all at 1 minute 4 seconds apart). So, if that were the way it worked, it would be very easy to predict when they really happened.

The later iterations are quite different though. I didn't notice any 7-planet alignments, except for the starting point in each of them. I could have gotten distracted momentarily and missed it on any of them (here at work) so I could be wrong on that. Or maybe the last two where NB was spinning I just didn't "see" it... but the planets themselves seemed to be moving at all different speeds and after the initial frame didn't appear to be in alignment at all.

I'm not saying you did something wrong. I'm just saying I don't quite understand how the last few are supposed to work.

 

The current simulation will only have an alignment with ALL of the planets every 792 years, but it only shows a 1-year rotation. The other multiple-planet alignments will still occur, but again are multiple years in between, so not in this video.

 

The last two are a very different take and very theoretical. Right now.. and in all other simulations.. the planetary orbits are in whole Earth hours.. while these last two are whole NB years.. So for example the Blue planet which I have as a 3 hour orbit.. becomes a 3 'year' or 6 Earth weeks orbit. So it's much slower and the last two simulations themselves are 1 year and 6 months respectively.. so none of the planets (apart from Daedelus) even makes 1 complete orbit.. so there's no alignments at all in those two.

The Orrey simulation is it would be depicted in-game while the game mechanics sim is what would actually be happening.

 

Yea, I figured I just didn't understand how they were supposed to work. Thanks for the clarification and explanations.

 

For completeness, what is the orbital time on Daedalus? Currently, I believe the in-game lunar cycle is insanely fast (just over one NB day, ~72 minutes). I think this should be closer to the 14-day/14-hour orbit of Felucca, both to adhere better to established lore and to give us a meaningful orbit (two complete lunar cycles per month).

Then, the moon actually has to SHOW the cycle, instead of just tell us about it by text...

 

The Daedelus orbit is actually 7 hours. It's one of the few things I didn't touch though technically in the latest sims it's 14 due to the new NB rotation.. I remember the lunar cycle came up before.. it really should be visible but I'm pretty sure last time it came up there weren't any plans to work on it.. hope they do.

And actually.. I just realized how off the orbital orientations are and am compelled to now go fix them. lol The order constellations are now where the chaos ones should be and everything else needs to be angled up towards north by probably 45-60 degrees. That would actually place some planets in the southern sky during the parts of their orbits they normally wouldn't be visible.

 

The new models are an evil hypnosis tool. Pure evil! My room is now spinning coming out of the watching transe.

But great work!

 

Just wait until you see the updated version with proper orbit orientation. I probably won't finish them both tonight.. it takes a couple hours to render one and I have to redo a bit. Oh and I just had an interesting idea how to do a 2 angle view for comparisons..

 

In order for there to be moon phases, the sun needs to be stationary relative to NB. I get the geo-centric system, but I don't think there is any evidence, other than the Moondial, to suggest the sun revolves around NB.

If it does, then the phases of the moon will not adhere to the same pattern as Earth's moon. In fact, based on your simulation, there will be frequent eclipses and observers on NB will see multiple moon phases all in the same night.

I'll just assume that "sun" on the moondial is a dark star () that we can't readily see.

 

Which is actually what occurs in-game right now. Though you should note my more recent simulations are for a stationary sun.. but in-game mechanics requires one that moves since you can't very well spin the world in-game.

 

I think you guys will find this one a little more interesting. This is less about the numbers and more about in-game representation. The planets are still orbiting by NB year rather than Earth hours as they do in game now.. Daedelus is still on the 7 hour orbit though.

What I tried to do here is guestimate the approximate angles of the planet's orbital plane for a stationary sun/spinning world system. Then I realized a few things needed to change. Notebly that the sun should not line up with the orbital plane.. either it would prevent witnessing alignments (like it does now) or it would end up in the southern sky.. and one of my goals is to make as few visual changes as possible.

So what I ended up doing is moving the sun.. and consequently Daedelus' orbital plane to stay in line with the sun. This has the effect of keeping the sun in the northern sky while allowing the planets to cross the northern sky during the night. Making those alignments at true north much easier to see.

Visually there is no change to the constellations.. except with a spinning world they now also appear during the day in the opposite side of the sky as the night.. but since you can't see them during the day it really doesn't matter.. but it is interesting.

I've also changed the perspective so we can see the angles better and since this gives us a more 3D perspective I changed the 'visibility' disc to a half sphere. Again the purpose of this is to show what part of the sky is visible at any given time.

The left is day time, the right is night. Keeping in mind that a player would be standing on the equator (for all intensive purposes) and north is straight up... to top half north.. bottom half south.



Orbiting sun model to come later.

 

With the change to the sun and moon orbit, the southern areas would be polar, as there would be at least one region that gets no sunlight at all throughout the year.

Beyond that, I like this representation. Very interesting to watch.

 

I can only imagine the massive temperature gradient and the storms that would be created. That simulation is pretty cool.

 

Indeed.. at the moment the southern pole receives no light in this sim. What I like best about this particular model I think is the fact that Daedelus would no longer block the viewing of alignments.. nor for that matter would the sun.

 

Interesting new model. Not what I was expecting.

I bet the Shrine of the Oracle likes this model more than the Avatar of Nicholaus Copernicus.

 

will you change the tilt of NB in relation to the sun to give rise to the seasons?

 

Well.. that would require that both NB spin and the sun have an elliptical orbit 1 year. I could build a model for that but neither an in-game orrey or the actual game mechanics would need to simulate an elliptical orbit. It just wouldn't be noticeable by the players. If folks would like to see it though I could be persuaded to build it. It wouldn't be hard.. all I'd really need to do is squash and move the sun's orbit slightly. Actually come to think of it the orbit wouldn't even need to be elliptical.. just offset slightly so that the distance throughout the year isn't a constant..

 

Since the orbit of the planets/satellites is not along the equator in your orrey, wouldn't you get the same effect if the sun/moon was moved to that median? It would still offset the planets, only by a 30 degree angle instead of 90. Give the sun a slight wobble to simulate the changing of the seasons, and I think that would be pretty good. There would still be more (partial) solar eclipses than the current model, but I don't think it should impact the total alignment.

 

Sure that would work.. I was just trying to preserve the sun's location in the sky. I'm making the assumption here that (for the time being at least) the player's perspective is from the equator regardless of where they are in the world. Otherwise.. and this would be pretty cool if they actually did it.. they would need to offset the system based on an areas location in the world. But in the current model the sun is probably too high (or low in the sky as it would be)..

All of this is pure theoretical now of course. I'm pretty confidence in the numbers. now I'm just hoping Portalarium has a little more to think about.