Does anybody fully understand the system map conventions? So for instance horizontal bar out from a star lists things orbiting the star. Vertical bars down from planets to show moons orbiting planet. What do the bridging bars mean? E.g. up across down. Not orbiting the star, but what - "just passing through"?
system map conventions
- Thread starter Setu
- Start date
ED only shows the orbits of bodies, not of centre-of-masses. This makes binary planets harder to spot when they are orbiting another object.
I have encounters a "triple" planet in one system - a binary planet orbited by another planet. The system chart drew this like a step-pyramid. In my best ASCII art:
. +-----+
. | . . |
+-+-+ . |
| . | . |
O . O . O
It makes we wonder how far this can progress? Can we have binaries-of-binaries-of-binaries...?
The other thing you may see are bodies orbiting a binary star, which are drawn on a horizontal line starting with a '[+]' between the two stars.
Last edited:
I saw a post where the explorer took a pic of a quadruple of planets nested like this. So I guess thats about as much. It takes really peculiar mass/speed/excentricity to make up 3, let alone 4 or more.
I wonder how stable some of these extremely nested systems are. But, they are fun to fly through.
The same bridging is used for stars vertically to show their orbital bond (on the left side of the system map).
Sometimes there are horizontal lines of bodies not attached to a star but rather to an "x" between stars. This means those bodies are orbiting around the center of mass between a pair of stars. In the navigation panel, they are also not subordinated to a star and can be found on the same level as the two stars they're orbiting around. In my experience, they're harder to identify from the nav panel, but the HUD icons still help.
Sometimes there are horizontal lines of bodies not attached to a star but rather to an "x" between stars. This means those bodies are orbiting around the center of mass between a pair of stars. In the navigation panel, they are also not subordinated to a star and can be found on the same level as the two stars they're orbiting around. In my experience, they're harder to identify from the nav panel, but the HUD icons still help.
Last edited:
They are also a total pain to locate as you cant use the usual AU x 500 to give the Ls distance.
That's true! Sometimes a bit irritating. Would be cool if the bridging bars would have a small x marker giving the average distance/acclimation/etc of the linked planets/stars.
Not sure what you mean by "the usual AU x 500", but my approach is to select them one by one in the nav panel and watch my mini-radar to get an idea of their locations relative to my position. Together with the ls-distances from the nav panel I can then decide if it's worth to detail scan them or not.
Last edited:
If you click on an object it will give you the Astronomic units (AU) from the star, so if the planet you are interested in is 0.76 AU, then 0.76 x 500=380, so look for an object at 380Ls and that will be your planet of interest. It is actually slightly less than 500 but 500 is a nicer number to use. It works a treat, also works for other stars in the system.
How could I miss that all the time.. Thanks!
How could I miss that all the time.. Thanks!
Unfortunately the spinning pairs of objects linked by a bridge are not normally given AU, which can be a pain, but by a process of elimination you can work them out. If you are going to do a full system scan then it doesnt matter anyway.....
Good idea, I'd not thought of that
I still find them usually pretty easy to identify because their distances in the nav panel are very close if not identical. Also, if you're still near the star, you could just count bodies from inner to outer to find the one you're looking for. Or get a rough estimate of their distance by looking at the closest other planets around them. ^^
But still, I'm dreaming of an improved system map which would basically be a small model of the system itself.
Last edited:
lol, it would all be so much easier if we could select an object in the system map.....
Of course, if we had an orrery view ... "Hisss" as can of worms is opened.
IIRC 1.3 will bring something like that.
Also when there are moons you can count how much there are and corelate that with what you see in the nav panel. Anyway, while exploring, i almost always choose the next object to scan in the nav pannel.
Sounds awesome. Could you specify "something like that" please? ^^
Thanks for the replies. I understand better now! Being able to select from system map would be great! As would being able to select via HUD stars in galaxy map! I recently saw an interesting group of very bright stars but was not able to identify them on the galaxy map - I suspect they were various large distances. It is hard to correlate view out the window with direction in galaxy map if you cannot compare how they are aligned with our galaxy.