Alright.. been doing this for the past 2 days or so.
I'm trying to see if the orbital mechanics of the stellar bodies (main star, parent star of the planet, moon) and other systems mentioned by Ram Tah may orbit in such a way that lines up with a Ruin site (since they're attuned to the environment and this is a popular concept in many Earthly historical sites)
If 2 or more of these sites intersected with the point then that means I could use their orbits to identify a site.
For a visual idea of what I'm thinking about
To test this I used the first Ruins site as my basis for testing this theory.
To get the orbital path I used the following site to get the intersection point of two great-circle paths.
http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong-vectors.html
And the antipode from here
https://www.antipodesmap.com/
I've since used a modified version of the movable type page that has the functions I need and only returns the data in a decimal format
One problem with getting a relatively precise lat, lon is trying to be consistent using the nav track of my ship pointing up at 90 degrees and keeping it in the "middle" of the target reticule.
In order to get around this I used the target reticule to get "close" to having it directly overhead and ensure that my ship is below the drp height as seen here but with the targeted body directly above
By being below this point I activated a jump it would give me an Escape vector that's 90 degrees and since the reticule for that and the selection reticule are the same size I can get a close approximation to the exact location.
I would line these up perfectly and then note my exact lat and lon.
After a certain amount of time (less for a fast moving moon or longer for an almost stationary sun) I repeat this process and record the 2nd set of lat/lon. Using these 2 I can get a bearing to use to try and calculate a path.
I've been doing this to get the "Intersection of two great-circle path" as found at the Movable Type latlon-vectors page and write down the lat, lon and it's antipode
You can view my results here
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/51002357/Calculations.xlsx
While doing these I'm looking for any that have intersections that are relatively close to the Ruins (-31.7877, -128.9711) since the method for capturing these isn't really precise so one that's (-30.1001, -130.1234) would be close enough.
So far I've done this on the original site with the 4 systems as well as every "star" in SYNUEFE XR-H D11-102 and the moon and none quite match up.
What it's looking like, however, is that my great-circle isn't the correct way to derive a ground path for stars and other bodies. If anybody knows how to best proceed with doing that I'm open to suggestions.
My hope is to find that the ruins are tied somehow to the location of the stars or other systems and if so we can greatly reduce the search area for the other landable bodies by calculating any associated paths and intersections and then specifying locations to search
Here's the problem. If I use different lat/lon for the same object but still and the calculated bearings I get different intersection coordinates so obviously my method for trying to approximate the ground track of the bodies is off.
So I present to you what I've been thinking and gathered in the hopes somebody can help me get consistent measures that we can then use to look for any possible intersections.
Perhaps a better way of working out a haversine formula for identifying the great-circles and intersections or maybe something I hadn't thought of.
