Are there eccentric orbits in Elite?

VR Nupol

VR Nupol
I have never seen one, or I just missed them. But mostly it seems every orbit is a perfect circle.

would be really cool if they add them or make them more aggressive. Also polar Orbits of stations or moons. Maybe I missed some too but the planets that orbit gas giants are mostly on a equatorial orbit. The only thing I know of that has a slight tilted orbit on a gas giant is the Robigo Mines station. I hope things like that will find a way to elite with the Beyond update.
 

Sylveria

Sylveria
Nupol said:
I have never seen one, or I just missed them. But mostly it seems every orbit is a perfect circle.

would be really cool if they add them or make them more aggressive. Also polar Orbits of stations or moons. Maybe I missed some too but the planets that orbit gas giants are mostly on a equatorial orbit. The only thing I know of that has a slight tilted orbit on a gas giant is the Robigo Mines station. I hope things like that will find a way to elite with the Beyond update.
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Depends on your definition of an "eccentric" orbit- because most of the orbits of objects are not actually perfect circles, which you can see with the orbit lines.

Now if you're referring to "wobble" of orbits (gravitational pull of various objects), that's a completely different issue- how would you interpret this as visually different in-game versus what exists currently?
 

JesusRocks1988

JesusRocks1988
Yes, there are many eccentric orbits in Elite. They're not particularly rare if you go out exploring a bit.

Good examples include the Planet of Death near Colonia - a planet with an extreme elliptical orbit around a White Dwarf. It's so extreme that at its farthest, it's a fairly normal distance, but at its closest, it's inside the exclusion zone of the star. Gives you a wonderful view of the surface of a White Dwarf as it arcs across the sky in about 10 seconds - a surface that would normally be obscured by glare.

Other examples that I don't have names for include solar systems where all the planets have perfectly circular orbits along roughly the same plane, except the farthest one which is highly elliptical and around 70-80 degrees off the plane. I've seen moons orbiting gas giants where one or two moons are orbiting almost 90 degrees to the others. I've seen whole solar systems where all the planets orbit at odd angles.

Go out and see for yourself, there are plenty.
 

GG7

G
You know... Even though the Earth is considered to have an elliptical orbit... If you actually look at the orbit on paper, it is at first glance nearly a perfect circle. Not the glaringly obvious ellipse many assume it is on paper. Only after checking the numbers do you discover that it isn't a perfect circle.
 

Runis

Runis
Eccentric orbit?

There are some out there.

And some crazy ones in RL of stars around Sag.A. resulting in a crazy acceleration when they get close to it.
Check this vid around timestamp 3:35.

[video=youtube_share;MDrY4g522q8]https://youtu.be/MDrY4g522q8?t=216[/video]

Info for space nerds: Stellar orbits near Sagittarius A

Maybe one day..
 
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GG7

G
Nupol said:
I have never seen one, or I just missed them. But mostly it seems every orbit is a perfect circle.

would be really cool if they add them or make them more aggressive. Also polar Orbits of stations or moons. Maybe I missed some too but the planets that orbit gas giants are mostly on a equatorial orbit. The only thing I know of that has a slight tilted orbit on a gas giant is the Robigo Mines station. I hope things like that will find a way to elite with the Beyond update.
Click to expand...

The stuff with truly eccentric orbits would be things like comets and other "Ort Cloudish" kind of stuff. As far as I know, none of this stuff is currently viewable in Elite Dangerous.
 

JesusRocks1988

JesusRocks1988
Right, I had to do some screenshot digging because I don't normally take screenshots of orbit lines, but here's an elliptical and highly eccentric orbit for you:

2QBUy4R.png


HINT: Don't look at what I'm targeting.
 
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[VR] optimal_909

[VR] optimal_909
Sylveria said:
Appears to be relatively "eccentric" to me, as it moves closer and off to the left as time passes. :)
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0.9X eccentricity, sorry for the lack of details. :)

It had an orbit of about 4 days, so I had to go back to witness the flyby. Actually landable ice giants (20k km radius) like this are 'prone' to have such orbits - whenever you see one, it's worth checking the stats!
 

Para Handy

Para Handy
One of the recent CGs (not the last one) involved a station in a very eccentric orbit, I can't remember which one now.
 

Jukelo

Jukelo
From experience the vast majority of planets have slightly eccentric orbits. You can actually check via the system map, it's one of the orbital parameters displayed there.
There's of course a few more extreme cases out there, although you wont find any parabolic or hyperbolic trajectories.
 
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V.Shepard

V
One of the latest money makers took advantage of an eccentric orbit. The planet/Station in LQ Hydrae that gave all of the huge payouts was highly eccentric. Its average orbit was about 40,000ls which is how the passenger payouts got such a huge bump. At the time of the Rhea runs it was about 14,000ls away from LQ Hydrae's primary instead of the full 40k. This is why the run was so appetizing - the mission reward were based off of average distance rather than actual distance.

I was hardly in a position to protest - I netted a cool billion from that convenient state of affairs.

So, yeah. We have eccentric orbits.
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
It is extremely rare, but you can even find Earth-like planets in eccentric orbits - though one can debate exactly how "Earth-like" the life on such planets would be, given the extreme differences in global climate between high summer and deep winter such a planet would experience. The record-holder according to EDSM is in the Byoomao ES-I d10-9066 system, situated less than 1000 LYs from Sag A, with an eccentricity of 0.9271; by comparison, Halley's Comet has an eccentricity of 0.9671. I called in there just last week:

VEfWs8i.png

6bWFX8N.jpg
 
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