Best tool for course plotting?

GreyAreaUK · Jan 12, 2017

I need a way of plotting a line between two stars and then extending it (in either direction) to see what lies along it. What would be the best tool for this?

(It's nothing to do with current mysteries incidentally, I'm just curious about something).

Many thanks.

osser · Jan 12, 2017

I don't know of any 3rd party tools that work with the galaxy map.
If I want to see what's beyond a point I just zoom out and scroll.
Is that what you mean?

GreyAreaUK · Jan 12, 2017

osser said:
I don't know of any 3rd party tools that work with the galaxy map.
If I want to see what's beyond a point I just zoom out and scroll.
Is that what you mean?

I need (well, want) something that's a bit more accurate than just eyeballing it, if possible. I've got two fixed points in the galmap (two stars) and I want to see what lies at the furthest extent of a line that runs through them both.

MattG · Jan 12, 2017

Given 2 points, you should be able to make a formula to express the line between the points and then solve that formula for, say Y=65000. You'd then need to check galmap for anything at those new co-ordinates. There are online tools to help solve the equation between 2 3D points, or remember back to those calculus lessons at school...

mpfj · Jan 12, 2017

I've always thought it would be a nice feature to allow us to pick an object in the skymap and get its details, for just this purpose.

furrycat · Jan 12, 2017

Selecting from the skybox has been requested several times.

For the task at hand, edts could possibly do what you want. Given two systems you should be able to do something like close_to --direction SystemB SystemA to get the systems which extend from SystemA to SystemB. Reversing the arguments would get the systems in the opposite direction.

It will only work for systems which are listed in EDSM, which though a lot of systems is only a tiny fraction of those actually in the game. Within the bubble it would give good results. You'd need to use the -n flag to increase the number of systems returned and, for in-bubble use, -m to restrict the search range.

GreyAreaUK · Jan 12, 2017

Thanks all. I suspect I'll resort to printed out Galaxy screen shots and a ruler

BeanpotBeanie · Jan 12, 2017

The equation for a line with three coordinates is:

ax+by+cz=r

Assuming you can get the (x,y,z) coordinates from the galmap for each system you can calculate the coefficients for this equation (a,b,c) then solve for r. With this equation for the line between these two systems you can test third systems to see if their coordinates fall on the line.

Here's a link explaining the equation better. http://www.math.utah.edu/~wortman/1050-text-lei3v.pdf

Maybe someone who understands their math better can add to this.