Newcomer / Intro Scientific exploration questions

[TheDayman]

Hey guys,

Quick question for those more familiar in astronomy then I. The system map screen shows a particular objects properties, such as temperature, radius, orbital period, etc.

What is Orbital Eccentricity, Semi Major Axis, Orbital Inclination, and most of all Arg of Periapsis?

Yes, I could ask Google, but where's the fun in that? Plus I'd have to read a huge page on Wikipedia and still not come close to understanding exactly what these are. I would THINK Orbital Inclination is the objects incline to the orbital plane? And Orbital Eccentricity is how oval shaped the orbit is, right? I have no idea of what the other two are though.

Thanks,
Dayman

 

[andyraptor]

If you've got a spare 1.5 Million Cr ... buy a Advanced Discovery Scanner....

Then you'll never need to know.......... for exploration purposes in this game

 

[TheDayman]

If you've got a spare 1.5 Million Cr ... buy a Advanced Discovery Scanner....

Then you'll never need to know.......... for exploration purposes in this game

Yeah, but I wanted to know for my own scientific curiosity. I'm having a lot of fun scientifically and learning a lot from this game.

 

[Dommarraa]

I wouldn't trust anything you read around here. I do know my stuff, well enough to know that most of what the expert sounding people post is total gut rot.
I could explain it, but not on a mobile, too much typing, and predictive text would have no chance

 

[Bluefalcon8560]

To make this simple the terms that you are seeing are used to describe the shape of the orbits of celestial bodies.

Eccentricity and semi major axis describe the shape of the orbital ellipse. Semi major axis tells you how big the orbit is and the eccentricity tells you how circular the orbit is. 0 being a circle and less than 1 is an ellipse. Greater than 1 is not an orbit. Orbital inclination and argument of peri apsis are related. Inclination is the angle relative to a reference plane as you expect. Argument of periapsis is the where the obiting body passes closest to its central body that it's orbiting. What makes this complex is that the argument is relative to the inclination of the orbit. ?????? Example: an argument of 0 means that the point of closest approach happens when the obiting body passes through the reference plane mentioned above.

Do you need this for the game, no because we do not calcute orbitals for our ships. However, for the purposes of immersion, you can get a sense of the layout of a solar system from this data. Particarly if the planets are all at very different inclinations, then travel distances between them could long - for example.
The
fact that this data is being displayed suggests that the Background sim is calculating the position of the planets and moons in each star system where there are players. Pretty amazing to me that all of this would be happening as it means that the distances and relationships of the planets is changing - however slowly.