Forums » Suggestions

Asteroid Orbit

Dec 20, 2008 Kierky link
Imagine, a really large asteroid, with a whole lot of little asteroids, circling it in orbit, travelling at different speeds.

Comments and Suggestions to Improve Appreciated & Welcome.
Dec 20, 2008 ratonu link
First step to having planets. I don't know if the game engine supports gravity and inertia... Even as a "technology park" somewhere in some gray sector, this would be interesting to see...
Dec 20, 2008 Daare link
Tangentially related but speaks to the problem of one large object using the current graphics engine.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/20028#250169
Dec 20, 2008 Person link
Hmm... Asteroids circling other asteroids...

I hope that before suggesting anything like this in the future, you at least understand the physics behind what you're suggesting. Yes, there are many parts of VO that largely depart from actual Physics, partly to make the programming easier, partly to make the game more fun. But honestly, GRAVITY between two objects that are sand-grains of mass on the galactic scale?!? Recommended reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation

But don't just take my word for it. Let's do some math. For this to be even slightly interesting, roids would need to be traveling at a speed of at least 10m/s. And to make it look not stupid, they'd have to be moving in an orbit of at least a kilometer. Now the centripetal force required to keep an object moving in a circle is mv^2/r. Because were just talking about gravitation, the gravitational force must be equal to m/10 where m is the mass of the orbiting roid. Now let's look at the formula for gravitational force: GMm/r^2 where G~10^-10.

Through use of our brains, we get 1/10 = 10^-10)M/1,000,000 so
M = 10^15 kg or 1,000,000,000,000,000 kg or one QUINTILLION kilograms.

Therefore, any roid small enough to fit in a sector would have to be a black hole to induce even a reasonable amount of gravitational force on its surroundings. So really, your suggesting that the devs put black holes in the game. I'm not even going to respond to that one.
Dec 20, 2008 Armonia link
or, we can have little asteroids orbiting around a bigger asteroid and you leave the technobabble out of it.
Dec 20, 2008 Daare link
As a dedicated technobabbler, I can say that it's not technobabble if it's real physics and mathematics. The confusion is understandable though since the best technobabble is *based* on real physics (and usually pretends that mathematics doesn't exist).

That being said, I think it's unfair to slam the idea just because it violates the known laws of physics in a game which uses severely violated laws of physics. If static asteroid fields can exist than it isn't completely implausible that rotating ones could also. Whether it's feasible or not...
Dec 20, 2008 Armonia link
agreed
Dec 21, 2008 Person link
The problem is not as much that it defies the laws of Physics, but that certain laws of Physics are more intuitively ingrained in our brains than others. Gravity just happens to be one of them. If you saw one roid orbiting another, the logical conclusion would be to look for the rope between the two it to move in that way. You see extremely massive things every day in real life, and yet you aren't gravitationally attracted to them, so your brain would not accept that in a game either.

Also, in my last post, I also failed to point out the obvious: it could potentially be rather hellish to program, and would not really add anything to the game.