I spent a lot of time at sea mostly being bored in a twenty year career in the USN which makes not having to calculate orbital mechanics a bonus. However, CT Book 2 and MT does I think provide a method for space travel.

On January 20, 2018 at 6:34 PM Caleuche <xxxxxx@sudnadja.com> wrote:

Taking a little bit of a break from analysis of the map data, I thought I'd ask a little about how you all (I still don't like that English doesn't have a distinct plural you) handle the actual space aspect of the game, when you do handle it. I've noticed that much of the discussion tends to avoid this sort of thing and realize that many (most?) Traveller players completely leave these things out of their games, but here I go:

First, to contextualize this, let's say players are in control of a ship and establish orbit around a world. They give you their orbital parameters, their systems do detect another object in orbit. So, you give them a plot:

https://i.imgur.com/fO7K6zm.png

They've established orbit via typical Traveller complete lack of concern about efficient approaches, but you do have state vectors and give them their orbit elements from that:

Eccentricity 0.0499883

Semimajor Axis 31837185 meters

Inclination 57.2958 degrees

Longitude of the Ascending Node 360. degrees

Argument of Periapsis 359.999 degrees

True Anomaly 156.421 degrees

as well as the elements of the unknown object:

Eccentricity 0.193345

Semimajor Axis 12734885 meters

Inclination 18.9076 degrees

Longitude of the Ascending Node 360. degrees

Argument of Periapsis 13.3884 degrees

True Anomaly 166.803 degrees

(this is a quickly contrived situation - there is an off-plot star, this singular world and the two objects orbiting it. The rotation of the star, of the planet, and of the ecliptic are all coplanar - this would normally not be the case).

There are a few problems with this: first, I'd like to be able to take a Traveller-style "clutch of triangles" world map, somehow get it into digital form, and then further project it both onto the 3d sphere as well as the ground track plot. I can do the projection math with no trouble, but what I have yet to do is find if there is a standard, digital format for Traveller world surface maps and if someone has both done the work of writing an import/exporter (in any language, I just want to use it as a template) and if someone has written a utility or .. whatever that can take the corner points of one of the map triangles and output latitude and longitude of that point.

Second, stylistically I'm trying to get to the point that the plots resemble the old NASA 60s and 70s plots, something like this:

https://www.honeysucklecreek.net/images/other_stations/red_lake_images/MA-9_ground_track.jpg

Do you do anything during games to give the games a "golden age of spaceflight" feel? Are astrometrics ever a concern at all in your games? I am going to guess already from the flow of comments on the TML that nowadays players and referees do their best to avoid realistic space flight concerns - for us it would come up now and then that someone on the ground would want to know the rise and set times of an orbiting starship or communications satellite relay, or you as a referee would want to know when the players' ship will overfly a particular object on the ground. Even so, I'm curious what you do to project a feeling of spaceflight, or that Traveller is indeed taking place in space.

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