It's Only Rocket Science, How Hard Could It Be?

I’ve added a test object ‘Satellite Hub’ to play with satellite tech and see what challenges I’ll face if I ever want to add player launched satellite or space station gameplay. I discovered plenty of problems that would need to be solved but I did develop some useful features that have made it into current builds.

I wanted to stabilize launched satellites and have them behave the same way moons and planets do for vehicle navigation and orbit calculations. For this I needed to go from a position and velocity to a solution of orbital mechanics.

This was difficult work. I made use of Bing chat AI and ChatGPT 4 to help explain, modify and write a special orbital mechanical library for my 2D 2 body simulation with all the odd properties of my mini solar system. The AI solutions came with lots of bugs so I ended up having to solve a few orbital mechanical equations manually. Solving these equations took me a lot of time and paper so I whipped together an orbital graphing calculator in Unity instead so I could play around with the math.

Eventually I fixed up the math and was able to replace all the world's existing orbital calculations. This boosted realism as the relationship between the eccentricity, orbital period, distance and offset from the center of the gravity well are now all derived from real orbital mechanics. So moons and planets have more realistic orbits.

Have a look at the orbit renderer I'm using when you're travelling between worlds. I think it's way easier to tell what you're looking at when you're interplanatary now.