testtubegames wrote:So, I sit down to my computer for the first time in quite a few days -- returning from a trip to a place with very sparse internet. I boot up the forums to see what's up in the world... and I find this! So cool.
What a neat idea! I wasn't sure what to expect when I loaded it... but, yeah, you 'fractilized' that planetary system.
I plugged in your python code, too, and tried my hand (not so successfully) at making other neat systems. With too many planets, of course, you can't zoom out enough to see them. Or you have to cramp them in so close to one another that their motion chaotically decays.
What surprises me, in fact, is how little decay you notice in your examples. You take a couple of circularly co-orbiting planets, and replace one with a closer set of co-orbiting planets, moving about the same space. To the 0'th order, that's *kinda* not changed anything. But of course, it really has. Instead of a 2-body system, there's a 3-body system, and chaos will tend to take over. At least, in a bunch of my examples, chaos took over. But it seems you've been able to space things appropriately to keep order (for as long as I've had the patience to run them). There must be some rule that could tell you what values of locexp, say, you'd need to keep the pattern from decaying (for a given amount of time). Hrm, gotta think about it more...
To get a better view of the system, you could edit the starting X coordinate. (But be careful, Xset and x0 are opposites of each other: If the first (smallest) mass starts at -39000, Xset has to be 39000.
I think the problem is you're setting locexp to too small values. When I played around with the script, I found that 4 was too small, so I stuck with 5. (If it gets to still be an issue, there's always 6!)
Oh, and I found a bug related to initmass
I've fixed it, but if you changed it earlier it might have caused problems.
Edit: Actually I didn't, apparently. Will look closer later. Yes I did, I just forgot to update it in the interpreter. The link's fixed too. Have fun with a high-speed version of the original:
Code: Select all
Gravity Fun at TestTubeGames.com: [ForceG: -2,Qual: 1,Zoom: 1,xSet: 0,ySet: 0], [x0: -310,y0: 0,vx: 0,vy: 10.1622776602,t0: 0,who: 2,m: 1000], [x0: -290,y0: 0,vx: 0,vy: 0.162277660168,t0: 0,who: 2,m: 1000], [x0: -200,y0: 0,vx: 0,vy: -1.16227766017,t0: 0,who: 2,m: 2000], [x0: 250,y0: 0,vx: 0,vy: -2.0,t0: 0,who: 2,m: 4000]