[Updated] The Solar System to Scale

[pixelfck]

Space, is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is.
~The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (1979)

Mod description:
A micro adventure that takes you into our solar system either the Sun, planets and moons and the distances between them to scale or the Sun, planets and moons but the distances between fastly reduced to match the Transcendence pixel to light seconds scale.

I created this mod mostly to satisfy my own curiosity about the distances and scale in our solar system. It is one thing to read that Saturn is 1,433,449,370 km (890,745,438.518 miles) away from the sun, it is a whole different experience crossing the distance in your Wolfen-class gunship.

Download: The Solar System to Scale

Version information:
Game version: 1.3
API Version: 22
Mod name: The Solar System to Scale
Mod version: v1.02
Release Date: 2014-06-30
Author: Pixelfck
Licence: CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike)


Game modifications:
none

[RPC]

Awesome Pixel!

[RPC]

Found bugs D:

Pixel nuu.png (173.66 KiB) Viewed 9836 times

Also love this info on Earth

love this.png (219.35 KiB) Viewed 9836 times

[pixelfck]

Nice catch! I've fixed the bug and re-uploaded the mod on xelerus. Latest version is now v1.01.

[digdug]

1:1 scale with the solar system ? Woah ! This is pretty awesome since Mutos tried it in 2009-10 and failed because the game couldn't manage too large systems. so he had to reduce the distances using a scaling factor.

[pixelfck]

I guess the engine made some progress

Also, I've only included a relatively small part of our solar system in this mod; no Trans Neptunian Objects have been included. At the same time, no object smaller than 1/8 the size of our moon (rounded up) is included, because they would have been smaller than 1 pixel in diameter:

• The Sun
  • Mercury
  • Venus
  • Earth
    • The Moon
  • Mars
  • Main asteroid belt
    • 4 Vesta
    • 3 Juno
    • Ceres
    • 2 Pallas
    • 10 Hygiea
  • Jupiter
    • Io
    • Europa
    • Ganymede
    • Callisto
  • Saturn
    • Mimas
    • Enceladus
    • Tethys
    • Dione
    • Rhea
    • Titan
    • Iapetus
  • Uranus
    • Miranda
    • Ariel
    • Umbriel
    • Titania
    • Oberon
  • Neptune
    • Proteus
    • Triton

~Pixelfck

[Vachtra]

The scale is a bit off for the game system but at least the objects are to scale with each other.
To game scale would be about 1/27th the size you currently have it making earth barely over 1 pixel if you wanted it to be the right size and the sun a mere 111 pixels. Even at this scale you get a nice comparison.
I've been working on this on and off for some time with asteriod belts and elliptical orbits. Still some time until it's done.
I do not and will not have the moons to scale with the planets. it will be more like the current setup where you more get a feel of the planet areas. Otherwise it's either just a bunch of pixels or planet on top of planet. No fun for little Harpo.
It would be neat to have a ship designed to accelerate like current craft. Then we'd really see the size and headache they go through. Saturn in two years. Make sure you point it in the right direction.

Just so you know, i get a little picky sometimes, i like the mod. Lots of data to convert and compare. Would like a little more info on the planets though. Some of the docking screens still broken too.

[pixelfck]

Everything is exactly to scale (rounded to the nearest whole pixel).

The adventure named 'The solar system to scale' has 1 pixel = 434.275 km for the sizes of the Sun, the (dwarf) planets, the moons, the asteroids and the distances between all of them. This scale completely replaces the 1 pixel is 12,500 km rule used in vanilla Transcendence, so the units shown by your targeting scanner are off by a factor of ~28.8.

The adventure 'The solar system NOT to scale' uses the transcendence pixel to light-second scale for distances (1 pixel = 12,500 km); so the distances shown by your ships targeting scanner are correct. The object sizes (including the sun) use the above mentioned 1 pixel = 434.275 km.

The mod includes all (known) objects with a (mean[1]) diameter larger than 217.137 km. Any object smaller than this would result in a 0×0 pixels object.

Distances between objects are defined by semi-major-axis and eccentricity. Since the Transcendence engine does not support Argument of periapsis, all the defined Kepler orbits have an argument of periapsis of 0. At the same time all[2] orbiting bodies have been given a mean anomaly of 0, so they are nicely lined up for us to explore. If I had given them their real mean anomaly, the distances between them would have been a lot larger.

Some of the docking screens still broken too.

This is not the most helpful of bug reports. If you found any broken docking screens, please name them (which planet/moon did they appear on) so I can fix them.

~Pixelfck

1: For some of the smaller objects (10 Hygiea for example) the mean diameter is not exactly known. In all those cases, the objects in question were close to the 1×1 pixel threshold.
2: In the 'The solar system NOT to scale' adventure, the mean anomaly for moons is random and for asteroids it has about 16 degrees of variation.

[Vachtra]

Ah there's the scale. Nice to know up front though.
The broken docks are so far everything past Mars. I haven't tried them all but it is a long way and I didn't have my ftl drive in.

Again, nice work.

edit1: i would suggest decreasing the scale at least for you to check the system since it shouldn't affect the final product.

[pixelfck]

I cannot replicate your bug. Are you sure you have the latest version (v1.01) of this mod?

[Vachtra]

Have the current version. It also didn't run in the current beta for me, something about not finding a ship.

[RPC]

It ran fine for me, can you post the error that showed up?

[Vachtra]

Tried it again with the same file I already had and it behaved this time. Who knows....

[Vachtra]

Something I've noticed is that the mask area for the sun is a rectangle in the upper right area of the sun approximately the size of the viewable area. Is this a limit with the game?

edit: Dropped cargo at the corners and they're just outside of the view and seem to make a square.

[Jay2Jay]

It would be cool if you made every system to scale. Imagine a transcendence where everything is to scale.... This would include either increasing the speed of all ships to make up for the distance or at lease increasing the autopilot factor. Could someone make it so that you can choose which level of autopilot to use? That would be cool.

Jay2Jay out! \(0_0\) (/0_0)/ \(>o<)/