/plaNetarium

Godot library for N-body orbital dynamics

Primary LanguageGDScript

PlaNetarium

In-development Godot library for N-body orbital dynamics simulation, wherein multiple 'Gravitors' (stars, planets, moons, etc.), moving along fixed Keplerian orbital tracks, generate gravity that acts on 'Gravitees' (satellites, spacecraft, etc.).

Designed with a focus on game development (real-time performance and easy interactability) rather than actual orbital analysis.

Screenshot of the application

The Keplerian orbits are computed with W.H. Goodyear's Universal Variable Formulation1, while the N-body dynamics are were done with Forest and Ruth's fourth-order symplectic integrator2, but are now done with PEFRL3 (as it's nominally 340x more accurate, at the cost of an extra force sampling).

Skybox starmap from Solar System Scope, under CC Attribution 4.0

Footnotes

  1. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19660027556 ↩

  2. Forest, E.; Ruth, Ronald D. (1990). "Fourth-order symplectic integration". Physica D. 43: 105–117. doi:10.1016/0167-2789(90)90019-L. ↩

  3. Omelyan, Igor & Mryglod, Ihor & Reinhard, Folk. (2002). "Optimized Forest-Ruth- and Suzuki-like algorithms for integration of motion in many-body systems". Computer Physics Communications. 146. 188. doi:10.1016/S0010-4655(02)00451-4. ↩