- #1
whartung
- 13
- 7
- How did you find PF?
I was looking at a post of mine on Stack Overflow, and realized that it was 11 years old.
11 years old, something I was interested in, and am still interested in, but something I don't have a solution for.
I've been spending the past month, off and on, on what I would have thought wasn't an insurmountable problem. But it's a month later, and here we are.
I posted a recent question on SO, and it was almost immediately closed (but thankfully not before someone answered it). But it told me that they weren't interested in the kinds of questions I was asking. It's also a lousy place for discussion, which is what I'm really needing. I need to "talk" to "someone" about what I'm struggling with.
Fundamentally, it looks like my problems may involve differential equations, but I simply don't have that kind of math background. Keywords I've stumbled upon are "Lambert's Problem", "Two value boundary problems", etc. I know what a derivative is, I don't know what the chain rule is (don't know that I care, if my calculator can give me the derivative of an equation, do I care how it's done?). But it's all unapplied vocabulary.
What I'm trying to do is simply "space" stuff, for gaming. Not even a video game, but tabletop. To make things "look right". To answer ballpark questions. I just did a sample simulation on the effect of gravity for a ship I was moving, and found that, yea, there was some impact (of course there is), but not enough to matter for my purposes. I'm not NASA, it's a game. Of course, my sim can be wrong, so there's that as well.
So, I'm badly, and incompletely self taught. Latching on to the little bits I need to move my problem forward rather than trying to be a generalist in any field. Looking at simulation techniques, and problem solving for my simple ("simple") space mechanic problems. I know there's as combination of flat math solutions, but also optimization problems (which is a software thing, not a physics thing). I just want my ship courses to be plotted, which is turning out easier said than done.
Hopefully I can find some common ground for discussion here.
11 years old, something I was interested in, and am still interested in, but something I don't have a solution for.
I've been spending the past month, off and on, on what I would have thought wasn't an insurmountable problem. But it's a month later, and here we are.
I posted a recent question on SO, and it was almost immediately closed (but thankfully not before someone answered it). But it told me that they weren't interested in the kinds of questions I was asking. It's also a lousy place for discussion, which is what I'm really needing. I need to "talk" to "someone" about what I'm struggling with.
Fundamentally, it looks like my problems may involve differential equations, but I simply don't have that kind of math background. Keywords I've stumbled upon are "Lambert's Problem", "Two value boundary problems", etc. I know what a derivative is, I don't know what the chain rule is (don't know that I care, if my calculator can give me the derivative of an equation, do I care how it's done?). But it's all unapplied vocabulary.
What I'm trying to do is simply "space" stuff, for gaming. Not even a video game, but tabletop. To make things "look right". To answer ballpark questions. I just did a sample simulation on the effect of gravity for a ship I was moving, and found that, yea, there was some impact (of course there is), but not enough to matter for my purposes. I'm not NASA, it's a game. Of course, my sim can be wrong, so there's that as well.
So, I'm badly, and incompletely self taught. Latching on to the little bits I need to move my problem forward rather than trying to be a generalist in any field. Looking at simulation techniques, and problem solving for my simple ("simple") space mechanic problems. I know there's as combination of flat math solutions, but also optimization problems (which is a software thing, not a physics thing). I just want my ship courses to be plotted, which is turning out easier said than done.
Hopefully I can find some common ground for discussion here.
!