Or at least, the material that covers them is. Why is it so hard for someone to lay out the problem nice and simply – “given these parameters and position at origin time, the position & velocity at time T will be:…”.
Still, it’s fun to screw around with. I’m making some progress – I can at least calculate the period of a Kepler orbit correctly. I’ve also coded up a bunch of algorithms for determining position & velocity, but their “input” is the angle of the position in question, not a time… so I’ll need to figure out how to map time to angle, and from there get the actually useful values.
It’s now 3:12 AM. I shouldn’t be staying up this late. I had planned on working from home tomorrow morning while doing washing, but maybe I won’t have time now. :/
Still… it’s been a long time since I stayed up late coding. It’s kind of nice. More rewarding than doing the same playing Left 4 Dead 2.
