Beware of Asteroids!

[Snowmantis]

Agreed that if you prepared properly the Ship crew and the ships sensors should be able to take on the asteroid. I was ready with a ship, armaments, ground based weapon platforms, etc and I still lost my planet.

Lets face it, manually flying a ship and manually firing weapons is NOT something a new player can be expected to handle.

[Haxus]

The city report is fixed, pending server update.

Asteroid events reported by observatories now show direction angle, azimuth angle, and distance to asteroid, relative to the solar system.

Fixed various issues with ships, mission orders, and crew. Asteroids are not difficult now, if you have a ship with weapons and sensors.

Asteroids are easy enough to engage that I blew up a few in deep space, far from my system. This led to finding and fixing a minor error that caused the broken bits to be cleaned up from my scene instantly in deep space. Some garbage cleanup code needed tweaking.

[Deantwo]

Looking at the sensor contact information from a city report, I am not sure how I can use it to locate the asteroid.

Code:

Hazardous asteroid observed! Orbit collides with <my world> <time and date> GMT. 6,096.0m diameter. 998.8m/s velocity. Spotted SE at 128°, azimuth -26°, 18,929,783m away relative to the solar system plane of ecliptic.

First it says "south east (128°)", that is simple enough to locate with the helm's compass.
The "azimuth -26°" on the other hand I don't quite understand. I googled what "azimuth" means, and from what I understand it is the same as the first degrees.


What I am missing is the "altitude". So I am not sure if maybe "azimuth" was meant to be "altitude" or not.

On the other hand, it is not possible to change the helm compass of a space fighter to be relative to the solar system plane.

PS: Did the distance of an AU change with the new universe?

Update: My city suddenly stopped detecting the asteroid, so I don't know what happened. I can't stay awake another hour to find out if it is really coming or not. Cities have been having a really weird time detecting asteroids since universe reset, observatories don't seem to detect the upcoming asteroids at all.

[Kiwi]

I just used the city report information to successfully intercept an asteroid.
Here's the math, I used the Solar System coordinates:
I'm denoting the first angle reported as A, the second angle as B and the distance as D.
I'm also using degrees here. If you're putting this into a spreadsheet it may assume radians so you'll need to multiply the angles by π/180.
One AU is 724205m. The asteroid distance is given in m and we need the coordinates in AU, so that's why the division is there.

Asteroid X = sin(A)*cos(B)*D/724205
Asteroid Y = cos(A)*cos(B)*D/724205
Asteroid Z = sin(B)*D/724205

I'm in the process of putting this into a nice, useable google sheet. I'll update my post when it's done.

Edit: Here it is. Go to "File > Make a copy" so you can use / edit it.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...sp=sharing

[Norway174]

-snip-

Whoa... That's some real complicated math. I've never been able to wrap my head around the sin() and cos() stuff.
Thanks for making this is into a neat little sheet so dumb people like me can figure out the location. :D

[Falkenkopf]

Thanks for the calculation aid.

Seems, you need to be a scientist (at least mathematician) - and a professional 3D designer to play this game properly. ;-)
I like and dislike these circumstances at the same time.

I like challenges and this one with the asteroid is a very cool one.

But I'm a slow person and like to enjoy slow progress, having time to learn the controls and mechanics of a game and the ambience (i love the visuals/mechanics of celestial objects in this game). So maybe the asteroid shoul start to appear, when a specific level of progress is made (i.e. civilization has reached the progession level of building a decent spacecraft, that is capable to destroy the asteroid). If the player is able to do so within a week and if he has the understanding and abilities to really prevent the impact, is another story, that leaves enough room for some nice doomsday news. :-)

[AnrDaemon]

You don't need to. All equations are already well known, you just need elementary school education to substitute variable values. But even that is not required, many a people played this game "by the eye", tweaking and rotating the things until they get usable results.

[Vhwatgoes]

Edit: Here it is. Go to "File > Make a copy" so you can use / edit it.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...sp=sharing

This sheet is super handy. As someone with the math skill that according to some would fail elementary school, I can say this sheet will save empires.

[Celarious]

I tried the math manually the first time, got it completely wrong, and this spreadsheet just saved my ass. Thanks for making it!

[Deadeye]

With the servers being offline, is the impact date also pushed forward? Ours is supposed to be arriving today but it looks like we won't be able to do anything about it at the moment.