HalcyonSpirit

If you can, it might be a good idea. There's a bit of an expectation in some parts that that's how things work. With certain graphs, people expect the results to be based on the graph's limits, so a recalculation is necessary for that. However, that's up to you. The real question is what you think will be more useful for the people using the program: having increased resolution or increased breadth of options in the displayed results by zooming, or having a quick way to change the area of results based on an initial calculation? If you have to choose just one, this has to be considered.

Yeah, sure, I'll have a go at it. And thanks for the book ID, I'll probably be getting it sometime regardless of what I end up doing. Even though I'm not in the industry yet, aerospace is where I want to be, and astro stuff is my big interest. As far as my program goes, no point in worrying about the complicated issues until the fundamentals are implemented. Those are easy enough, though I do need to figure out a more general transfer orbit function than the ones I currently have.

I'm of course interested in beta-testing, but I'm also wary of the fact that I saw you use terms like "genetic algorithms," "porkchop plots" and "Lambert solvers" and all I could keep thinking to myself was this. Of course once I pulled out my notes from my classes I recognized the Lambert stuff, and I know the ideas behind most everything else that you've mentioned once I remembered them, but my lack of real-world experience with the stuff does show... (More than two years out of college and I still can't land an aerospace-related job. Blah, stupid economy.) It probably wouldn't be hard for me to quickly pick up what you're doing, but I just wonder how useful I'd be despite that. Regardless, I'll send you a PM about it. If nothing else, there'd be a lot for me to learn from it, and I may be able to pick up on any possible non-obvious errors. I think I'm going to try my hand at writing something as well, if only for myself to brush up on what I already know and expand my ability from there. Probably won't hold a candle to yours for a long time, since I had planned on making mine a simple brute-force type solver initially before improving with optimizations and such. Still, gotta start somewhere. Heck, maybe I'll be ordering textbooks on the subject by the end of it as well! What text did you order, anyway?

Well, looks like you're well on your way toward getting this program operational. Good work so far. Of course, I'm half sad that that's the case, since yesterday I decided I wanted to create a program like this myself. Figured it'd be useful to the community with the upcoming update, and it'd also let me review my Astrodynamics coursework from my aerospace undergrad classes. But sure enough, I come here to see if anyone's done anything similar and here you are creating a program that appears to be more intricate than what I had in mind for my own. A lot further along and using algorithms much more efficient than anything I could probably come up with, too (not exactly trained in coding, just the underlying basics of astrodynamics and enough coding ability to put something together). AND in the more universal Java language, rather than my MATLAB-based program I had planned. Sad day for me, but good work on what you've done so far (from what I can see, anyway). Any thoughts on the kinds of pitfalls and surprises you've encountered when coding your program? I'm most interested in the actual orbital mechanics stuff as far as that goes.