Elite and Procedural Solar Systems

[Bill Phil]

So, just about everyone knows about Elite: Dangerous. The franchise itself has actually been around for quite a while, since the 80s, even. But I'm a bit more interested in the science behind the sequels, Frontier, First Encounters and Dangerous. They had, and havem fairly realistic procedural generation of entire star systems, not just the one star and planet like the first game. They've been improving the way it's done with every game.

What I would like to know is the science behind it. How do accretion disks become solar systems? What are the determining factors? How could I go about making a procedural solar system? Not the terrain, but the planets and moons, with Keplerian Orbits, and the star, with its own data.

I want more than just randomly generating those things in the solar system, I would like to do it realistically.

Thanks, guys. You're the best.

[Nikolai]

How do accretion disks become solar systems?

The Accrete project has used some scientific papers to simulate the formation of a solar system. If you use a known random seed, it will generate them procedurally. The papers on which it is based have since been superseded by later findings and models, but it's a place to start.

http://znark.com/create/accrete.html