System designer and Kerbol system in Celestia

[Aetherdyne]

Last week, I saw a thread suggesting possible additional planets elsewhere on the forums, and it occurred to me that people might want to fool around with those suggested planets in Celestia, which is a free astronomy exploration program available here.

I'm no stranger to modifying Celestia with fictional star systems; I did it a fair amount several years ago with the Terran Trade Authority series, including creating some of the planetary textures. More to the point, I created a spreadsheet back then to ease the burden of designing new systems for Celestia, which I am making available (see below) so people can do this sort of thing themselves. Instructions for use are included, though they may be slightly out-of-date, in that there's a new tab to centralize the output which is not currently described. I'll warn you that the process is a bit fiddly, but I think it's better than doing it all by hand.

I've also included a very preliminary rendition of the canonical Kerbal star system -- mostly it just has all of the named bodies at their proper sizes and orbital positions. It does not currently include textures, meshes, etc. to make the planets look like they do in-game, though I went to some effort to find stand-ins. I currently use a few textures I already had lying about from my TTA work (included) as well as some real solar system textures (which come with Celestia). For example, Mars is pretending to be Duna, and Earth is pretending to be Kerbin.

Actual textures for some Kerbal planets and moons can be obtained from the KSP wiki, and of course potentially from KSP itself, but I haven't done this for you ... I'd prefer to make my own high-res versions. Just haven't gotten to it yet.

Because Kerbol is not a real star, and I haven't gotten around to adding it to Celestia's database, I am currently putting the planets in orbit around Van Maanen's Star, a white dwarf about 14 light-years from Earth (white dwarves are very small ... actually a lot smaller than Kerbol should be, but it's just a quick fix). A script is included that will cause Celestia to travel to this star and thence to Kerbin when you start the program.

To get the system into Celestia, backup your current start.cel file (if you care about it) and then unpack the archive into the main Celestia directory. It should place everything into the correct directory. Let me know if you run into any issues.

The spreadsheet and texture files are under the CC-BY-NC license.

[AustralianFries]

Huh... This is really interesting. I'll check this out.

[Aetherdyne]

Hopefully it is helpful.

I was poking around the spreadsheet file, and I think I figured out a way to make it a bit easier to cope with in the next version. I've started moving toward making it less fiddly when you have multiple tabs for planets and moons ... now for a moon (for example) you'd just specify the name of the tab the planet data is on and which planet it is, and the sheet grabs the info it needs that way. There will also be a way to specify which planets/moons to include in the output so you don't have to manually remove the extra lines that aren't being used. It will take me awhile to fully switch the spreadsheet over to the new methods, though.

The next version will also include Kerbol itself as an extra star (they aren't hard to add, I just needed to remind myself how to do it). If you don't want to wait, here are the contents that you should save as kerbol.stc and place in the same locations as ksp-kerbol.ssc

#######################
# Kerbol.stc
#
# This places the system about 5ly "behind" Altair, chosen mostly because Forbidden Planet
#######################
"Kerbol" {					# Star name
        RA 297.6958			# J2000 Right Ascension in degrees
        Dec 8.8797			# J2000 Declination in degrees
        Distance 20			# Distance from Sun in Light Years
        SpectralType "K5V"	# MK spectral and luminosity classification
        AppMag 15			# Apparent visual brightness
	Radius 231999.98	# Radius in km
}
#######################

Kerbol's exact type is, of course, ambiguous according to the wiki, so I just made it a very, very small orange main sequence star. The apparent magnitude value is even more arbitrary (actually, it's just the number that was in whichever file I was looking at for the format).

After you create that file, you will need to open both ksp-kerbol.ssc and start.cel and search-and-replace every instance of "Gliese 35" with "Kerbol" in order to move the planets there and make celestia go to the new star when you open it.

Edited July 3, 2013 by Aetherdyne
forgot a sentence

[sytaline]

Looks cool! Keep going.

[Aetherdyne]

I posted the most recent things I'm fooling around with to my blag here on the forums in this post. I'll probably post things more there in the future, unless I'm releasing an update or discussing something here.

Incidentally, the current version of the files now includes Kerbol as its own star as described above.

Edited July 13, 2013 by Aetherdyne
Probably should not merely link to just the one post.

[Dockillar]

I hope other games do this as well, It would be humorous to see this in Universe sandbox or space engine...

Can't wait to check it out!