ok so after shipping i kept looking at the payout and the ratings and it was pretty obvious why the multiplier was low people said it looked cool but there was nothing to DO with it. fair. it was a screensaver. so i turned it into a sandbox.

biggest change: the sim now runs on REAL orbital data. each planet has its actual semi-major axis (AU), eccentricity, and period from nasa’s jpl, and the sun actually sits at the true focus of every orbit now (before, the ellipses were centered on the sun which is wrong kepler’s first law says the sun is at a focus). i also found out my local copy of main.js was some old backup from day 1, so the kepler code i thought was there had vanished from disk good reminder to commit more.

new stuff:

• click any planet and get a data panel with semi-major axis, eccentricity, period, live distance from the sun, mean anomaly and true anomaly
• pause/play + time speed slider (0-500x) + a real date picker, so you can jump to any date and see where the planets actually were. “where were the planets on my birthday” is now a use case instead of a screensaver
• solver view: the newton-raphson solve of kepler’s equation drawn on the canvas — auxiliary circle, M point, E point, and the iteration dots literally marching onto the answer. i think this is the coolest thing, you can watch the math converge
• orbit editor: eccentricity + orbit size sliders per planet, live reshape, reset to real values
• the moon orbiting earth at its real ~27 day period
• scroll to zoom

the solver viz took the longest to get right because i wanted the construction to be mathematically correct, not just decorative. the moon was easy lol.