pushing a label fix now so it's not a guessing game. thanks.
Life looks much easier when realising that we're all flying at least ~30 km/s through dark space every second of our lives.
Thank you so much! I was just thinking about how to create something similar a month ago for my birthday, but didn't succeed like you did.
And definitely give yours another shot. Since this is just vanilla JS, feel free to view source on mine to see how I handled the frame loop if you get stuck.
It's interesting to see how little effect the orbit and rotation had on the straight line. A proposal is to align the numbers for the different movement categories so that it's easier to see the magnitudes of them.
It took me a couple of seconds to understand the concept, from the title I though it was going to be a planner to show gravity assists etc.
Good call on the number alignment. I'm using a variable-width font which makes comparing them messy. I'll switch to monospace or tabular-nums in the next push so the magnitudes scan better.
And fair point on the title-'calculator' implies mission planning. Maybe 'travel visualizer' would have been safer!
treating 'distance traveled' as a proxy for age since we're all stuck on the same rock moving at the same speed.
also there are some cursors with question marks but they don't espatially ;) call the FAQ, do they? firefox on win10
re: the cursors that's definitely my bad UX. they are just hover tooltips (standard title attributes), but setting the cursor to help (?) makes them look like clickable buttons. i'll swap that out so it's less confusing. thanks for the firefox check.
i thought about it, but i was worried a log scale might abstract away the 'feeling' of the distance (making a light year look deceptively close to a kilometer). i want the user to feel small, and log scales tend to make things look manageable.
but you're right it's probably the only way to fit the solar loops and galactic arc on the same screen visually. might be worth a prototype for v2.