How to Calculate and Visualize Orbital Trajectory?

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#1

I want to be able to see my objects trajectory in orbit without having to wait for it to fully pass. I looked up trajectory formulas and saw some promising stuff on kinematic functions but unfortunately that was in C# and not in Lua and I don’t understand how to implement the math.

All I need is the formulas and a bit of explanation, thanks! Link to video of the orbital motion

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#2

The Beam object can be used to represent conics. I included a small utility library in the weapons system that Roblox has released that is used to handle parabolic arcs, both with rendering and raycasting.

Parabola.lua (6.3 KB)

This might be a good start. Check out Parabola:_setBeamControlPoint() and Parabola:renderToBeam() for an example of setting a beam’s CurveSize properties to render a parabola. This can be extended to other conic sections, but I’ll admit I’m not really a strong mathematician these days.

#3

Thanks but what I mean’t by visualize I mean’t how to represent the data