Introduce yourself!
About me:
I’ve been coding a bit of astronomy since the VIC-20 was a thing. The first program I remember writing was a 2-body gravitational system in BASIC. Since that time I was a nuc electrician’s mate on the USS Aspro (SSN 648) and a professor of entomology at University of Illinois (my research was a sort of "ancestry.com" for honey bees). I now live in Alexandria, Virginia, and spend most of my time coding or planning my next photography/hiking excursion.
Comments
I'll be around here to answer questions about I, Voyager as you develop your game. I have no idea whether it will be good or terrible to set a space tycoon game in a realistic solar system -- but no one has done it before!
I'm an ex-professional programmer, currently just a hobbyist and a stay-at-home dad. I'm also an amateur photographer (astrophotography among other things) and a musician. My girlfriend is a mad scientist and our son is named after a constellation.
Just a note on "Newtonian orbital mechanics": What a lot of people mean when they say this is that you have position/velocity updates each frame based on good ol' F = ma. However, to get anything close to real-life solar system positions doing so, you need a super computer. Well, NASA has that. What we do is put everything "on tracks" based on NASA's solutions (the tracks are "orbit elements"). The tracks move due to perturbations (these are "element rates" we also get from NASA).
You can still add a spaceship or planet with position/velocity/mass. It's just a little indirect. Look at the Body and Orbit objects (system_tree/body.gd & system_refs/orbit.gd). Let me know if you have questions.