Well you dont need a few years, you need a month or four, i mean for the moon, it does the whole belt in 30 days, so you just need 30 days of data, the sun we already have, and the others, well meh, Eroee and Sidiak are ok, 3-4 months to do the belt, Tarox half a year, all good there, i mean we could just half the suns belt, cept the sun doesn't do retrograde. Now we have Papaxi and Aapek which do it in -about- a year, now this might be a day or not short of a year. Though a group of Astrologers working together would be good, i very much doubt it'll ever happen, i mean how'r the cities/communes gonna like it if all the Astrologers are suddenly working together, all happy like, while the rest of are fighting, killing, butchering eachother?

An Jairdan, i have nooo idea about sin waves yet >.> Just finished yr11 Maths damn it.

The orbital periods aren't exactly going to match a sine wave. Heck, not even RL orbital periods match sine waves. Orbits don't need to be spherical. Things speed up as they get closer to the sun.

Yeah... but who says the Sun is the center of our universe, i mean hell, Lusternia might be the center, and we using rl science say it's the sun.

But yeah, i dont even know much about Sine waves, but there's two ways of doing this, the old fashioned, people sitting in Astrolabe, and well then we can work out the pattern from that, or what ever Jairdan is suggesting, though either way, you'd get accurate results.

real life orbital patterns don't because you are dealing with fluctuations in gravity and all that sort of stuff, here in Lusternia we are dealing with a closed system without any real chaos factor (except for the rounding to the nearest day, which a sin wave regression (yes, I know its sine, but i'm used to shorthanding it in written equations) can take into account.

Soo, yes, if you did it correctly, you could get 90% accurate predictions.

Hmm I might make a Celestine Alt just to check out this Astrology.

That's true but largely irrelevent. It wasn't the elliptical nature of orbits that made Archimedes toss out the sine wave approach, it was something much more simple: the fact that you're standing on a body that's also moving in an orbit. That's why they needed those godawful, far-worse-than-a-sine-wave epicycles (essentially, sums of powers of sine waves), which didn't even work, to get anywhere near modeling anything. That failure is what pushed from the geocentric to the heliocentric model.

What is being proposed is essentially what Kepler did, and the math is far, far, far more complex than a sine wave, because you have to account for your own planet's motion as well as that of the other bodies, which is why it required much more accurate measurements than Lusternian astrologers can make. Heck, you can't even tell how far through a sign a body is.

But the odds are that all that was not implemented because (a) it's really not required for the coding effort involved, particularly given that the Moon's orbit has been impossibly wrong since day one and hardly anyone noticed that; and (b) an accurate system would be likely very imbalancing since time spent in different signs would vary considerably, syzygies would be far scarcer, and inner planets would never be very far from the sun so the impact of the sun's current location would be much more important than it is now, while the inner planets would be much less important.

Assuming that what was modeled is only sidereal time, what's visible from Lusternia as it orbits (assuming it does) and not the underlying heliocentric, synodic movements, even a sine wave is more than you need (since there's no amplitude to measure changing anyway).

Well, I was thinking Amplitude would be the signs they traveled through, while the length of the graph measues out the days, so the (X,Y) coordinate would give you the sign when you went and found the particular day on the graph.

If amplitude measured the sign, then a sign wave would have them go through signs in a pendulum order, not a circular order. E.g.: volcano, antlers, twin crystals, dolphin, twin crystsals, antlers, volcano. Now that would be some interesting orbital mechanics!

Well, obviously it would take some ability to visualize it being flipped on the way up for it to work properly on a sin wave :-P But, its a fairly simple thing to do so long as you understand all the parts. Obviously i'm not going into a full on explanation of every last detail, cause, if the person using my idea can't be creative, they deserve to screw up :-P

ahem... i've said it before the basin of life is flat... look at the damn picture. In relation to this, Celestial bodies are half-formed dieties with random sleeping patterns that walk around the flat basin in a lazy but also random pattern. Also you can tell which diety is the fatest by the speed of their movement.

No one cares about Celestial bodies, it's the Astral bodies we're interested in!

(I had to make that correction like 50 times to the ghelp file. Which -I- wrote. >_<)

I believe one of our coders have fixed the moon thing. Because it travels so fast, it really is shifting signs in the middle of the day and then gets rounded off to the nearest day. When you round to the nearest day, it causes it to appear uneven since some times it rounds to 1 day within the sign and sometimes rounds to 2 days. Now it should shift in mid-day, making the time period when measured in Lusternian hours approximately the same for every period. This should not really have a noticeable impact on the planets since being off by a day due to rounding is not as noticeable for something with a time period of several months or several years.