SpaceERP: episode 2: Location

It is a next episode of a story of me developing a ERP grade system for interstellar operations. In the last episode I was writing about entities. Today I will follow up on the location issue I have recognized before.

Satellites, space crafts etc. have a precise location in the space. As mentioned earlier there can be different ways to located a object. Just like on Earth, with long and lat or by the address.

But in the space it is more complicated! Because if you take Earth as the reference point (0,0) and choose any X, Y, Z directions, position of everything is changing constantly.

A satellite that rounds Earth changes position. Spacecrafts that travel thought space change position. With hundreds of kilometers per hour.

So, it is not possible to mark a position of a space unit. So how will we obtain the position?

I see two ways. First is a travel log. It would be a list of all actions that a space unit does over time: take off, travel, acceleration through gravity, landing, etc.

For each step, say travel, we can provide details to the system: expected velocity, route, etc. Than based on these data, and many other like weight of cargo, we can calculate the current projected position of a spacecraft.

On the other hand things can do differently than in the projection. The spacecraft will change it’s settings to account to not predicted issues.