This Addon for Celestia provides a rendering of the Manticore star system, inspired by books by David Weber.
Information about Celestia is available at http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
If you restore this Zip file into Celestia's Extras directory, it should recreate all of the directories and files necessary for the Addon to work with Celestia v1.6.1 or later.
Each of the following methods of viewing this Addon provides a different set of experiences.
The included HTML (Web) file "manticore.html" contains Cel:// URLs which will take you to a few viewpoints around the Manticore system. The first time they're used, you'll have to tell your Web browser that it's OK for URLs to run a program on your computer.
The included folder "scripts" contains .CelX scripts which provide brief tours of the planets orbiting Manticore-A and Manticore-B. Select (double-click on) the icon of the script you want to run.
Celestia's menu "Navigation" --> "Solar System Browser" can take you to objects orbiting around the Barycenter of the Manticore system. Unfortunately, a bug in Celestia prevents the browser from taking you to planets orbiting the stars Manticore-A and Manticore-B.
If you know the name of a place where you want to go, you can type to Celestia this sequence of commands:
where [Enter] means you should press on the large Enter key at the right side of your keyboard, and g means you should type the letter "g" to go to the object.
Note that you must first have gone to the star Manticore-A before you can go to one of its planets or moons, and the planetary system of Manticore-B can't be visited until you go to Manticore-B.
A few very rudimentary spacecraft models are included in the Addon: a battleship, solar power stations, some space forts and a few others. It would be nice if they could be supplemented with space stations, asteroid processing plants, spacecraft manufacturing complexes and/or replaced by more sophisticated designs.
The surface textures used for the habitable planets Manticore, Sphynx and Gryphon are random fractal surfaces. They have no relationship whatsoever to how the planets are described in the books. It would be nice if those surfaces could be replaced by more plausible surface maps.
No city lights are shown on the night sides of the inhabited planets. They could be provided with the use of Celestia's SSC directive NightTexture and an appropriate texture image.
All of the included planet surface textures have a resolution of only 1024x512 pixels. Higher resolution images would allow closer viewing of the planetary surfaces, although they'd make the Addon larger.
It'd be nice to have more accurate orbital information.
For simplicity, the orbits of the stars and planets are aligned using the coordinate system used to describe objects in our Solar System. As a result, the ecliptic planes of the Manticore system is parallel to our own, and its principle axes are aligned with ours. It's more likely that their alignments would be at some unknown angles instead.
The planets have been positioned in their orbits approximately as shown in the system diagrams on page 3 of Jayne's Intelligence Review, Volume 1 (also identified as [JIR1]). Since that publication is dated 1905PD, the date for the positions was taken to be January 1, 4007CE. Because of the vagueness of the date and the difficulty in estimating the planets' positions, this Addon probably shouldn't be used either to plan interplanetary spacecraft trajectories or to make astrological predictions ;) (And let's not get into the discussion of the orbital period of Sphynx: it is specified in the SSC catalog as it is described in the available documentation, which is not what would be required by the physics of orbital dynamics.)
Please contact one of the authors of this Addon if you would like to provide enhancements to be incorporated into the next version of this Addon. Each of us can be reached on the Weber forum at http://forums.davidweber.net/ as "Ensign Re-read" and "selden", respectively.
Also, please don't hesitate to create your own Addons which can be used in conjunction with this one, or by themselves.
Sometimes models are drawn bright red instead of shaded. This happens when Celestia tries to apply more lighting effects than are allowed by the OpenGL shader routines. It's a side effect of being illuminated by two suns and having to draw planet-shine and eclipse shadows caused by both suns at the same time. Some workarounds are to turn off some of the shading effects (eclipse shadows, for example), or to tell Celestia not to use OpenGL v2.0 shading: type a Ctrl-V several times while Celestia is running.
This Addon was inspired by a series of books about Honor Harrington and the Star Kingdom of Manticore, written by David Weber. For more information, visit http://www.davidweber.net/
Some of the information used to create this Addon was obtained from publications by Ad Astra Games. For more information, visit http://www.adastragames.com/
Additional information was found on the Web sites http://honorverse.wikia.com/ and http://honorverseglossary.wikispaces.com/
The models included in this Addon were created using Anim8or, a free 3D design program written by Steve Glanville. For more information, visit http://www.anim8or.com/
The planet surface textures included in this Addon were created using Planet, a free program written by Torben Æ. Mogensen. For more information, visit http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/torbenm/Planet/
This Addon for Celestia was created by Selden Ball and Ensign Re-read. It is Copyright © December, 2011. All rights reserved.
This Addon may be freely redistributed for educational purposes. All included models and documents were created entirely by the authors. They may not be used for any commercial benefit without explicit written permission from the authors.
Ensign Re-read and Selden Ball
December, 2011