Although this is actually intended to be a writing resource, I am posting it here (initially at least) to get a broader audience and hopefully some bright person out there who can validate it for me.
As I couldn't find anything out there that did what I wanted, just various Java scripts and apps that each did a bit of it, I have written a little calculator for working out interstellar relativistic times, speeds, distances, accelerations etc. So, for example, given an intial velocity of 0 and acceleration of 1g for two years, then the traveller's apparent time is 1.43 years the final velocity is 0.8996 ly/y (.8996 the speed of light) and the distance travelled would be 1.25 light years.
It can be downloaded here http://www.focussoftware.co.uk/downloads/StarTraveller.zip
And if anyone would like to validate it and see if it produces the result they would expect I would be immensely grateful.
It is pretty simple to use. The only thing to understand is that all units are in years and lightyears. This makes most things pretty simple but you should appreciate that velocities are not in m/s or km/h they are in lightyears/year or ly/y. Also acceleration is the same, so instead of the familiar 1g being 9.81 m/s^2 (metres per second squared) it is 1.03 ly/y^2.
At the moment the download is just a raw exe file zipped. It doesn't really need to be installed in any way, it can just be saved anywhere convenient and run standalone. If there is any interest I might put together a proper installation setup.
Oh, I should add that it is free and that I haven't done any real error checking yet, so it is quite possible that if you put silly values in it may simply crash (divide by zero or some such). Also my intention is to build on this so it can calculate multiple stage journeys eg an acceleration stage, a cruising stage and a deceleration stage and also provide a graphic display of the results.
As I couldn't find anything out there that did what I wanted, just various Java scripts and apps that each did a bit of it, I have written a little calculator for working out interstellar relativistic times, speeds, distances, accelerations etc. So, for example, given an intial velocity of 0 and acceleration of 1g for two years, then the traveller's apparent time is 1.43 years the final velocity is 0.8996 ly/y (.8996 the speed of light) and the distance travelled would be 1.25 light years.
It can be downloaded here http://www.focussoftware.co.uk/downloads/StarTraveller.zip
And if anyone would like to validate it and see if it produces the result they would expect I would be immensely grateful.
It is pretty simple to use. The only thing to understand is that all units are in years and lightyears. This makes most things pretty simple but you should appreciate that velocities are not in m/s or km/h they are in lightyears/year or ly/y. Also acceleration is the same, so instead of the familiar 1g being 9.81 m/s^2 (metres per second squared) it is 1.03 ly/y^2.
At the moment the download is just a raw exe file zipped. It doesn't really need to be installed in any way, it can just be saved anywhere convenient and run standalone. If there is any interest I might put together a proper installation setup.
Oh, I should add that it is free and that I haven't done any real error checking yet, so it is quite possible that if you put silly values in it may simply crash (divide by zero or some such). Also my intention is to build on this so it can calculate multiple stage journeys eg an acceleration stage, a cruising stage and a deceleration stage and also provide a graphic display of the results.
