i thought about it, but i was worried a log scale might abstract away the 'feeling' of the distance (making a light year look deceptively close to a kilometer). i want the user to feel small, and log scales tend to make things look manageable.
but you're right it's probably the only way to fit the solar loops and galactic arc on the same screen visually. might be worth a prototype for v2.
valid point on the visualization. i tried to map it initially, but the depressing reality is that even at 1.2 trillion km, we're basically a stationary dot on a galactic scale. a map just looked like a blank screen, so i went with the starfield to try and convey speed instead.
re: the cursors that's definitely my bad UX. they are just hover tooltips (standard title attributes), but setting the cursor to help (?) makes them look like clickable buttons. i'll swap that out so it's less confusing. thanks for the firefox check.
thanks. i love those old screensavers because they were so efficient. tried to keep this one lightweight too just a simple canvas loop so it doesn't spin up the fans.
I actually ran the numbers on time dilation! At 600km/s (0.2%), the effect is surprisingly small. We basically 'save' about 63 seconds a year compared to a stationary observer relative to the CMB. Not enough to live forever, but enough to be late for a meeting.
The fish tank analogy is perfect. It feels illegal that we're moving this fast without a dashboard.
And definitely give yours another shot. Since this is just vanilla JS, feel free to view source on mine to see how I handled the frame loop if you get stuck.
Yeah the scale difference is crazy. Once you add the Galaxy/CMB velocity, the earth's rotation basically becomes a rounding error.
Good call on the number alignment. I'm using a variable-width font which makes comparing them messy. I'll switch to monospace or tabular-nums in the next push so the magnitudes scan better.
And fair point on the title-'calculator' implies mission planning. Maybe 'travel visualizer' would have been safer!