Plotting a course to Jupiter

What are we looking at here? The Sun, Mercury's orbit and Mercury itself, Venus's orbit, and, behind it on the left, a bit of Earth's orbit. The little ship near the Sun is drawing its current planned course to Jupiter. Today, while refining the ship's flight algorithm, I threw almost all of it away and rebuilt it from scratch. I made a lot of improvements as all sorts of things surfaced along the way: errors in calculations, bad timing for the start of various game modules, and smaller issues. The navigation aim point is now set not on the planet but on where the planet will be. To do that, the ship calculates the planet's movement along its orbit, including all its nonlinearity. I sketched out the basis of the ship's modules: life support, power, maneuvering engines, and so on. I think I can bring them to life today and create the architecture for how all this stuff works. The planets' visualizations have been reduced by a factor of ten. At true scale they'd be only a few pixels across. So they're still much larger than they really are, and eventually they'll scale with the camera's position. The mathematics of flight, speed, and distance, though, is fairly realistic. To land, you have to fly mathematically to those very pixels, even though the visible surface is much larger.