alt Hacker NewsJust FYI the sizes of the planets, stars, and their orbits are not to scale at all. To get an idea of how empty space is, there are 63,360 inches in a mile, and 63,239 astronomical units in a light-year. So if you scaled everything down such that Earth was 1 inch from the Sun, Neptune would be 30 inches away and Alpha Centauri would be 4 miles away.
If you were using a 4k display and had the Sun and Alpha Centauri visible at opposite sides of the display, the orbit of Neptune would be in the same pixel as the Sun.
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FYI we have a up to scale model of the solar system in Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System
Come visit!
Another comparison: if you count the "solar system" as ending at Neptune's orbit (obviously it extends much further, but just for the sake of comparison), then you could fit ~4465 "solar systems" in between our sun and the closest star, Proxima Centauri.
Sure, but why does this need to be to scale. Isn't the point more to get the humans a way of understanding where things are relatively? Navigating the map makes it interesting in being able to interactively see where some of the stars are relative to each other. Seeing Regulus and Castor/Pollux from this perspective is much different than on terra firma.
Even sci-fi writers that try to get this right have a hard time wrapping their heads around it.
"It's called space for a reason."
When I saw the series adaptation of The Expanse, it was really obvious they played a lot of artistic license to make it exciting. A real space battle would be dots firing invisible dots at each other. "Close quarter battle" would be within something like 2000 kilometers, maybe more. That is close.
Mercury is orbiting partially inside the Sun, and Jupiter is nearly as wide as the Sun when it should be 1/10 as much, so the planet nodes should be scaled down 10x relative to the Sun.
Also, I did a top-down pixel measurement, where I could see the distance to Tau Ceti as well as the orbit of Neptune. The radius of Neptune's orbit was 32px, while the distance to Tau Ceti was 1152px, for a ratio of 36, when in reality, Tau Ceti is 11.9 ly away, while Neptune has an orbit radius of 30 AU, which means Tau Ceti is around 25,000 Neptune orbits away, so the planet orbit scale is too big (or distance to other stars too small) by a factor of ~694 (25000/36)
Edit: Since this was top-down, the vertical displacement didn't factor into the distance, which also contributed to Tau Ceti appearing too close on screen, so the error is slightly better than that, maybe a factor of 600.
Edit 2: Tau Ceti is rendered at 3.652 pc × 3 world units/pc = 10.956 world units
Neptune’s orbit radius is rendered as 30.05 AU × 0.0065 world units/AU = 0.195325 world units
The rendered ratio is 10.956 / 0.195325 = 56.09 Neptune-orbit radii
The real ratio should be 25,067.5 Neptune-orbit radii
The scale error = 25,067.5 / 56.09 = 446.9×