Conic Sections and do we want more?

[STxAxTIC]

Hello all, so my life is three things - choose two:

1) Satisfy my employer
2) Write code
3) Write natural philosophy

So here's a thing or two about conic sections - these are the shapes you get with gravitational orbits, satellite dishes, headlights, radar, all kinds of stuff introduced in here. There is almost no calculus in this until the Problems section at the end. If you can write QB64 code, I assume you can also follow algebra. Hope it's digestible. Might be useful to someone, might not. Better to post it somewhere than to just sit on it though.

EDIT

Oh yeah - so I'm doing central forces and classical gravity next. I may use qb64 to generate the figures because why not? If I come up with any code worth sharing I'll do so - but all the real effort is going into a PDF. (More time-friendly than source code.)

[loudar]

1) Satisfy my employer
2) Write code
3) Write natural philosophy

Well now you have to insert a fourth one into there! :D

[Ashish]

Whoa! There are some very good questions in the PDF.

[_vince]

Will it make my QB64 better?

[Qwerkey]

Conic Sections - another mathematical wonder.  At some stage "pure mathematicians" decided to study the curves which result from taking plane sections of a cone.  And lo and behold, we find that Nature uses them, eg Kepler's laws of planetary motion described by conics.  This probably won't make our QB64 stuff any better, but fascinating neverthe less.