In accordance with the unix philosophy of keeping things simple and modular, a long range goal for this project should be to separate the "ground track generation" functionality from the shapefile output (for instance), since I have found various uses for gtg without actually generating shapefiles, such as WheresThatSat. In this conception, gtg would be a library, and a higher-level wrapper around the core orbit model libraries (SGP4++, plus any other models implemented). Then, a utility similar to the current iteration of gtg could be written using the gtg library + shapelib library, but gtg could also be used in other programs without invoking any shapefile stuff. It would be used to produce a sequence of ground track coordinate and attribute data in a format-agnostic fashion.
In accordance with the unix philosophy of keeping things simple and modular, a long range goal for this project should be to separate the "ground track generation" functionality from the shapefile output (for instance), since I have found various uses for gtg without actually generating shapefiles, such as WheresThatSat. In this conception, gtg would be a library, and a higher-level wrapper around the core orbit model libraries (SGP4++, plus any other models implemented). Then, a utility similar to the current iteration of gtg could be written using the gtg library + shapelib library, but gtg could also be used in other programs without invoking any shapefile stuff. It would be used to produce a sequence of ground track coordinate and attribute data in a format-agnostic fashion.