Pondering multi-wheels

[Mike V]

This is not immediately related to anything - but I had an idea and am curious what you think.

I was thinking absentmindedly about Time Matters stuff, and it suddenly occurred to me - TM puts everything on the same wheel (and uses the transiting chart angles, obviously). One reason it's able to do this more naturally than more graphical applications is that TM marks whether a planet is transiting or radical in the wheel itself. I can also imagine it would be really difficult to make 2+ concentric wheels in the textual format TM uses. I did pull that off with my (web-based, Javascript-based) application, and let me tell you... not fun.

That aside, it's also pretty darn convenient to read a chart with everything on one wheel.

How do we feel about this same concept for:

• 3 or more charts in TM as a "text wheel" (like it currently is)? For example, Kinetic returns. It might get pretty cluttered, but it's not like a Solar Fire-style triwheel is exactly easy to read anyway. I can't necessarily imagine needing a quadriwheel for anything, though. (I've messed around with that in Solar Fire for quotidians, but it's pretty messy.)
• Graphical applications down the line using a single wheel, TM-style? Imagine if Solar Fire just condensed both wheels onto the same chart, for example.

Here are some options for what a graphical interface like Solar Fire's might look like with a condensed multi-chart wheel:

• Have a graphical or textual indicator indicating which chart it is - t, r, p, etc. Solar Fire has text indicators for retrograde and stationary planets; why not add another one for which chart it's from? This could also be colored differently (which the retro/stationary indicators are as well).
• Show planetary glyphs (or parts of the nearby info) in different colors for different planets, without adding more text.
• Have toggles to show/hide various charts, or various planets from various charts (middleground planets, transiting/radical/progressed planets, whatever). These would be toggles accessible on the chart itself so you don't have to leave to change settings.

Anyway, just thinking.

[Jim Eshelman]

Opinion: Sure. We'll need triples for Kinetics and Anlunar and Quotidians - and all on one "wheel" seems the way to go (at least for now). BTW, Mike N said he'd redesigned the wheel to make three charts fit easily and that work is one more thing we lost along the way.

If graphical wheels are eventually introduced, I'd have to see it to have an opinion. If there were a graphical representation it might be cool to have each chart in a different color to make the distinction even more obvious.

I think it makes some things easier and some things harder. Tradeoffs. But certainly in the current square format it seems the logical way to go.

[Jim Eshelman]

With this week's "aspectarian divisions" debugging, I'm reminded this morning that one change in a triwheel is in the aspectarian, which will need new sections.

Current structure of a biwheel is: transit-to-transit; transit-to-natal; natal-natal. That is,

1. Wheel 2 to itself
2. Wheel 2 to Wheel 1
3. Wheel 1 to itself

Triwheels will be for many uses, the three scenarios we immediately identified being Kinetic returns, Anlunars, and Quotidians. (Quotidians are slightly different conceptually since it's not the transiting angles that are used.) Just thinking aloud, aspectarian segments should probably be something like "outermost to innermost," which gets really complicated, In no particular order, the KLR and Anlunar (for example) would require (I list as for an Anlunar below, though for a KLR you'd substitute progressed for SSR positions):

• Transit-to-transit
• SSR-to-SSR
• Natal-to-natal
• Transit-to-SSR
• Transit-to-natal
• SSR-to-natal

I'm not sure what the sequence should be (nor do we have to figure it out right now since this is version 2.0 stuff). It probably should start with T-to-T and end with N-to-N to preserve the flow in current SSR and SLR calculations. Perhaps (just thinking aloud, feeling through how the brain might want to register it for seeing how the SSR or natal progressions are unfolding):

1. Transit-to-transit
2. Transit-to-SSR
3. Transit-to-natal
4. SSR-to-SSR
5. SSR-to-natal
6. Natal-to-natal