[noir_lord]

> the most interesting application of math was figuring out orbits/positions of stars.

For me math started to click when I started writing simple games for the spectrum, I realized quite quickly that what I needed was trigonometry and once I knew the name I could go to the library and get out books.

I was implementing a text based destroyer game (similar to mtrek/jtre though I didn't know those existed) and I had to implement handling bearings from the ship to the enemy ships, handle firing guns and missiles all that stuff, I made lots of horrible simplifications (shells experienced no air resistance so flew in perfect parabola's, the surface of the sea was a perfectly flat plane, no curvature (non-euclidean geometry would have been a step too far at 10-11) etc) but fundamentally it worked and was playable as a game, you could issue orders, fire shells (and later missiles though that made the game a lot more brutal and short) with bracketing and taking into time of flight - I was a strange child.

I got the original idea from a ZX81 kids book on game programming that implemented a simple side projection game where you set the elevation and velocity of your shot and aimed for the opponents ship, it was simple (couple of pages of code) and I wanted to do something a bit more realistic - as a side benefit I ended up reading up on naval warfare in quite a lot of depth, again a strange child.