Chapter 8. Breaking Down a Vector into Components
In Chapter 7, I show you how to take multiple vectors and combine them into a single resultant behavior, which is a useful skill in helping simplify the number of actions on an object. That works fine if you're interested in examining the combined behaviors of an object, but what happens when you're interested in studying multiple behaviors but only have a single resultant to work with? For this situation, you need to understand how to create multiple behaviors of a resultant, or the components of a resultant vector.
The most useful feature of working with components is that these behaviors let you explore basic behaviors in more detail. For example, when an airplane is coming in for a landing, its approach is actually a vector with a given orientation at a specific speed. However, the pilot must maintain a certain horizontal behavior (which ensures that the plane actually reaches the runway and doesn't overshoot) to land the plane safely while guaranteeing that the vertical descent isn't so fast that it causes the plane to crash into a fiery heap when it hits the ground. The pilot needs to be aware of both the vertical and horizontal behaviors at the same time, for uniquely different reasons.
In this chapter, I show you how to break a single vector back into multiple behaviors that act entirely in Cartesian or non-Cartesian ...
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