I'm creating a Java class that should encapsulate the six orbital elements of a celestial object, the six osculating elements of the same celestial object, the mass of the body and the name of the body. This means that my Java object must be created with no less than fourteen parameters, and I am now thinking about including another four constants of perturbation as parameters, which will bring that number up to eighteen.
This is how it looks with fourteen parameters:
new Planet("Mercury", 3.3022E23,0.387098, 0., 0.205637, 0.00002123, 7.00559, -0.00590158, 252.252, 149473., 77.4577, 0.1594, 48.3396, -0.122142)
I've looked around people say that a class that takes in more than ten parameters is probably poorly designed. They also say that a class should do one thing and one thing only. Well, I'm just doing one thing literally, the only thing the class does so far is calculating the position of the celestial object with those parameters as a function of time.
What is best practice for dealing with this situation?
I would prefer combining the already mentioned solutions - as you write in your intro "I'm creating a Java class that should encapsulate the six orbital elements of a celestial object, the six osculating elements of the same element, the mass of the body and the name of the body.", it seems to me that you can group each six parameters into a new datastructure, so that you end up with four parameters for the Planet constructor (name, mass and the two parameter objects with six own values each) - next step I would ask myself if the six orbital and osculating elements somehow carry extra meaning or are merely a group of six (as in "arbitrary number") elements and can therefore be represented as a list.