How Does Avoiding the Spacelanes Break Gameplay?

[spara]

Here's one more thought that's probably been mentioned in this thread or in some of the other similar threads.

Maybe it just requires more skill to fly at high speeds off lane. There could randomly be splinters and bolders spawned to in front of the player requiring the player to be observant and ready to steer around hazards. This can be achieved by simply tweaking dsp to just spawn asteroids, boulders and splinters.

[RockDoctor]

I feel that the lanes are fine, but they have to be rationalized some how.

That's not difficult at all. No matter what your geometry - Euclidian, non-Euclidian, Einsteinian-gravitational - there will be some routes from A to B which are shorter than other routes from A to B. Crews cost money to feed, and cargoes have deadlines, so no matter what your choose for the Ooniverse physics, there will be quicker routes, which will attract more traffic than others.
What that geometry is, and how to calculate the optimal route, is where the interest comes in. And it's not a trivial problem. Try hunting your science reading for a discussion of real world quantum computing which doesn't mention the "Travelling Salesman Problem".
As far as I can tell, the physics model the the Ooniverse uses basically means that straight lines are the shortest routes between A and B. Which is fine enough - that tells you where your space lane will be (and also where to avoid if you don't like being mass-locked every 5 seconds, or getting into a fight every 20 seconds).
But I do have one beef. Mass locks. They work well for spacecraft - there's an OXP which varies the range at which you mass lock depending on the mass of the spacecraft affecting you. Works great. But it ignores the planet until you get to a certain altitude above it. (I've not investigated closely - it's somewhere between 2 and 3 planetary radii from the centre.) Which is unrealistic. If you assume all the planets have the same density (unrealisitic) then the mass-lock range would be something more like the cube of the planetary radius (with a scale factor). Which would mean that a gas giant might have a mass lock radius that gets in the way of the straight line route from witchpoint to system station. So your actual shortest-flight-time route is now to fly to a tangent to the planet's mass lock radius, then skirt the planet while staying minimally outside the mass lock range until you can resume your flight towards the system station. Worse (or better, depending on your point of view) is that a station in free space (ConStore at the witchpoint) or in orbit around a very small planet/ moon might have access from any direction, but most stations in orbit around planets of a decent size would need to be approached (optimally) by torus-driving to a point radially out from the station, then accepting the planet's mass lock and coasting in towards the station. There are high-angle turns lurking in there (we call them dog-legs when steering oil wells), which have potential for cutting the corner on injectors, where you an get a jump on/ from attackers.

Did I mention that a mass-related mass lock would considerably affect the (optimal) approach path to a station around a large planet. Meh, who cares about them? Well, larger planets have more space for more population, so more Gross Planetary Product in the economy, and so often higher prices. Hmmm!

One minor complication, from a planetary science MOOC course I took under @plutokiller a few months ago (yes, the guy largely responsible for Pluto not being considered a planet any more) is that the density of planets varies considerably with composition and size. So strictly, you shouldn't just assume that the mass is related to the cube of the radius. But it's a relatively minor effect - in the Solar System, the density range is from 687 kg/m^3 for Saturn to 5514 for Earth (an 8-fold difference). Mass OTOH ranges through nearly a factor of 6000 for the planets (all 8 of them) and radius by a factor of 30. Raising the radius to the power of 2.6 would give a Solar System-like distribution of masses, and mass * range would give you your parameter for when the mass lock effect kicks in.


I think that gives a number of interesting changes to gameplay at the expense of actually being somewhat related to reality. I've no idea how to develop OXPs, but this might give people some ideas.

[spara]

I feel that the lanes are fine, but they have to be rationalized some how.

That's not difficult at all...

Except that as a player you soon find out that the quickest, safest and hence the most cost efficient route to the main station is not on lane, it's off lane. So why is everyone surfing the lane?

[Astrobe]

I think the TL;DR of what Rockdoctor said is that the masslock should begin at the WP (well I might be interpreting a bit too freely).

This is actually very consistent: the WP is the closest to the station you can jump to because of the mass of the planet. The rest must be done the slow way or with injectors - but the wise thing to do is to keep your fuel for emergency situations. Torus could still work outside of the planetary radius, and therefore still work as a replacement for TAF for longer travels.

A few things remain strange in this scenario:

1. Asteroids that don't masslock. I don't see the reason why they don't, as they create ambush opportunities and therefore a minigame of spotting them and avoiding them when on torus (here we can apply some of the good ideas that have been discussed previously).

2. Players and NPCs can initialize jumps within the planetary masslock. Logically one shouldn't be able to do that, but it seems it has too many implications so we'll have to handwavium it somehow.

3. No fuel station at or near the WP. It's like "no gas station on highways". I understand that they are "prohibited" because they would break the game. However, maybe one can make it work with high fuel prices and non pass-through fuel stations with long wait queues (plus they should be slightly away from WP because security concerns). The justification for high fuel prices is that fuel stations are a juicy target for pirates (and tank ships as well), so they have to host a viper squad 24/7, which costs money. A mid-way station could also be a thing (with more acceptable prices, but still it costs the player some credits to take the safe and easy way). The increased use of Injectors probably calls for a global reduction of the injectors fuel burning rate.

[RockDoctor]

I think the TL;DR of what Rockdoctor said is that the masslock should begin at the WP (well I might be interpreting a bit too freely).

This is actually very consistent: the WP is the closest to the station you can jump to because of the mass of the planet. The rest must be done the slow way or with injectors

I was thinking that the mass lock should certainly extend a long way further from the planets than it does (or come a lot closer to ships). Good call on the asteroids too, I hadn't thought of them, but the same logic applies. The crude scaling from x*radius^2.6 I suggest is a substitute for a more sophisticated way of estimating mass of a body. Everything (?) in the Ooniverse has a centre and a radius, so you know when you've crashed into it, so it's a metric that can be applied to the game as-is.
Is it canon that the WP is the closest point you can approach the system in witch space? It can't be just that, because that wouldn't be a point, it'd be a closed surface, not far from a sphere centred on the star. (I notice an unrealistic lack of binary systems in the Ooniverse. Close or wide binaries.) I've always thought that Ooniverse (Eliteverse really) more resembles the Alderson Field that Niven & Pournelle used in "Mote in God's Eye" (which was a new book when Elite was a glint in an assembler's linker). There, the FTL trick ("Alderson Drive") depended on the intersection of "flux lines" between places where thermonuclear fusion was happening, and a local gravitational gradient. Which would give one witch point for appearing at from each star close to the star system under consideration. Hopping into Alderson (witch) space away from the jump point ("Crazy Eddie point") would require more energy, but as long as the gravitational gradient wasn't too steep, you could get away with it. Too steep a gravity gradient, and you're never seen again, or a thinning cloud of plasma.
That the Torus drive has different limitations to the Witch drive is because they use different physics. So no problems with torusing from witch point to closer to the planet.
Implementing Alderson Drive physics would be a big change in game play. Particularly the need to fly (torus) from station to jump point. I don't propose that.
I'm trying to remember my C.J.Cherryh books too - also more or less contemporaneous with Bell & Braben learning assembler, and with a trading system very influential on Elite ("standard-size cargo cannisters", orbital stations). I can't remember her (his?) limitations on the FTL drive, but they had to do a lot of travelling from station to jump point too.

[Alex]

Re: How Does Avoiding the Spacelanes Break Gameplay?

It doesn't.

What changed game play was too many fingers playing in the core game. Try to get an older version, before 1.80 (76 being my favorite) Game is great and your only real worry is the oxp/oxz's you add. I play 1.80 A lot, as there were some major changes to the graphics and I had a card that could use them.

Getting out of the space lane was a way of getting to the planet without getting roasted in they pesky systems full of nasty people that like roasts.

Another method is mentioned in the post "Question about trading" 'The Corkscrew technique'. Very useful to know. Even worked in the original Elite.