Oolite essay: game lore, features and mechanics

[Old Murgh]

And there are several OXP's which clobber use of the Torus drive.

Bullet Drive - can only travel in a straight line
Shaky Drive - drive as though drunk! Somehow, I downloaded this unknowingly in my early Oolite days, and it made Torus drive utterly miserable until I eventually worked out what made my Torus so hokey.
Hard Way - manouvering greatly inhibited (virtually no yaw, pitch is slow), shields knocked down to 25%, uses up fuel, poor maintenance clobbers performance even more.

A combination of shaky and hard way sounds extra cool.

[Cholmondely]

A combination of shaky and hard way sounds extra cool.

Extra-masochistic, more like. It is impossible to drive in a straight line with Shaky Drive. With directional restrictions - especially in a massive solar system engendered by Strangers World (or equivalent) - you will spend forever trying to get anywhere.

But if you really want to try it...

[Old Murgh]

Extra-masochistic, more like. It is impossible to drive in a straight line with Shaky Drive. With directional restrictions - especially in a massive solar system engendered by Strangers World (or equivalent) - you will spend forever trying to get anywhere.

But if you really want to try it...

OK, I imagined the ship took a rattling effect from the strain of speed which seemed appealing. So it's more of a swervy drive then?

[Cholmondely]

Extra-masochistic, more like. It is impossible to drive in a straight line with Shaky Drive. With directional restrictions - especially in a massive solar system engendered by Strangers World (or equivalent) - you will spend forever trying to get anywhere.

But if you really want to try it...

OK, I imagined the ship took a rattling effect from the strain of speed which seemed appealing. So it's more of a swervy drive then?

Think stocious. Very, very, very stocious.

And then think of aiming a little ship in a massive solar system at a similarly minute point in the far distance.

Hours of fun!

Please let us know how long it took you!

[Old Murgh]

Think stocious. Very, very, very stocious.

And then think of aiming a little ship in a massive solar system at a similarly minute point in the far distance.

Hours of fun!

Please let us know how long it took you!

When you put it like that it doesn't sound like my kind of thing.

[Cholmondely]

Think stocious. Very, very, very stocious.

And then think of aiming a little ship in a massive solar system at a similarly minute point in the far distance.

Hours of fun!

Please let us know how long it took you!

When you put it like that it doesn't sound like my kind of thing.

Aaah! But, just think about how many trumbles you can breed, Oh Bearded Patriarch, in the dismal and desolate wastes of the celestial heights! As you search ceaselessly for the SLAPU marooned in the outer wildernesses, missing it here, missing it there, you will be surrounded by the ever-increasing progeny of the younger generations, staring up at your august bearded countenance, drooling lovingly over your wizened features,...

Maybe I'd better stop there...

[szaumix]

Reasons to not be using torus drive:

• Mass-locked
• Mining
• Salvage
• Recharging

Being mass locked in company would be valid non-torus use.
Mining/Salvage as a reason would only be valid directly around quarry. The quickest and easiest way to and from quarry would be via Torus.
I accept recharging as an answer. I'd even accept "taking a break" as an answer, like a lot of commanders might have just survived an attack or be eating lunch, who knows.
But there is as yet no reason for fast assassins and pirates to be abstaining from T.Drive when I am not. And there is no reason for witch-to-station at engine speed. I still posit that Torus as a universal ship feature collapses the realities of space violence and trade as we know it. The thing about incentives is, the more we compound "maybe"s to find unusual excuses as to why something that should generally/logically be happening isn't happening... the further into the ridiculous we venture, and the more we resist (and fail to recognize) presumable reality.

Note that the last of these may offer no evidence to anyone arriving (via torus drive) at the scene.

I was aware of the point of the thought experiment and I appreciated and engaged it as such.

What I may say is that this issue right here may simply not be the presumable kind -- perhaps neither of us were "championing" anything in particular; I just don't use it because I can't justify it when playing my own game (player centrism). I followed and deeply appreciated your work on ship-to-ship scale and I have a number of your mods so it's not like we're on completely different pages.

I still 100% believe that presumable realities is a thing. Maybe just not this thing. Most of the mods I have, and am drawn to, either "fill the gaps" or correct issues based on the concept.

The economist in me is much more interested in the fact of any given incentive, disincentive, lack of any incentive than the specifics of it. Incentives are almost invariably the reason for the mechanics of any strategy, economic or otherwise.

The number of Oolite economy mods are my favorite tacit recognition of this fact.

[szaumix]

Bullet Drive - can only travel in a straight line
Shaky Drive - drive as though drunk! Somehow, I downloaded this unknowingly in my early Oolite days, and it made Torus drive utterly miserable until I eventually worked out what made my Torus so hokey.
Hard Way - manouvering greatly inhibited (virtually no yaw, pitch is slow), shields knocked down to 25%, uses up fuel, poor maintenance clobbers performance even more.

JUST by the way, I actually have Bullet and Shaky drive and believe it or not they sometimes do the one and sometimes do the other! I didn't end up getting Hard Way because i figured that would be a tacit recognition from me that Torus exists (instead of time lapse). The other two are kind of just like, "I'm disengaged from the cockpit so some general navigational error is expected." This can not be refuted by astrophysics (straight line momentum) because whatever engines are propelled by, it sure isn't momentum/ the laws of astrophysics! (Long time personal theory: the Futurama one. Basically all ships are always being "pulled" through space the way a kid has to have his hand on his toy car to make it move. So the laws of astrophysics apply to objects in space, just not to ships with functioning engines).

[Old Murgh]

Aaah! But, just think about how many trumbles you can breed, Oh Bearded Patriarch, in the dismal and desolate wastes of the celestial heights! As you search ceaselessly for the SLAPU marooned in the outer wildernesses, missing it here, missing it there, you will be surrounded by the ever-increasing progeny of the younger generations, staring up at your august bearded countenance, drooling lovingly over your wizened features,...

Maybe I'd better stop there...

Not the denouement I had planned..
But you have a point, one must make the most of things. Just maybe I''ll drunkenly torus off in search of the galaxy's edge as the object of trumble worship, if only to illustrate just how different the other guy can choose to roll.

[Redspear]

But there is as yet no reason for fast assassins and pirates to be abstaining from T.Drive when I am not.

You mean apart from the fact that they are waiting to ambush you (and likely others)?

If you could escape their masslock then they wouldn't realistically catch you even with a torus drive (if you veered even slightly in your heading).
Wouldn't pirates and assassins be mostly lying in wait rather than heading to the station? Pirates somewhere along the lane and asaassins at the witch-point?

Sure, they both have reason to head to the station but they have reason to avoid it too.
Just as they both have reason to avoid travelling alone (which would enable torus use), such as occasionally facing viper patrols.

And there is no reason for witch-to-station at engine speed

Escorts would mass-lock you would they not? If the player can get masslocked by a mamba and a sidewinder then why should a trader be immune?
Meanwhile vipers are in groups, therby masslocking each other, as are many assassins and pirates.

I still posit that Torus as a universal ship feature collapses the realities of space violence and trade as we know it.

Because...???

As long as travel time via torus (WP - station) is not faster than arrival rate at witchpoint then any stop for any reason would be enough to facilitate trader masslocks.

Pirate and assassin ambushes would still happen regardless (neither they nor police can typically torus if they are maslocked in their groups).

Any vessels headed towards the witchpoint would also cause masslocks (hunters, assassins, pirates, police, scavengers).

Any masslock occurrance increases the likelihood of other masslock occurances.

Factors that balance each other:

• Arrival Rate (traffic density)
• Travel Speed (average)
• Distance (WP to Station)
• Patrol Frequency (outbound traffic)
• Ambushes (pirates and assassins waiting on lane)

Ecounter Rate = (A + ((D + PF) / TS)) x (1 + ((AR + D) / TS))
(not tested, so could be wrong...)

Everyone suddenly torus driving everywhere?
Adjust any or all of Arrival Rate, Patrol Frequency and Ambushes for recognisable experience.

perhaps neither of us were "championing" anything in particular; I just don't use it because I can't justify it when playing my own game (player centrism)

No problem with that.

I followed and deeply appreciated your work on ship-to-ship scale and I have a number of your mods so it's not like we're on completely different pages.

Nothing personal either way I think, just exploring ideas. Friendly challenges can make us think more clearly. This argument likely won't be 'won' or even resolved but there's value in thinking things through, in challenging assumptions and even (especially I would suggest) in recognising them.

[Cody]

Wouldn't pirates and assassins be mostly lying in wait rather than heading to the station? Pirates somewhere along the lane and asaassins at the witch-point?

Sure, they both have reason to head to the station but they have reason to avoid it too.

Assassins are almost always clean, and can often be found in the aegis (or indeed launching from the station), where they'll harass you while you're waiting to dock, then wait for you to launch, and track you outbound, whether that's through your wormhole, or out beyond the aegis. I've even encountered lone assassins on my way to the station. Once on your case, they'll follow you right into the aegis and damn the consequences.

[szaumix]

this was all entirely reasonable and extremely compelling!
I'm not resisting the idea of Torus validity for the sake of resisting. I've just never considered it valid because NPCs never use it, because it is so fast it's basically a slow teleport, and because the various logical reasons in my head for its invalidity seemed more compelling to me than the reasons it would be valid.

Your logic for population vs compounding masslock is very compelling.

I was going to say that the big huge massiveness of... space... would mean plenty of room for ships to reroute some long way to their destinations. And I can already hear the reasonable retort: getting stuck in masslock out of the space lanes is a far worse risk/unknowable than getting stuck in space lanes where cops and hunters might help. And even that's assuming everyone has an ASC.

*grumble grumble*
I yield without agreeing. For now.


EDIT: I'm not sure if this is a lame argument or not but:

If everyone could instantly teleport anywhere they wanted in real life right now, the entire economy as we know it would collapse. There would be reason -- but far less reason -- to pay for cars, bikes, flight tickets, fuel, etc. The flow-on effect on every level of small business, large business, corporations, government decisions and the functioning of society would be unreal.

The ease and cost of doing something is an economic factor and presents us with presumable realities.

Basically one of my several remaining objections to Torus goes like this: it makes everything too fast and too easy and that doesn't even need to be argued: it is self-evident. While I do mean easy for me in the game, that also translates as easy for traders generally and especially for lone low cargo pilots. This means that the economy is more likely to gravitate to Real Life Economics by phasted than to the risk-based models of Cim (Risk Based Economy) and phkb (Risky Business), since faster/easier means less risk means more trade means less price variation. This has even more implications: slightly less need for space lane policing, more expensive weaponry (since need would reduce, therefore demand would reduce). This is just how incentives logically change dymanics. Anyway I still yield without conceding, you've given me a lot of points I never thought of before. I'll chew on it.

[Cholmondely]

Would it not be worthwhile to create an .oxp which gives everybody the Torus drive?

(Previous experimenters have eg. given NPC's the Energy bomb)

It would be interesting to see how this would change the gameplay. And how the Stranger's World restrictions change it further.



NB: Cim's SOTL AltMap does do this. It is very scenic - especially when you arrive at Witchpoint and see somebody Torussing towards you from the distance.

[cim]

Obviously I didn't get as far as implementing full gameplay in Altmap, but I got far enough to pick up some of the big issues with NPC torus. It definitely needs to be done in a scenario since you need to rewrite huge chunks of the base AIs to make them torus-aware, and existing non-torus AIs will cause a serious problem.

1) You have to make the system a lot bigger so that there's room to make the "spacelane" a bit wider, or everyone just piles into a giant heap and then gets in each other's way trying to clear it. That then basically takes away the organic nature of Oolite encounters - you'd virtually never have someone stumbling across an existing fight - so you need to do extra work to put them back.
2) You have to do a lot more long-range detection of torusing ships (which is slightly inefficient) so that long-range interception works (and therefore provides an incentive to stick to the patrolled lanes), and that needs to include remembering where a ship which dropped torus was last seen (and ideally the player needs to have a way to track these "last known locations" from the compass, too) ... but again, you don't want every pirate and police ship in the system piling in on the same trade fleet, at least not every single time!
3) You have to (as the partial implementations in Escort Contracts and RRS do) have a way to bind an entire fleet together in a single torus bubble, or most NPCs will never use torus even if they have it.
4) Patrols (pirate and police) need a good memory of which fleets they've already inspected and decided they don't need to interact with, or as soon as they move out of masslock and restart torus, they'll go after them again.
5) Pirates (and potentially others) actually need to very carefully consider use of torus - it'll take them longer to get into position, and they may need to use it briefly for final intercept, but if they fly the whole way in on torus they will be intercepted by patrols (if there are any). The issue here is that this makes replenishment of pirates much slower once the system sim is running.

There's probably a bunch more I didn't pick up on because I never got as far as trying to put combat into it, too.

[Redspear]

*grumble grumble*
I yield without agreeing. For now.

Happy to hear counter arguments whenever they occur to anyone.

EDIT: I'm not sure if this is a lame argument or not but:

If everyone could instantly teleport anywhere they wanted in real life right now, the entire economy as we know it would collapse. There would be reason -- but far less reason -- to pay for cars, bikes, flight tickets, fuel, etc. The flow-on effect on every level of small business, large business, corporations, government decisions and the functioning of society would be unreal.

The ease and cost of doing something is an economic factor and presents us with presumable realities.

Basically one of my several remaining objections to Torus goes like this: it makes everything too fast and too easy and that doesn't even need to be argued: it is self-evident. While I do mean easy for me in the game, that also translates as easy for traders generally and especially for lone low cargo pilots. This means that the economy is more likely to gravitate to Real Life Economics by phasted than to the risk-based models of Cim (Risk Based Economy) and phkb (Risky Business), since faster/easier means less risk means more trade means less price variation. This has even more implications: slightly less need for space lane policing, more expensive weaponry (since need would reduce, therefore demand would reduce). This is just how incentives logically change dymanics. Anyway I still yield without conceding, you've given me a lot of points I never thought of before. I'll chew on it.

OK, so firstly the obvious part: torus isn't teleport. Key differnce is that one would remove risk (of travel) the other only saves time in the absence of risk - When you're not masslocked you can't be hurt unless as a consequence of your own poor navigation. so torus or not, you still need a vehicle and consequently fuel, maintenence and likely all the weapons and kit you can muster if you want to make a success of it.

So it's clearly faster but is it easier? If so how so? Credits to time ratio is increased but that isn't the same as credits to risk ratio is it?
This is important because time is significant when it has consequence. If four years pass in game time then what does it matter unless I am paying for that time passing? Four years passing in real life is a different matter however as I am paying for that in all too many ways.

Contracts are important with regards to time of course but then those durations were set with the understanding that the player would have a torus drive. If we want realism then as long as the typical courier doesn't travel with escorts (can therefore use torus) then that still holds up I think.

Travelling faster down the lane doesn't mean I meet less pirates, rather it means I meet them sooner. They're already there.

I've even encountered lone assassins on my way to the station

That's a new one on me... thanks.

Would it not be worthwhile to create an .oxp which gives everybody the Torus drive?

If we do then (meaning no disrespect) I'd suggest we do it with a bit more thought.
What I mean by that is the energy bomb was (correctly) identified as a player only weapon and so the test (I believe) was to simply make it an 'available to all' weapon. This approach is to go from one extreme to (almost) the other.

As I argued here (and Murgh summarised nicely) the energy bomb, as it operated, only made sense for the lone wolf. Who's going to travel with you if they know you've got an energy bomb on your ship while they sit in another?

Thinking it through more, an energy bomb threat (instead of a mercy plea) could have been made by NPC pilots with systems failing (occasionally a bluff) to threaten the player if they don't back off. No pirate or even trader would earn enough bounty to warrant using the bomb it if they could help it. So only the player picking on lone traders, or facing lone hunters/assassins might ever face such a threat anyway.

THAT would have been an intersting test, maybe even with an energy bomb detector to be used if you target the relevant ship. Instead we got the fairly obvious point (albeit well made) that everyone having enegy bombs was silly.

So getting back on topic...

3) You have to (as the partial implementations in Escort Contracts and RRS do) have a way to bind an entire fleet together in a single torus bubble, or most NPCs will never use torus even if they have it.

(I realise that the above is an explanation more than a recommendation but I quote it just to make the following point.)

I would personally wish to avoid this as then everyone is torusing everywhere with significant consequences.
It's also an exception to a very simple rule (masslocked in presence of other ships) that is IMHO neither needed nor helpful.

One might expect little fleets of 'Jameson's' in this scenario, carefully making their way through the safer systems with no benefit (yet considerable risk) to them instead chosing to travel alone.

Whilst pileup issues might be expected if we promote realism them let's not forget that the lane is 100 times too short (for realistic planet sizes). So what we can try to do instead is to approximate realism with a little fakery behind the scenes.

Again, like the energy bomb, I see torus drives as something that anyone could equip but only makes sense for those travelling alone to actually use.

Torus 'bubbles' both negate masslock and also negate much of the sense in regularly encountering lone vessels or (for that matter) the life of a lone trader in general flying in anything slower than an Asp.

Exceptions should only exist in order to improve a rule's implementation I think, I don't see that happening here.