This corresponds pretty well with the lore, which says the stations were 1km x 1km x 1km in size, with a small rounding issue for that 995 value. I'm not going to sweat small variations like that.
So, at this point, the wiki, the DAT file and the lore is all *pretty much* consistent.
At this point, I would be prepared to say the wiki is wrong. But let's check the in-game values (or at least, the information available via the boundingBox property).
Coriolis station: 1000 x 1000 x 1034.3
Dodo station: 1336.8 x 1406.01 x 1172.12
Ico station: 1286.01 x 1286.01 x 1291.13
Each of these bounding box values is pretty much in line with the values specified in the DAT files for the associated station.
Summary: I *think* the wiki is wrong, at least as far as the Griff-style stations is concerned. However, before I make wholesale changes, is there any lore that would come into play for this? Or any other take on this I haven't considered?
I'll make the wiki match the in-game values, as that seems like the obvious link. The DAT files are probably not taking into consideration any subentity additions which is why they're slightly different to the in-game numbers.
Here's throwing my spanner in the works (hat in the ring, tuppence worth, etc.)...
The Space Trader's Flight Training Manual (SBG38/B1) p. 16, col. 2, par. 3, says about the Coriolis station: "They can berth 2000 ships, and support a fair-sized colonial life development of humanoids." This seems reasonable, and will be accepted as the basis of my subsequent argument here below.
Taking the average GalCop ship-type (excluding stations, and Tharg ships) to be approximately 42.6m on a side (I have my reasons, based on Elite-A data), and arbitrarily adding 25m before and after, for dockside machinery, equipment and vehicles at each berth, and then cubing that into 3D gives a volume of 794,022.776m³. (There have been arguments about imperial ft vs. metric m before, and apparently metric makes more practical sense.)
The Manual, same paragraph, previous sentence, says: "Each Coriolis station has a diameter of 1 standard kilometre." Cubing that into 3D gives a volume of 1,000,000,000m³, for approximately 1,259.40972 ships, and only ships, i.e. excluding the "fair-sized colonial life development of humanoids."
2,000 ships, and ships only, would require a Coriolis station of approximately 1,166.68689m on a side. That's not too far off from the "1 standard kilometre." ...but then the "fair-sized colonial life development of humanoids" still need to be added in.
The Dark Wheel p. 34, par. 12 - p. 36, par. 12 describes Alex Ryder's travelling and wandering around the interior of a Coriolis station, looking for Patrick McGreavy's warehouse inside the Magellan building on the "South City" interior facet. This seems to imply a significant amount of space for the "fair-sized colonial life development of humanoids."
Imprint p. i9, ch. 3, par. 1 apparently describes *all* the docks as running in levels behind the central free-space, opposite the station egress. Apparently, even farther behind the dockside, were the honeycomb of wedges of "the cargo warehouses where a specialised transport network supported the auto-trading system."
Based on my previous numbers, the latter Imprint quote seems to imply a square area of approximately 4,141.19789m on a side, giving a Pythagorean diameter of approximately 5,856.53823m -- *inside* the station. Let's make it a nice round "6 standard kilometres" as an estimate for accommodating the station's superstructure, and then we should also have sufficient space for the "fair-sized colonial life development of humanoids".
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If we stick with the "1 standard kilometre", and apply all the previous <i>Imprint</i> reasoning, subtracting some superstructure distance from that, let's say 100m each side, leaving a workable interior square-hypotenuse diameter-length of 800m, it gives us approximately 565.68542m to a square side, accommodating a total of approximately 37 ships that can be berthed per Coriolis station. ...Make it 36 ships: 6 x 6, nice an' square-like.
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How many ships seems reasonable to be accommodated inside a Coriolis station? In which arrangement (as described in Imprint, or just all packed in there as closely as possible?) are they to be accommodated? ...and what about that "fair-sized colonial life development of humanoids"?
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OH! ...And then... ... Just by the way... If you consider centrifugal gravity-vectors relative to the *flat* interior surfaces of the Coriolis station, that only gives you some elliptic areas on the four lateral interior facets that provide relatively safe gravity-angles, and Robert Holdstock's description in The Dark Wheel p. 34, par. 13, of his so-called "Commander City" being situated on the interior facet opposite the station egress is completely nonsensical. It is clear that he was never inside a station, nor had he apparently thought things through properly, before he blurted them out on paper.
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...And while we're talking about stations... (yes, I have some ideas about this) I think it would make the most economical sense for GASEC and the GalCop government to move their stations to the L1 and/or L2 Lagrange points in each planetary system. This low-orbit arrangement at the moment is costing us much more in trying to maintain those orbits than what we're saving in having the cargo shuttles and transporters running shorter planet-station distances.
Yes, I know Quirium is ridiculously cheap, but, running that little bit farther to L1 and L2, the shuttles and transporters won't use a fraction of what we're using now to maintain station orbits so deep in their gravity wells. ...And considering general, ongoing governmental failure, we would do well to try save as much expense, anywhere and everywhere, as we can. (A little more philosophical topic: I am of the contention that it is our Human propensity for greed and waste, wasteful greed and greedy wastefulness, that prevents us from ever establishing a stable government. What prevents us from moving the stations? ...or do we just not want to try to establish a more stable government?)
1) Only SOTL Exploration does anything with Lagrange Points - but that means that we do have the appropriate coding for Oolite.
2) If I understood the argument, then we need to remember that the point of the stations is not to save energy with a Lagrangian orbit, but to save energy in terms of getting stuff in and out of the gravity well of the planet.
3) With the magic non-use of energy by a ship for flying, one might presume that the same magic (Bless Giles!) applies to stations too?
I know nothing about Elite-A (I only ever played on the BBC), but if the ship sizes are reduced by a third due to the use of imperial units, then the station can presumably take rather more ships. Or am I missing something?
And. Is there any good reason not to revert to the original imperial measurements for ships (and to reduce the size of the docking port correspondingly)?
The Space Trader's Flight Training Manual (SBG38/B1) p. 16, col. 2, par. 3, says about the Coriolis station: "They can berth 2000 ships, and support a fair-sized colonial life development of humanoids." This seems reasonable, and will be accepted as the basis of my subsequent argument here below.
I'd just like to chip in myself here to point out that one way to interpret that would be 2000 ships OR a fair sized colonial development. It said AND because it can do both, it's not necessarily clear that it can do both at the same time. Smallprint of the GASEC manual if you like...
Taking the average GalCop ship-type (excluding stations, and Tharg ships) to be approximately 42.6m on a side (I have my reasons, based on Elite-A data), and arbitrarily adding 25m before and after, for dockside machinery, equipment and vehicles at each berth, and then cubing that into 3D gives a volume of 794,022.776m³. (There have been arguments about imperial ft vs. metric m before, and apparently metric makes more practical sense.)
I'd like to imagine it as loads of the smaller ships (vipers, shuttles, escorts), lots of medium sized traders (cobras, morays) and rather less of the big freighters). If that were true then the weighting of that 2000 ship value would be towards the smaller vessels. I think that there's some logic to that in that one might expect escorts to outnumber freighters, or for the the more versatile mid-size vessels to linger a la Mr. Ryder.
The Manual, same paragraph, previous sentence, says: "Each Coriolis station has a diameter of 1 standard kilometre." Cubing that into 3D gives a volume of 1,000,000,000m³, for approximately 1,259.40972 ships, and only ships, i.e. excluding the "fair-sized colonial life development of humanoids."
So, taking my above interpretations into account (if one were of such a mind) then no problem, it's big enough.
Mr. Ryder therefore (one might assume) docked at a station with facilities for rather less than 2000 ships and perhaps only a 'small-sized colonial life development of humanoids'.
I'd have to get the calculator out to work out how feasible that might be but I think you get the point that it's another (less conflicting) way of reading it.
And. Is there any good reason not to revert to the original imperial measurements for ships (and to reduce the size of the docking port correspondingly)?
Maybe I'm not the best at summarising but there's a whole (sizeable) thread's worth on this...
Jens said he would've, Giles said it didn't look right somehow. Later on I remarked that the relative scales of the ships themselves (along with all the usual stuff) were messed up and gradually people seemed to conclude that I was less trouble if I was left to get on with it... or something like that.
The Space Trader's Flight Training Manual (SBG38/B1) p. 16, col. 2, par. 3, says about the Coriolis station: "They can berth 2000 ships, and support a fair-sized colonial life development of humanoids." This seems reasonable, and will be accepted as the basis of my subsequent argument here below.
I'd just like to chip in myself here to point out that one way to interpret that would be 2000 ships OR a fair sized colonial development. It said AND because it can do both, it's not necessarily clear that it can do both at the same time. Smallprint of the GASEC manual if you like...
Taking the average GalCop ship-type (excluding stations, and Tharg ships) to be approximately 42.6m on a side (I have my reasons, based on Elite-A data), and arbitrarily adding 25m before and after, for dockside machinery, equipment and vehicles at each berth, and then cubing that into 3D gives a volume of 794,022.776m³. (There have been arguments about imperial ft vs. metric m before, and apparently metric makes more practical sense.)
I'd like to imagine it as loads of the smaller ships (vipers, shuttles, escorts), lots of medium sized traders (cobras, morays) and rather less of the big freighters). If that were true then the weighting of that 2000 ship value would be towards the smaller vessels. I think that there's some logic to that in that one might expect escorts to outnumber freighters, or for the the more versatile mid-size vessels to linger a la Mr. Ryder.
The Manual, same paragraph, previous sentence, says: "Each Coriolis station has a diameter of 1 standard kilometre." Cubing that into 3D gives a volume of 1,000,000,000m³, for approximately 1,259.40972 ships, and only ships, i.e. excluding the "fair-sized colonial life development of humanoids."
So, taking my above interpretations into account (if one were of such a mind) then no problem, it's big enough.
Mr. Ryder therefore (one might assume) docked at a station with facilities for rather less than 2000 ships and perhaps only a 'small-sized colonial life development of humanoids'.
I'd have to get the calculator out to work out how feasible that might be but I think you get the point that it's another (less conflicting) way of reading it.
Excellent, Redspear! I like your reinterpretations, and would gladly except them in fanfic, wiki articles and OXPs, because you have clearly thought things through a bit. (However, I would like to think that mine are a bit more conservative... )
Yesss! I love your analysis. The weighting of smaller vs. bigger ships is an issue that I was wondering about, but I wasn't quite sure which numbers to use in order to bring it into the calculations in a logical and practical way; so, I just went with an ordinary ol' arithmetic mean (kind of...). Maybe, one day, I'll spend a bit more time on trying to figure some better numbers, and then see where that gets me.
Last edited by user2357 on Tue Jun 11, 2024 9:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
1) Only SOTL Exploration does anything with Lagrange Points - but that means that we do have the appropriate coding for Oolite.
2) If I understood the argument, then we need to remember that the point of the stations is not to save energy with a Lagrangian orbit, but to save energy in terms of getting stuff in and out of the gravity well of the planet.
3) With the magic non-use of energy by a ship for flying, one might presume that the same magic (Bless Giles!) applies to stations too?
I know nothing about Elite-A (I only ever played on the BBC), but if the ship sizes are reduced by a third due to the use of imperial units, then the station can presumably take rather more ships. Or am I missing something?
1) Great! I am glad to hear that Lagrange points are a possibility.
2) Yes. I imagine that relatively small shuttles and transporters would require less Quirium to go to L1 or L2 and back than to maintain low orbit for the station. However, I also imagine that placing the stations at Lagrange points would further save on Quirium as opposed to continual orbital adjustments to maintain low orbit deep in the gravity well. From all I gather, much fewer orbital adjustments would be required at Lagrange points due to the near-zero gravitational distortion of space-time at those points (unlike deep in the well at low orbit).
3) I've also done some calculations (but it's been yonks; I don't recall the details), but it's not quite magic non-use of energy; some miniscule amount of Quirium is still used during ordinary flight, and a little bit more during a Torus jump, but it's so little compared to even a 0.1 light-year hyperjump that it doesn't even register on the dials. Therefore, I would imagine that a station would actually use a little bit more Quirium to maintain low orbit. Therefore, then, my proposal of relocating stations to Lagrange points. Let us save where we can. Case Study on micro-saving: https://www.mashed.com/447921/how-servi ... es-100000/.
See, this is the sort of discussion I loooove. And again many thanks to the lovely Cholmondley for including me in his thinking
The Coriolis is lorewise the only station that was described as being a kilometer in diameter as far as I know... The others (Dodo being the only canonical one mentioned) could be anything. And whoever said that the more expensive stations would likely be bigger is definitely someone I agree with
Am I remembering correctly that quirium is only "used up" in hyperspace travel? Quirium is basically a magic energy supply. My headcanon positions it as something that has high potential energy that is only released when creating the interdimensional "rip" that generates the hyperspace tunnel. Otherwise it's the equivalent of a battery that can easily handle any other energy needs for a standard scale ship.
Going back to the original questions around scales (and oooooh have we had those over the years) myself and a reasonable number of the old-timers tended to agree that the stated scales in the fiction and manuals were basically made up by a horse that was educated by a teapot that had itself been raised by termites in the jungles of Antarctica. I experimented a little with some of the ships in a 3D program to see what the relative sizes would be like visually and found that a reasonable amendment was to change any mention of "metres" in the ship scales to "feet". I tried this again when trying to build Elite/Oolite ships in Space Engineers: using the 0.5m blocks to create the Adder, for example, created something that you could house a village in. It had storeys, it had vast cargo space... The Krait...just don't get me started. The Krait - a "small fighter" - was sooooo big that I couldn't actually get it off the ground on the SE earth like planet without surrounding it in thrusters...
Station layout is interesting as well. I agree with the OP that without amazing artificial gravity tech the Holdstock's "Commander City" concept is unfeasible. However, there could be some fudge factors here with the station's interior design. For example, how likely is it that the docking port opens out into the open central chamber with access to all facets? Unlikely, I think, even from a health and safety perspective. I always viewed it as a similar process to the Amiga docking and undocking animations - and similar to ED in a way - with a docking bay that could house a few ships that then gave the commanders access to the rest of the station once disembarked. I even wondered for a while if there could be a rotating matrix of docking bays, each providing 6 berths, that would be moved into position for each new ship that would need to dock, but the mechanical engineering for this would be...interesting? That said, I always liked this idea, with a huge gryoscope like structure taking up the majority of the 1km diameter central area (and yes, I know km is not an area) and maybe about 20% of the station's facet-based interior actually being inhabitable, possibly with two or three levels per facet.
The "Commander City" aspect might be as simple as this: Commander City is zero-g and only the use of magboots allows normal walking about. That's why it's called "Commander City": only cpace crews can live/work there without getting violently sick...
The location of the stations in orbit is, I agree, more based on logistics than astronomical convenience. They're a trade post, yes, but they are also an observation area. My modern thinking is still that most/maybe all worlds are strictly off-limits to travellers, but there could still be some limited transit between some planets and the stations to allow diplomatic relations or some direct produce trade. I mean there HAS to be a simple way to get that Lavian Brandy up to space... Maybe in the Ooniverse there are many systems with stations in the lagrange points as well that serve a different purpose... Again dipping into my headcanon, Galcop may have good reason for both having stations in orbit and not allowing for planetary visits from offworlders that have nothing whatever to do with protection or astronomy
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Alien Systems
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I love your analysis. The weighting of smaller vs. bigger ships is an issue that I was wondering about, but I wasn't quite sure which numbers to use in order to bring it into the calculations in a logical and practical way; so, I just went with an ordinary ol' arithmetic mean (kind of...). Maybe, one day, I'll spend a bit more time on trying to figure some better numbers, and then see where that gets me.
And again many thanks to the lovely Cholmondley for including me in his thinking