Trivia

[st3f]

It sounds like there's a tricky decision as to when to stick to the original game and when to branch off and change. I'd love to see *huge* space stations and transporters so that I can have that opening sequence of Star Wars flypast experience.

Hopefully nobody will mind if I throw an idea in here. Maybe the first galaxy should be Elite-like then , as you progress further into the game you get new types of bigger space stations and huge ships. (not that I'd know if this had been done -- I'm still on the first Galaxy.)

[Arexack_Heretic]

It has been done, most missions start in later galaxies.
Gallileo has a huge work in progress that alters a large number of systems in a distant galaxy.

There are some pittfalls to confining ships to certain galaxies, but I am confident Giles is working on the problem.

[Cholmondely]

When looking at the size of the ship compared to a station, it does become clear exactly how big the Cobra is, but how well the scale works. I started working on an internal model of a Coriolis some time ago, and this shows the scale (the Cobra is the red blob, the long box is the docking port):

Bearing in mind that the Coriolis is a small, easy to construct design, the scale fits fairly well!

Selezen - do you still have the original image anywhere?

Oh! And the Dream Team Beta oxp is missing oodles of textures. Any idea as to where they might be? I'm particularly after the Adder.

[Cholmondely]

All the ships in Oolite are ridiculously large, even when you don’t take the tiny planets into account. Weren’t they at some stage converted from N ft to N m instead of 0.3048N m? If so, the sizes on feet were merely surprising, not silly. :-p

Agreeing here!

The adjustment from feet to meters was necessitated by the increase in scale of the space station to it's full 1km diameter glory. If the ships had stayed scaled by feet then they'd almost all fit in the docking slit sideways - and docking is such an important part of the experience it was necessary to scale ships to match.

The Cobra 3 is particularly huge!

Just musing about this.

The only reason for the distorted size of the ships seems to be the need to make docking a challenge.

But there are at least two other ways of keeping the challenge, while not distorting the ship sizes.

1) Have more docking bays - but smaller ones (see cim's Multidock text OXP).
2) Have the one large docking bay - but with multiple ships entering and leaving at the same time (player needs to avoid them).

[cbr]

an option would be to have inside the 'big' docks have 'those' light thingies forming 'virtual paths (cubes/rectangles) one has to follow for perfect entry, get outside -> credit penalty of some sort. or on your flight tab.

The rectangles can be smaller than the docks to fit the smaller ships and i believe the position of the player ship from the perfect entry line can be calculated?