light speed is 300,000 km per hour. In Oolite it's something like 1 km per second (my 0.3LM ship takes about 10 seconds to get 3 km from the station before i hit the hyperspace button) which is 3,600 km per hour.
So it's roughly 100 times slower in Oolite.
But things are 100 times closer together so it still takes the 'right' amount of time to get to the sun from the planet. Earth is 8 light minutes from the sun so it'd take my ship about 25 minutes. And that's about what it takes in Oolite.
The point of all this is that it means that a given volume of space is made (100x100x100) a million times smaller so the chances of you randomly bumping into someone are a million times higher. So you get some combat and everything is fun.
I think the ships are also made 100 times bigger in each direction as otherwise you wouldn't be able to see them until you were far too close.
Of course the reasons for the off-scale measures are exactly as you are guessing. Nevertheless it's annoying as soon as you start thinking about it.
And of course: The speed of light in vacuum is about 300,000 km per second (not per hour!). So it stays the one thing which is really out of scale!
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The Edible Poet wrote:
However when I jump into a system and the sun looks like it's blatantly sitting on top of the planet, it does tend to grate on my illusion just a little.
Why this? I our solar system it would be perfectly reasonable to be at a point where the sun looks as big as the Earth. And I would estimate it to be at roughly one-and-a-half to two moon orbits. Which is about the distance I would expect a witchspace jump to Earth to end.
All of this means I see no reason to move the sun further away in the first place. It would seem too small (= too far away) to me then.
The speed of light in vacuum is about 300,000 km per second (not per hour!).
D'oh! idiot! I was so busy converting 3E8 into something more readable I forgot the seconds/hours thing!
On the other point - The sun and moon appear to be almost exactly the same size to us because the sun is as many times bigger as it times further away.
Why this? I our solar system it would be perfectly reasonable to be at a point where the sun looks as big as the Earth. And I would estimate it to be at roughly one-and-a-half to two moon orbits. Which is about the distance I would expect a witchspace jump to Earth to end.
All of this means I see no reason to move the sun further away in the first place. It would seem too small (= too far away) to me then.
Just a gut reaction. Which I guess will just be based on my perception of other games and movies and stuff. Come to think of it in my old versions of Elite, when sitting by the planet looking at the sun it would always be allot smaller than in Oolite, so maybe thats what's bugging me.
Debug console? What Debug console? In my days we didn't have such a luxury!
Yes, very usefull to in flight: change mission variables and all the other JS commands without restarting anything. A task for you to implement this for Windows?
Actually, Ahruman has already done the hard work for Windows too, by implementing a Python-based debug console. This can be run either from the development environment (which is a Unix-like shell) or from the Windows command line. Unfortunately, running it on the development environment results in no output from the console, while running it from the command line results in output coming correctly from console, but no input is accepted. There must be a small detail somewhere that escapes us, but at the moment it's one of the "D'oh, it ain't work" things on Windows.
Come to think of it, it might be worth someone looking at the C console (tools/simpleDebugConsole) again. Previously that didn’t get anywhere because building CFLite for Windows turned out to be… somewhat more challenging than I expected. The new version from the OS X 10.5.2 source dump might be less of a problem as a side effect of the Windows port of Safari. Unfortunately, the Read Me file with the source isn’t very informative on that front.
You're very, very right! 
