Going the long way

Chrisfs · Post by **Chrisfs** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 12:52 am

I was wondering, is it set up in the game logic to get from one system to another simply on normal engines? Has anyone tried that (or looked at the code?). I would be curious if you pointed yourself in the right direction (if you could figure out what that was) and left the game on overnight, where you could travel from one system to another, 'the slow way'

phonebook · Post by **phonebook** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 1:00 am

most probably not

here is a sobering thought- supposing you could travel at half the speed of light, to get to the edge if our solar system would take a couple of years at least (the oort cloud)

lets put that speed into perspective- if you attemtempted the same journey in the fastest thing in space humans have currently developed, it would take, and i apologise for this, 10,000 years!

hj1an · Post by **hj1an** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 1:06 am

phonebook wrote:
most probably not

here is a sobering thought- supposing you could travel at half the speed of light, to get to the edge if our solar system would take a couple of years at least (the oort cloud)

lets put that speed into perspective- if you attemtempted the same journey in the fastest thing in space humans have currently developed, it would take, and i apologise for this, 10,000 years!

Apologize if I'm mistaken - but isn't the Voyager 2 nearly reached this area already, and it's taken, what, maybe "only" 30 years?

phonebook · Post by **phonebook** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 1:59 am

good god no LOL

look at this link:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/ima ... em-big.jpg

remember that that scale is logarythmic, its gonna take a MIGHTY long time to get through that oort cloud

phonebook · Post by **phonebook** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 2:15 am

in fact, it says on the nasa website, that were it to not break up, it would reach the mid point in well erm - 40,000 years- thats the mid point between us and alpha centauri

space is huuuuuuuuge- and without wormhole or envelope folding or whatever- its just not going to happen- this is the same posited technology as time travel- after all distances in space are space time distances, not distances as we appreciate them

hj1an · Post by **hj1an** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 6:46 am

phonebook wrote:
in fact, it says on the nasa website, that were it to not break up, it would reach the mid point in well erm - 40,000 years- thats the mid point between us and alpha centauri

space is huuuuuuuuge- and without wormhole or envelope folding or whatever- its just not going to happen- this is the same posited technology as time travel- after all distances in space are space time distances, not distances as we appreciate them

Aah, thanks for clearing that up. I had confused Oort Cloud with the Heliopause...

Post by **Cmdr James** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 7:23 am

Chrisfs wrote:
I was wondering, is it set up in the game logic to get from one system to another simply on normal engines? Has anyone tried that (or looked at the code?). I would be curious if you pointed yourself in the right direction (if you could figure out what that was) and left the game on overnight, where you could travel from one system to another, 'the slow way'

No you cannot do this. Each system is a separate place and the only way go get to another is witchspace. Even if you left it forever, you would never reach anywhere else.

Diziet Sma · Post by **Diziet Sma** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 8:19 am

Just to throw a wrench in this discussion..

I do recall DaddyHoggy remarking not so long back that he once (on C64 Elite I think) got stuck in witchspace with insufficient fuel to reach the nearest system. He left the game running overnight at full throttle, and the next day found that he was now within range of said system...

So maybe travelling in witchspace works a little differently.. it could be an interesting experiment to see if it would work in Oolite..

Post by **another_commander** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 8:21 am

Diziet Sma wrote:
So maybe travelling in witchspace works a little differently.. it could be an interesting experiment to see if it would work in Oolite..

Trust me, it won't work.

Diziet Sma · Post by **Diziet Sma** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 8:24 am

I didn't think it would, to be honest.. but was kinda hoping somebody might waste some time trying..

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 8:56 am

Diziet Sma wrote:
Just to throw a wrench in this discussion..
I do recall DaddyHoggy remarking not so long back that he once (on C64 Elite I think) got stuck in witchspace with insufficient fuel to reach the nearest system. He left the game running overnight at full throttle, and the next day found that he was now within range of said system...

So maybe travelling in witchspace works a little differently.. it could be an interesting experiment to see if it would work in Oolite..

I did and it worked - I moved the required 0.2ly overnight to reach my intended system - I could test it because on the C64 when you were stuck in WS the crosshair on the local chart was halfway between your two jump systems but it used up all of the fuel req'd to make the jump - when I left it over night - on the local chart (to make it run even faster) - the crosshair had moved from the midpoint to where I presume I currently was now (only by a few pixels) - but when I selected my original system again and hit the H key I jumped and had no fuel left - fluke or quirk or bug - don't know and don't care - this was during my phase of Elite playing where I'd promised myself if I "died" then I would start again...

phonebook · Post by **phonebook** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 11:03 am

aha! but thats another matter altogether. sometimes you get caught in witchspace damn close to your destination- i do quite a lot of the going up dance

very occasionally, i have tried to hyperspace out of the thargoids, only to find i couldnt- not because of lack of fuel, but because on closer examination of the compass- i was at the destination

i think it must be a feature, that sometimes witchspace is very near a system- actually IN the system- just quite a distance from the planet

or

the c64 with its 37K (i know its a little more) mapped the entire galaxy in glorious 3d

ACTUALLLY......

i seem to remember the same thing, i am re reading your post again and again, making sure i dont misquote you before i start accusing you of porkies, and i cant help thinking that what you experienced is ringing a distant bell- the bit about the moving crosshairs- perhaps the 64 had a feature that in witchspace, if you carried on moving, you eventually got somewhere- it would only need a starfield simulation after all

MORE ACTUALLY......

at the time, i rationalized this in my head, by saying that to be able to get out of witchspace you had to kill all the thargoids in that bit- must have been a trial and error thing

EVEN MORE ACTUALLY......

god all this remembering is painful- the crosshairs only ever moved a couple of pixels- you moved to a safe point from the original drive failure in order to get out of witchspace

sorry if there was any implication in this post that you were one of the people who found generation ships and dredgers HAHA i just thought it cool to show my thought processes as a man in his forties trying to remember stuff from being at university!!!

perhaps someone who has dissembled the 64 version......?

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 12:08 pm

Trying to do my own thinking about to my C64 Elite Days...

After a misjump (forced or accidental) I'm pretty sure you always ended up half way between your start system and final destination, but used all of the fuel that that jump should have used. Now sometimes this half way point put you close enough to either your planned system with your remaining fuel in which case you could just 'H' again or, it put you close enough to a different system so that you could move the end point crosshair and jump to that instead (the number of times this was an anarchy system I cringe to recall!).

When I did the 'leave overnight' experiment - I did panic that I might set off in a tangential direction to what I needed but unless I got lucky I think that witchspace does not actually have a 'direction' other than a 1D one, so when I set off in my "random" direction I was actually just travelling down this 'tunnel' towards my intended destination because the crosshair moved in direction towards my original destination (and I had to do this because there was no system within the small circle of my remaining jump capability).

I also remember that the C64 had an odd bug - sometimes systems that appeared within the 7ly circle where actually 7.2ly away and some that were definitely outside the circle where only 6.8ly away - so I learned to always check and never actually believe the circle in the local chart!

As an aside and no doubt will be missed in this thread - but where did the 0.4ly resolution come from?

phonebook · Post by **phonebook** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 12:30 pm

aaaah thats right- you had to re choose a system!!! and yeah it was always an anarchy planet - or seemed to be!

phonebook · Post by **phonebook** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 12:37 pm

tho i cant for the life of me remember it taking all night to get the crosshairs a few pixels along- tho i daresay overnight, you would have travelled a few

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