have been musing gravity and such things

[phonebook]

one of the cleverest things here i feel, is the speed up and slow down function that our control over our spacecraft affords us- in space if you were to carry on thrusting then you would carry on accelerating- well up to a point, space isnt a total vacuum; and if you stopped thrusting, then you would carry on going at roughly the same pace.

so we dont have a thrust control, we have a speed control, where presumably zero is the speed that puts you in orbit arround a planet(travelling at the speed that the planet(or the star, or a calculation based on the gravitational pulls of everything) rotates), so to accelerate and maintain a particular speed travelling in the direction of planetary rotation, then I would imagine some downforce would need to be applied as well to keep the ship on the straight and level, and not leap to a higher orbit- and conversely when we travel at a certain speed counter rotation, then i presume some kind of upforce is applied too

i am trying to provide some kind of justification for the ways our craft sit in space- and it seems to me if we treat the speed controls as just that, and presume them linked to a balancing computer of some kind, then we achieve this

[Commander McLane]

i am trying to provide some kind of justification for the ways our craft sit in space- and it seems to me if we treat the speed controls as just that, and presume them linked to a balancing computer of some kind, then we achieve this

The assumption for Elite (and therefore Oolite) has always been that a very clever flight computer is doing all the work for you, and converts everything in a way that your spaceship steers like a car. And this is the only explanation you're going to get.

The attempt to make navigation in space more "real" (= newtonian) is collectively known as "Frontier Elite 2" and "Frontier First Encounters", and loathed by one third of the members of this forum for the very fact of its maybe-more-realistic-but-unfortunately-totally-unplayable-and-therefore-sucking-all-fun-out-of-the-game approach to navigation and steering. (The second third have fond memories of FE2 and FFE, and the rest never knew it. ) IMHO we shouldn't go anywhere near that with Oolite.

So let's just stay where we are: Our controls are as they are, and our spacecrafts fly as they do, because of some very sophisticated flight computer system, the details of which we don't need to bother ourselves with.

My 0.2 ₢.

[Captain Hesperus]

It's like the Eurofighter Typhoon. Aerodynamically, it's a tumbling brick, but all the celver computer-jiggery-pokery makes it fly like a standard fighter (better in fact, since it's inherent lack of aerodynamic qualities allows it to manoeuvre radically different to other aircraft). Take this analogy and apply it to the ships in Oolite. every microsecond the ship's flight management system takes bearings from astronomical 'landmarks' and uses them to determine if the ship is moving from the course prescribed by the pilot's input. If it is deviating, the management system automatically and without the pilot's choice makes the minor course adjustments using the external thruster arrays (which are actually recessed into the hull, unlike the primitive C.21 Terran vessels). When a ship enters a geostationary orbit, the ship takes a bearing from the planet's surface, calculates the rotational speed of the planet, the gravitaitional field and the ship's trajectory and again without the pilot's input uses the prime motivator and navigational thrusters to maintain the correct altitude, speed and trajectory relative to the planet.

Simple.

Captain Hesperus

[Sendraks]

The attempt to make navigation in space more "real" (= newtonian) is collectively known as "Frontier Elite 2" and "Frontier First Encounters", and loathed by one third of the members of this forum for the very fact of its maybe-more-realistic-but-unfortunately-totally-unplayable-and-therefore-sucking-all-fun-out-of-the-game approach to navigation and steering. (The second third have fond memories of FE2 and FFE, and the rest never knew it. ) IMHO we shouldn't go anywhere near that with Oolite.

So very, very true.

[Micha]

I don't so much see the Elite way as using advanced computers and lots of little thrusters to maintain ship flight attitude according to pilots wishes, rather the fact that in the Elite universe (and Ooniverse) the sub-light engines and control surfaces hook into some kind of ether and drive / steer the ship that way.

Otherwise you'd get all sorts of Elite pilots hacking their ships systems in order to turn off the auto-attitude controls.

[Disembodied]

I'm with Micha here. It looks and feels non-Newtonian because it is non-Newtonian. The biggest clue is the fact that you don't need any fuel to fly. Fuel is used to create wormholes, but after that you can swoop and skim around in space to your heart's content forever and never use a single microgram of reaction mass.

Our ships have big flaring jets of something blue and glowing coming out their rears, that get bigger when we go faster. But when we slow down, there are no big jets shooting out the front. Plus, again, no fuel is used – so these can't be rocket motors. We're forced to turn to technobabble and explain the rear jets away as being some sort of trailing wake of disturbed spacetime, left behind by our thoroughly non-Newtonian system drives ...

[ovvldc]

Best not to rationalise too much...

[aegidian]

I'm with Disembodied. Oolite - normal space - drives burrow through the semi-rigid phlogiston leaving glowing subspace channels that heal at a constant rate, like hot boiled prunes through icy jelly.

[Commander McLane]

Ah! So that was it, what it was. Just out of interest: How would a space-walk in Oolite work?

[Disembodied]

How would a space-walk in Oolite work?

Flushed with pride after having my theories supported by the Great G Himself, I'd venture to say that space-walks would work pretty much as normal. Without an engine to grip the phlogiston, space is just space.

There's maybe a size restriction on system drives: missiles, after all, run out of fuel after a while ... although their flight characteristics suggest that they behave in a similar way to ship engines. Perhaps engines below a certain critical size have to consume quirium in order to push through the "surface tension" of the phlogiston, to get deep enough to achieve any grip. Ships have drives big enough to get traction without consuming quirium: although if they choose to do so, using fuel injectors, they can achieve greater traction and therefore higher speeds.

[Chrisfs]

I'm simply glad that when I press the slow down button for long enough, it stops.