Oolite Bulletins

Disembodied wrote:

There are lots of reasons why technologies can plateau, from the cultural to the economic to the physical. Recent human history has seen a lot of technological progress, and it's currently running (in many areas) at incredible rates. Taking a longer historical perspective though I think it's a mistake to see this as a constant of all technologies and all societies – even technological ones – in all ages, not least because we're currently running a little overclocked ... But in game terms this is purely a matter of choice. I see my ooniverse as a fairly static place, with little or nothing new being developed anywhere by anybody: it's a decaying, if not decadent, culture, a downbeat place with all its glory days behind it. Its ships are old, its political structures stagnant. Not a place for heroic virtue: "brave" and "bold" lose out to "sly" and "surreptitious". There's nothing new under these suns, just repeated variations on the same low-key themes.

Disembodied wrote:

it's a decaying, if not decadent, culture, a downbeat place with all its glory days behind it. Its ships are old, its political structures stagnant. Not a place for heroic virtue: "brave" and "bold" lose out to "sly" and "surreptitious". There's nothing new under these suns, just repeated variations on the same low-key themes.

Cmdr. Maegil wrote:

Still none of this means there won't be companies competing both commercially and technologically, trying to make the most profit possible before the system implodes.

El Viejo wrote:

<reads the thread, chuckles, and boards his trusty Cobra Mk III>

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Drew's right - war does lead to massive advancements in technology and yet it also doesn't...

We've been killing each other now with balls of lead accelerated by the rapidly expanding gas of gunpowder (or its modern variants) for hundreds of years now - very little has changed in that respect.

Most ships and vehicles are still powered by some variant of the ICE and have been for 100 years.

Nuclear tech briefly shifted the dynamic - both from an engine point of view (subs and big ships) and mass destruction (threat of) - but all wars since WWII have thankfully been "conventional".

Armour has got better, engines more efficient, sensors more sensitive, weapons "smarter", but all in all, we haven't moved that much.

Disembodied wrote:

anything radically new will only come from isolated technical wizards and remote weirdos doing dangerous things in fraught circumstances. A genius engineer might crank together some crazy configuration of ductwork and baffle-plating, to squeeze some more juice out of a drive that was – in theory – already working at capacity. But they're not going to go into production on a mass scale, because they'd be instantly mired in a welter of regulation, lawsuits, death threats and assassination attempts, while simultaneously being ripped off at every turn by corporations too big to sue

Disembodied wrote:

I see my ooniverse as a fairly static place, with little or nothing new being developed anywhere by anybody: it's a decaying, if not decadent, culture, a downbeat place with all its glory days behind it. Its ships are old, its political structures stagnant. Not a place for heroic virtue: "brave" and "bold" lose out to "sly" and "surreptitious". There's nothing new under these suns, just repeated variations on the same low-key themes.

drew wrote:

This leads (in my fiction) to folks like Rebecca, Coyote, Derik et al illegally customising their vessels

drew wrote:

In fact, I sort of do this in real life with my car. It's an old Mazda MX-5... which just happens to have a stage 2 supercharger (200bhp) and uprated brakes and dampers, not that you can tell from the outside...

El Viejo wrote:

drew wrote:

This leads (in my fiction) to folks like Rebecca, Coyote, Derik et al illegally customising their vessels

'You might think that... I couldn't possibly comment!'

Fatleaf wrote:

drew wrote:

In fact, I sort of do this in real life with my car. It's an old Mazda MX-5... which just happens to have a stage 2 supercharger (200bhp) and uprated brakes and dampers, not that you can tell from the outside...

I knew there was a reason why we got along!

Bugbear wrote:

I've been lurking around and indulging in the odd bit of thread seancing (is that even a word? i.e reading up old/dead threads).

There's the recurring theme of what makes a ship too uber and the uber vs standard debate (which is highly entertaining in its own right - long may it endure).

There's also the question over how one justifies, for example, the improvement of a Cobra III to a Cobra IIIe (or whatever your favourite variant is this month) - where all the stats have been improved and the only negative is a higher purchase price.

I'd like to propose a mechanism to justify this - while I'm sure it's not possible given the current structure of Oolite, perhaps it's worthy of consideration when the core is updated.

At it's simplest, allow attributes of a ship to degrade over time. So in other words, you Cobra IIIe's top speed of 0.375 when you bought it degrades by whatever function you like as time goes on, so for example, after 5 years, you're only getting 90% of the 'new ship' top speed (the actual numbers would need to be determined as a result of balance testing).

This pseudo-degradation would then provide the illusion of technological progress. Presumably, a Cobra variant with a more recent design/build date should be faster than the standard Cobby of 3200 vintage.

The same could go for other components - ECMs could become less effective as time goes on, necessitating the need to upgrade to a better one; older model missiles become less effective; older, less effective components become cheaper in the shipyard as newer, more expensive components become available (and these in turn would degrade as time goes on).

Such a mechanism could also justify the frankly outrageous price being asked for a Fer de Lance - not only are you paying for the genuine walnut cockpit inlay and sumptuous leather seatings, made to measure for all space faring species, you also get rock solid reliability and longevity (i.e. the ship's degradation function is much flatter than, say a cheap as chips Adder) - and from a gameplay point of view, it's that longevity that the player will notice over time.

I don't know....this is just another one of my ramblings while I try to avoid doing actual work