Oolite Bulletins

Here are a couple of thoughts.

On an oolite space station, where there is a likelihood of ships crashing into the surfaces, would the habitable area be right on the outside edge? Would it not be prudent to have the habitable area well inside the circumference of the station?

Here's a free diagram of one idea for the internal layout of the station. The thing rings are the floors of the inhabitable area of the station, one positioned at 800m diameter and one at 900m diameter. Each would provide more than adequate clearance between floor and outer hull to prevent too much trouble if an idiot pilot ploughed his ass into the station.


The only drawback might be that there might be that constant feeling of walking uphill due to the curvature. Alternatively, flat surfaces could be made with some other method of travelling (which I think would be more canon from what i remember of the Dark Wheel).

Second thing, there would need to be artificial gravity for the facets of the station that face towards and away from the planet. Again, "Dark Wheel" canon states that the facet facing the planet is habited and is called "Commander City" on Lave Station. It is, of course, entirely possible that those facets have the "floors" at 90% to the facet itself (leading maybe to a ring layout like the diagram above) and thus meaning that artificial gravity wouldn't be needed...

Selezen wrote:

The only drawback might be that there might be that constant feeling of walking uphill due to the curvature.

The drawbacks are significantly more complicated than that. Moving turnwise makes you heavier, and moving widdershins makes you lighter. Walking parallel to the axis of rotation, you’d feel a sideways drag due to Coriolis effect (hah). These effects are likely to make you feel rather queasy until you get your station legs.

Selezen wrote:

Alternatively, flat surfaces could be made with some other method of travelling

On a flat surface, you’d feel an outwards force when you weren’t at the centre. Walking across it, ignoring the effects described above, you’d feel as though you were walking along a hyperbola oid.

Even with artifical gravity, stations might rotate to provide gyroscopic stability. After all, plenty of tonnage must move about in there - particularly when loading and unloading ships. Spinning might cut down on the use of station-keeping thrusters.

I've often wondered how you'd feel getting out of bed - a change of say 1.5m of your head position as you stand up would have a reasonable percentage change in the perceived "weight" of your skull and its contents... (permanent morning sickness?)

This article seems to suggest that for a 1G 500m radius station the coriolis effect might not be excessive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial ... y#Rotation

You beat me to the punch there, m4r35n357.

Selezen wrote:

You beat me to the punch there, m4r35n357.

hehe I was going to post my own calculations, but I didn't trust the answers I got, so I chickened out & used Wikipedia
[EDIT] Otherwise I would have said the centrifugal force at the outer hull is: 500*(2*pi*0.4)^2/9.81 = ~322G
I was told the value of 0.4, don't know where it came from as it doesn't seem to be in the default shipdata files. By the same (wrong?) calculation, the value of 0.15 for rotation gives ~45G . . .
[FURTHER EDIT] I looked at 1G and found that corresponds to rotation of 0.02 . . .
Please point out any mistakes you can find!

Cmdr. Maegil wrote:

- create a folder Oolite\AddOns\main_stations_slowdown.oxp\Config
- in this folder, create a file named shipdata-overrides.plist
- open it with a text editor such as jEdit or Notepad++ (NOT Notepad, it adds corrupting metadata)
- copy the following code and paste it on the file

Code: Select all

{
	"coriolis-station" =
	{
		station_roll = 0.15;
	};
	"dodecahedron-station" =
	{
		station_roll = 0.15;
	};
	"icosahedron-station" =
	{
		station_roll = 0.15;
	};
}

Save and restart with the shift pressed until the spinning ship appears.

Is that really all you need to do? Makes no difference on my setup . . .

m4r35n357 wrote:

Is that really all you need to do? Makes no difference on my setup . . .

Then you have probably done something wrong and your plist isn't recognized. For instance, have you made sure not to have any additional brackets in your code? Have you saved it exactly under the required name? Have you not used Notepad? Have you made sure that your editor hasn't put a hidden ".txt"-extension behind the file name?

There's a lot of things that can go wrong.

Commander McLane wrote:

m4r35n357 wrote:

Is that really all you need to do? Makes no difference on my setup . . .

Then you have probably done something wrong and your plist isn't recognized. For instance, have you made sure not to have any additional brackets in your code? Have you saved it exactly under the required name? Have you not used Notepad? Have you made sure that your editor hasn't put a hidden ".txt"-extension behind the file name?

There's a lot of things that can go wrong.

Yep I use Ubuntu, cut'n'pasted everything, even persuaded Smivs to send me his working version and still nothing . . . I must confess I'm stumped.
[edit] even used od to check for unusual characters & line endings, looks clean, permissions on everything look OK.

Got to admit I'm stumped. As maresnest says, my working one didn't work there and his version (sent to me) checked out fine.
I'm wondering if maybe another oxp is overriding this...just winning in the pecking order.

Pull out all other OXP's, and leave the override for station roll in. (The script works fine for me)

If you're using OXP stations, another method is to tweak each OXP internally... that's how I've been doing it.
I have the Torus station set slower than the others, at 0.08.

El Viejo wrote:

If you're using OXP stations, another method is to tweak each OXP internally... that's how I've been doing it.
I have the Torus station set slower than the others, at 0.08.

Griff's Coriolis is set to 0.08 as well. I haven't really changed the station roll before, but I have added the code to my gimi-custom.oxp now, and I like the result.

Gimi wrote:

Griff's Coriolis is set to 0.08 as well.

That's his Alt-Coriolis, I think... his 'normal' Coriolis is set faster.