Oolite Bulletins

Sagasa wrote:

Hmm, GalCop is powerful enough to make both the Federation and the Empire wary of provoking them too much. The reservist policy gives them the largest navy out of the three and the requirements for enlisting ensure that the pilots will at least be competent.

The Co-operative have access to a technology that neither the Federation nor the Empire (assuming, of course, that your universe tolerates their existence at all) understand: the torus in-system drive. If Frontier-esque ships ever went toe-to-toe with Oolite ships, there would only ever be one result. We'd literally run rings around them. They'd be barrelling along, slaves to dull old Newton, using fuel all the way, and we'd nip in and out and slice them up for fun. So it's not surprising they stay away!

Sagasa wrote:

I like to think of GalCop as taking a laissez-faire approach to governing with minimal interference for maximum profit. Their organization makes me think of the United States where the president has minimal say in the matters of individual states but is the overall commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Very flexible but able to consolidate its forces into a sledgehammer of military might.

All they need is a God-Emperor to unite them.

Your ooniverse, your rules! Like I said above, I see them more like the G20, except even less effective, filled with hundreds of self-centred, squabbling species at various technological and civilisational levels, with an eclectic mix of political systems and often little real control over their own individual planetary populations ... It's more about preventing interplanetary interaction than about facilitating it, and each system jealously guards its own sovereignty.

Smivs wrote:

Not directly related to this Thargoid discussion, but mention has been made of a Federation and an Empire.
I must point out that such things do not exist in either Elite or Oolite. They are 'devices' invented to give a different computer game a bit of backward compatibility with the original Elite.
I think to analyse GalCop and its role in terms of a coherent Thargoid threat in conjunction with Federations and Empires that may exist in the future of a different game is just muddying the water.
In Elite and Oolite, GalCop is simply a trade organisation and has very little to do with defence and military matters.

El Viejo wrote:

Sagasa wrote:

Hmm, GalCop is powerful enough to make both the Federation and the Empire wary of provoking them too much.

In your Ooniverse maybe... but neither the Federation nor the Empire exist in my Ooniverse, and GalCop is pretty much as Disembodied describes it.

Really? I always thought that the Galactic Federation and the Duvall Empire were part of the accepted canon in the Oolite universe. They are mentioned in both the wiki and Drew Wagar's Oolite saga. If they're not canon, then perhaps many of my points were based on a faulty premise.

Sagasa wrote:

Really? I always thought that the Galactic Federation and the Duvall Empire were part of the accepted canon in the Oolite universe. They are mentioned in both the wiki and Drew Wagar's Oolite saga. If they're not canon, then perhaps many of my points were based on a faulty premise.

Canon = fanon for Oolite, pretty much ... one person's canon is another person's hooey! Partly it's a product of so many OXPs: everyone gets to build their own universe, and their own canon too. If you like it, you keep it! Just be advised that combining the Frontierverse with even the vanilla Ooniverse requires some pretty nifty plotholing ...

I imagine 4 empty Pylons and two thargoids remaining on your tail along with damaged sheilds and over heated laser cannons. and crippled fuel injectors might make the Esc button become a viable if not appealing option .

Duggan wrote:

I imagine 4 empty Pylons and two thargoids remaining on your tail along with damaged sheilds and over heated laser cannons. and crippled fuel injectors might make the Esc button become a viable if not appealing option .

Not in interstellar space... no point in ejecting there.

Disembodied wrote:

Canon = fanon for Oolite, pretty much ... one person's canon is another person's hooey! Partly it's a product of so many OXPs: everyone gets to build their own universe, and their own canon too. If you like it, you keep it! Just be advised that combining the Frontierverse with even the vanilla Ooniverse requires some pretty nifty plotholing ...

Silly me thinking there was one Grand Unified Timeline for the Oolite universe.

Well, at least I got a few general opinions on Thargoids from several commanders here.

General consensus seems to be that Thargoids are dangerous because we don't know a lot about them.

I guess that's for the best since that way, anyone can fit whatever fluff they like however they like.

While it was fun thinking about the what-ifs, it makes me think that I may have a bit too much free time. :

Disembodied wrote:

combining the Frontierverse with even the vanilla Ooniverse requires some pretty nifty plotholing

<chuckles>

Interesting discussion.

My Ooniverse is—of course—vastly different from all Ooniverses mentioned so far, with some similarities.

First of all, in vanilla Oolite there is no Thargoid invasion on planets or stations. There is the occasional Thargoid that somehow stranded in a system, and can indeed be dealt with rather easily. Their in-system appearance is not what makes them fearsome. The frightening experience is to become a victim of a misjump and find yourself alone in an arena with four or more Thargoids, with potentially not enough fuel do use your injectors and finish your jump out of interstellar space. And with a malfunctioning witchdrive that doesn't let you jump out for two or three minutes anyway. This is what originally makes Thargoids threatening: a band of ships with turreted lasers attacking you from all sides with no place to run or hide. For me that was definitely an adrenaline-inducing situation in 8bit-Elite, and it's still an adrenaline-inducing situation in (vanilla) Oolite.

The threat to GalCop is not an invasion, but instilling fear of witchjumps to ordinary pilots, which can potentially bring all interplanetary trade to a halt.

Perhaps (to take up one of the points in the first post) GalCop could quite easily dispense with the Thargoids if it had a huge and organized navy. But GalCop doesn't have a navy. For me the main point of GalCop was always that it's an incredibly low-key organization. It is so little organized that having a navy is simply out of the question. Nobody would even think of it. Instead they depend on the incredibly non-effective approach of every-trader-pilot-is-part-of-our-reserve-navy. Again: that's a reserve without any main force. As far as my own personal Ooniverse is concerned, I am willing to grant that (more as a PR-gag than anything else) GalCop has built a grand total of 16 capital ships (Behemoths). But 16 ships for the whole interstellar space between 2048 systems do not a navy make.

Thus the Thargoids pose a real threat, mainly because GalCop isn't able to deal with them.

As far as the Federation and the Empire are concerned: indeed, they are not Elite canon. Whether you incorporate them in your Oolite canon is up to each player. I tend to believe in their existence, but don't know a lot about them. I would suppose that both have a considerably military force and GalCop would be no match for either of them. However, for both Feds and Imps GalCop are outcasts, almost physically repugnant. Therefore neither of the powers would bother to start a war with GalCop. Not having to tolerate the presence of anything GalCop is the best thing that can happen to both, so they're simply not interested.

For me the main point of GalCop was always that it's an incredibly low-key organization.

Now that you mention it, this view does fit the GalCop I roam around in within the vanilla game more than the GalCop I've read about in the Oolite Saga that goes around assassinating people left and right/

As far as the Federation and the Empire are concerned: indeed, they are not Elite canon.

Wait a sec, if the Federation isn't Elite canon, then what was the reason for the removal of the Sol System's coordinates from the galactic charts?

Overall though, the vanilla ooniverse seems pretty peaceful. No tensions between other political entities (because there are no other political entities), the average person on a planet is free to go about their business, and traders are free to trade between stations with only pirates and the occasional Thargoid ambush to worry about. Not a bad place at all.

I suppose I've gotten too used to GRIMDARK courtesy of WH40K to the point that I'm actually relieved that the only thing waiting for me in hyperspace are few bugs.

Thus, when I read about Thargoids attacking space systems in the Oolite saga, I find it difficult to stop myself from asking why we don't just drown them in the bodies of our dead.

Disembodied wrote:

This depends on how fast any FTL communication actually is. In my brain, anyway, the fastest way to send information in the ooniverse is to put it on a ship and have it flown to another system. Way faster than EM waves, but still not instantaneous. Multiple hours for the information to travel even a few light-years, and then more multiple hours for any reinforcements to be mustered and to jump through to intercept a raiding party.

Given the square-of-distance time property of witchspace, you could actually send information between systems fairly quickly with the right infrastructure.

You can jump 7LY in slightly less than an hour, if you do the jump as a series of 0.1LY jumps, and that's counting the 15 second spin-up time on the drive. For the average trader, that's not practical for two reasons - firstly, the strain on the drives means that you'd need to service between each trip, and secondly, all but one of those jumps would be without a witchpoint beacon for guidance.

For a small uncrewed comms drone, though, it's practical. You can calculate the start and end points of each jump with traditional witchspace dead reckoning. Because the drones are all identical and the path between systems is unchanging, you can pretty much hard-code the jump parameters for every step into each one, with just a little bit of a pause for recalculation after each step due to unavoidable drift. Once the drone reaches the target system, it transmits its messages to the main station, and then waits for a passing trader or Galcop patrol to scoop it up and take it in-system. The drones can be cheap enough that it doesn't matter too much if you lose one, or if the witchdrive gets so damaged that they need replacing rather than servicing after the trip. You could get high-priority messages from one end of the galaxy to the other in less than a day. Expensive - you might be looking at a few thousand Cr. for each drone, and need a few thousand of them in operation at once for galactic coverage - but probably worth it for the big galaxy-spanning organisations who need fast comms like Galcop, Galnavy, Tionisla Chronicle, and so on.

Low-priority messages, personal comms, yes, agreed it's probably looking at 2 weeks on a series of ships going the right way.

Sagasa wrote:

Wait a sec, if the Federation isn't Elite canon, then what was the reason for the removal of the Sol System's coordinates from the galactic charts?

My personal interpretation - much as I am impressed by the cleverness of the Selezen timeline and Drew Wagar's novels - is that there's a much simpler explanation. Sol isn't on the galactic charts because it's nowhere near any of the eight galaxies.

You can galactic hyperdrive from Sol's Lave to Chart 1. Because of the nature of intergalactic witchspace, though, you can't get back - you end up on a stable 8-node path if you keep doing it. After a few attempts, they gave up - but before all memory of the "failed" technology was lost, colonists/refugees/political escapees/non-humans with nothing to lose from the "Old Worlds" near Sol made it through - and named the 11 first systems they found after their old homes. They were probably called "New Lave" for a couple of centuries before the fledgling Galcop realised that there really was no going back.

(The identity of relative position between the two sets of systems is a partial coincidence - it's a coincidence that the suns were lined up like that, but the resonance between them is what led to the original "galactic" hyperdrive from Sol-Lave to Chart1-Lave being possible. You can't get back, though, because the resonance in the 256 systems of each Chart to its neighbouring charts massively overwhelms it)

This probably happened around 2500, far enough back to thoroughly colonise the 8 charts from a handful of large colony ships, and far enough back to account for the complete divergence in Oolite and Frontier technologies. (Except for ship names and shapes; given the in-service dates and the fact that the only major ship in Elite but not Frontier is the Mamba, 3105 is another plausible date, though that would place the "present day" of Oolite somewhat later than 3150 {1}.)

{1} The date 2084004 that you start from is listed in Oolite docs as days since the "epoch". If Oolite is set in about 3150 AD, then that puts the epoch at about -2555 BC, which is an ... unusual choice of start date. "Completion of the Great Pyramid of Giza" is about the only major anchoring event around then. (Okay, so maybe my theory needs the involvement of some ancient Egyptian aliens, who used the Great Pyramid to transport humans to Lave?)

{1} The date 2084004 that you start from is listed in Oolite docs as days since the "epoch". If Oolite is set in about 3150 AD, then that puts the epoch at about -2555 BC, which is an ... unusual choice of start date. "Completion of the Great Pyramid of Giza" is about the only major anchoring event around then. (Okay, so maybe my theory needs the involvement of some ancient Egyptian aliens, who used the Great Pyramid to transport humans to Lave?)

I do believe we've hit upon a credible theory as to why the early ship designers were so obsessed with triangles. Some sort of residual cultural memory. Bravo!

Sagasa wrote:

I do believe we've hit upon a credible theory as to why the early ship designers were so obsessed with triangles. Some sort of residual cultural memory. Bravo!

Works for me!

Disembodied wrote:

This depends on how fast any FTL communication actually is. In my brain, anyway, the fastest way to send information in the ooniverse is to put it on a ship and have it flown to another system. Way faster than EM waves, but still not instantaneous. Multiple hours for the information to travel even a few light-years, and then more multiple hours for any reinforcements to be mustered and to jump through to intercept a raiding party.

I recall reading a recent article about how scientists from the university of Beijing were able to quantum entangle two photons to facilitate a faster than light transfer of information over a distance of 16km. Of course, the cipher had to be transmitted by more mundane means but the potential is there. The possibilities are exciting quite frankly.

Sagasa wrote:

As far as the Federation and the Empire are concerned: indeed, they are not Elite canon.

Wait a sec, if the Federation isn't Elite canon, then what was the reason for the removal of the Sol System's coordinates from the galactic charts?

That's already assuming a Frontier point of view, but Frontier in itself is not part of the Elite canon (unless a player chooses to make it so). Therefore it's incorrect to state that Sol's coordinates were removed from the charts. As far as we know from Elite they were never in the charts in the first place. If Frontier put them in the charts that's Frontier canon, not Elite canon.

The Dark Wheel mentions old Earth, thus the existence—or maybe, for all we know, the previous existence—of Earth (and therefore Sol) is part of the Elite canon. But Elite canon gives us no information whatsoever about its location in relation to the eight galaxies, or its current status. That's what made it possible for Frontier to go ahead and place it on its charts somewhere.