Oolite Bulletins

Disembodied wrote: ↑Fri Feb 23, 2018 8:15 pm

DataPacRat wrote:

I'm wondering whether the Maesinites would necessarily be quite so pre-technological as you describe, though. Is there any more info about low Tech Levels than TL2 covers Oolite-quality missiles and rerouting systems for larger cargo bays? Depending on what counts as a "good enough" missile, then TL1 could cover anything up to roughly World War 2 level tech, or up to better-than-present-day tech.

There isn't really any more detail on what tech levels actually mean: TL1 could plausibly mean anything from "stone age" to "just capable of FTL space travel". My own preference is to imagine that the systems that make up the Co-operative contain a very wide range of societies, so I lean more towards TL1 being more towards the Stone/Bronze/Iron Age end of things. Of course, technologies do cross boundaries …

After trawling through (almost) all the OXPs and OXZs in the Wiki, I've come across one that might offer further light on Tech Level 1: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Ship_Configuration_OXP , in which at TL1 stations a pilot can purchase low-quality engines, hyperdrive, maneuvering thrusters, and shields. Admittedly, whether this addon should be treated as having any degree of "canon" is highly debatable, but I'm willing to run with it until something better comes along.

(One consequence of this: If you take a stock Adder from a broke start, and downgrade all the subsystems to their cheapest versions, you end up with around 8,000 Credits; so it looks like the Maesinites would only need to scrimp and save up to around 57,000 to get their prodigal daughter up into the black. ... Though I still get to start arguing (even if just with myself) about whether increased odds of survival against various pirates would be worth the extra effort/taxes/population/etc. Also, I'm hoping to get the new Home System OXZ ( http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Home_System ) working, as it's very much in line with the flufftext mood I'm currently aiming for.)

Somewhat further relatedly, I've also recently found http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_timeline and http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Chroni ... _Milky_Way , which indicate that Oolite 'officially' takes place starting in 3147, and it looks like it lasts until 3151 at the latest (with the end of the Thargoid menace)... and it looks like all sorts of interesting things are going to be happening with the non-human aliens by 3165 (with some further musing at https://web.archive.org/web/20090323080 ... _2info.asp ). So now I have some future events to think about foreshadowing, or possibly even sticking my rodentette pilot into the middle of. Fun times.

That timeline stuff ain't necessarily so. Some of us see no connection between Elite/Oolite and Frontier/ED.

Cody wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2018 10:04 am

That timeline stuff ain't necessarily so. Some of us see no connection between Elite/Oolite and Frontier/ED.

Indeed … Oolite is very much a "bring your own canon" affair!

DataPacRat wrote:

at TL1 stations a pilot can purchase low-quality engines, hyperdrive, maneuvering thrusters, and shields.

This is the technology that can be/is permitted to be assembled/repaired/fitted at a station in a TL1 system. Someone from a stone-age society could be given some tools and a bit of training, and become a competent mechanic - but they wouldn't then be able to go home and manufacture a car, or an engine, or a window or a tyre or a ball-bearing, or even make a spanner or a screw, to say nothing of drilling for oil and refining petroleum, etc. etc.

But you're totally free to interpret the ooniverse as you wish! And planets are big things: from way up in space, they might look like single units, to be summarised in a couple of lines and given a label - but down in the dirt there's room for all sorts of stuff to be going on.

Disembodied wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2018 10:50 am

Cody wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2018 10:04 am

That timeline stuff ain't necessarily so. Some of us see no connection between Elite/Oolite and Frontier/ED.

Indeed … Oolite is very much a "bring your own canon" affair!

But you're totally free to interpret the ooniverse as you wish! And planets are big things: from way up in space, they might look like single units, to be summarised in a couple of lines and given a label - but down in the dirt there's room for all sorts of stuff to be going on.

... Those lines, plus thinking about what my Maesinian Rattess might be doing to gather the credits to make her first Adder survivable, has just given me a rather horrible idea, which I'm going to go post more about in the 'Home System' thread.

Disembodied wrote: ↑Sat Feb 24, 2018 10:50 am

But you're totally free to interpret the ooniverse as you wish!

I'm currently trying to imagine what it would take /to/ accomplish the 'non-humans go away from G1' scenario. Looking at Galaxy 1's populations, my quick estimate is that there are roughly 300 billion non-humans in G1. Assuming an average of 75 kg apiece, that's around 25 billion tons of slave-equivalent cargo. The largest vessel I can find holds up to 3000 tons; somewhere north of 8 million trips would be required. Which would be 40 billion credits just for the galactic drives to G2 - 220 billion if they cycle the same ships around the other galaxies back again. And the organizational issues would involve convincing a hundred distinct cultures, across techlevels, organization styles, and species, all to make the same move at the same time.

It all seems... rather less plausible than "some human supremacists wiped them all out, and managed a large-scale coverup". Which is a scenario I'd rather avoid using.

So, looking at options for what else might be going on... there's the rather significant fact that after this point, galactic hyperdrives stop working - or, at least, people from G8 stop arriving in G1, so people in G1 start assuming that using a galactic hyperdrive is an expensive form of suicide, and so stop building the things. If that's a physical effect, then that implies something along the lines of Star Trek Q reeingineering spacetime, which is a /bit/ more of a mouthful than I really want. But there's also the extreme implausibility of a galactic-scale teleport which nudges its user along a chain of exactly 8 links; sure, it's good for playability, but I'm trying to handwave a self-consistent set of rationalizations here.

One approach that seems to have promise might start with the 'Big Lie' that witchdrives are physically limited to 7 lightyear jumps, and that GalCop enforced that limit for (insert nefarious control scheme here), until it fell and fully-capable drives became available in time for the next games. If we've got a single organization already maintaining that sort of large-scale fiction, then tweaking this conspiracy to also be doing something with the intergalactic drives requires much less suspension-of-disbelief than a lot of other theories. Eg, what if there are literally no limits on such drives, so that a backyard tinker can open a wormhole large enough for a whole planet - in order to keep hostile governments from teleporting every planet they don't like into stars and/or intergalactic space, this form of conspiracy might actually involve conspirators who aren't sneaky-evil-for-the-sake-of-evil. ... Until, say, collapsing economies lead to internal pressures among conspiratorial subgroups leading to differences of opinion, leading to a conflict circa 3165, in which one group tries to wormhole away all G1's planets, another group brings all the human planets back to G1 (and replacement planets for all the nonhuman-inhabited ones), and a new stable set of standoffs are negotiated between the formerly-united conspirators, part of whose terms are for G1 to be left alone.

... Okay, so it's shaky, missing a lot of detail, and needs a lot of improvement. The two virtues it has are that it simplifies the physics a bit (general universal laws - eg, "galactic" hyperdrives can go anywhere - are preferred by Occam over weird cases - eg, galdrives located in G1 can go to G2, etc), and it doesn't require any of the people involved to work against their own perceivable self-interest.

Anyone have any better ideas?

Ok.. I'm a little confused as to how we suddenly went from discussing planetary GDPs to galaxy-wide conspiracies, but whatever..

DataPacRat wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2018 6:17 pm

Anyone have any better ideas?

Well, since the subject matter under discussion just jumped lanes, have you seen Drew Wagar's take on what happened to all the non-human species? Which is a long-winded way of asking if you've read his Oolite Saga yet?

Diziet Sma wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2018 1:40 pm

Well, since the subject matter under discussion just jumped lanes, have you seen Drew Wagar's take on what happened to all the non-human species? Which is a long-winded way of asking if you've read his Oolite Saga yet?

Not yet; I'm close to finishing up reading Mossfoot's story over here. I've got that Oolite Saga in my to-read pile, and can move it to the top. Thanks for the suggestion.

DataPacRat wrote: ↑Thu Feb 22, 2018 9:55 pm

... I'm still trying to figure out what some of the numbers mean. Population 0.8 billion, fine, there's 800,000,000 sapient small harmless furry rodents. But the "Productivity" is listed as 768 megacredits, or about 960,000 credits per rodent. They're at Tech Level 1, so can't even build a useful missile, or reconfigure a ship's existing systems to fit in a larger cargo bay; and they're an anarchy, without large-scale forms of cooperation so... where is that wealth coming from? Is it the purely domestic production, or does it include trade that doesn't benefit the local rodents, or something else?

A modern-day first-world nation like Canada could be argued to fall under TL1, and has a GDP per capita of around $40,000... so might that imply that a Canadian dollar is worth around 24 credits?

How much further flufftext can be squeezed out of such numbers?

Using the Traveller rpg definition of TL, Canada would have a TL of 6 or so (see wiki page). Traveller was an influence on Bell & Braben in writing Classic Elite, and is thus relevant here.
But even if it had a TL of 1, that would not allow growing enough food to feed a population of 0.8 billion unless the planet was habitable.

A propos of Stranger's comments on planet habitability (and his restrictions on marketing food and wine/liquors, etc), this would logically lead to a massive restriction of population on primitive small planets which are not habitable.