Oolite Bulletins

EVERYTHING SHOULD CASCADE! SPACE DUST! ASTEROIDS! TRUMBLES! PANDA BEARS!

No. Not at all. Ships with fuel onboard, as well as stations, cascade. Everything else dies.

Since a q-bomb causes a violent and lethal reaction in quirium, everything powered by quirium should cascade, including derelicts but excluding stations.
Stations would have their quirium reserves shielded.
However, everything hit by the blast waves should be destroyed, including stations if hit by enough blasts.

My stance on this has just precisely been summed up by Cmdr Wyvern, so I simply second what he wrote.

The whole question revolves around gameplay, of course. I personally have never used a Q-bomb, so I don't really know how often a player would want (non-main) stations to cascade... but would this option not make the Q-bomb too easy to use? Should a successful wiping out of several enemy ships not be something that's quite tricky to do, where the dropping of the mine in just the right spot for maximum impact is a matter of fine judgement? If one can rely on a chain of stations and other immobile entities to carry the blast-wave for you, then does that not run the risk of making the weapon too über, in game-play terms as well as within the game-universe?

In terms of "realism", would a potentially station-busting megabomb be on sale to the general public? Even if the main station is invulnerable, with numerous OXPs adding other dockable entities around the place, representing trillions of credits of infrastructure and housing who knows what size of population, would it not be a bit harder to get hold of these WMDs?

Drew is of course the resident quirium expert! But even here we can finagle the deal with technobabble. Since the delevopment of the Q-bomb, *all* quirium not currently in use in a starship engine is gravimetrically shielded. It's just common sense, like keeping sparks and naked flames away from stores of gunpowder. However, because ships' engines rely on quirium's gravimetric, space-distorting properties to function, you *can't* shield a ship's engine. If you do, you're going nowhere.

I think Commander Wyvern has summed up what I feel should happen. Although I also like the idea that the presence of a massive body (moon or bigger) should prevent the explosion from happening at all. There should be "safe zones" near to planets and moons where cascades won't be triggered, even if a ship is hit by a blast from outside, and where Q-bombs simply won't explode in the first place.

More thoughts...

We know ships only use fuel in significant amounts for hyperspacing, and jetting around on injectors. Apparently only fumes are required for normal thrust; the engines produce normal thrust and are able to torus even after all the liquid quirium in the tanks gets burned up in the injectors. That says to me some tiny fraction of reserve is stored in the engine proper, therefore cascade.

But what of missiles? Does a missile in flight run on quirium, or use some other propellant? And should it cascade? hmmmm...

Thargoid wrote:

Why do I get the feeling this debate could go on for millenia?

That's why it's best to pick an option based on gameplay, and technobabble the decision afterwards...

I feel like missiles probably run on hydrogen/oxygen fuel, but I could be totally wrong. And, of course, cascade missiles should, if hit by q-waves... cascade?

I especially like the suggestion with the PANDA BEARS! Yeah!, wherever you meet one free-floating in space, it should cascade. Instantly!

@ Disembodied: When I opened this discussion by hinting at the bug that lets asteroids cascade in Oolite 1.72.1 (probably since 1.72; I don't know), I wasn't so much thinking about the player and his possible über-weapon.

What I was observing (quite frequently) was an absolute insane amount of cascading whenever a Thargoid ship had dropped one of its cascading Thargons. It would not only wipe everything out—which is pretty much expected behaviour of a detonating quirium weapon. But everything touched by it would also cascade, creating an amount of blue discs that you wouldn't even see in the Tionisla Orbital Graveyard (now how would anybody even get to the idea to drop a Q-bomb in this sacred place?!? ). And I thought, that can't be right. And it wasn't like this in previous versions. That's why I reported this behaviour in the first place, and so the discussion was triggered.

I never thought we need a general debate about which things should cascade and which shouldn't. And we surely don't need everybody to mix up 'cascade' with 'explode'. All we need is to fix the buggy behaviour in 1.72.1.

So I also don't really know why we are discussing this in the Suggestion Box. The natural place it belongs to is Testing and Bug Reports, because during some testing I noticed a buggy behaviour, and reported it. That's all I have to say to this.

@Thargoid - been thinking about what you said in your most recent post concerning the quirium content of ships which can't 'witch' on their own. Given that the disk created by a ship which can jump is some kind of "event horizon" which non-jump capable ships can also enter/follow - then I suggest that their must be a reason for this - else why can't missiles follow their pray through the jump-out point, or worse the cascade effect also carries on through the jump out point and into the space on the other side? I would sumise that even non-jump ships contain activiated quirium that allows them to breach this otherwise impenetrable barrier and its why things like asteroids and missiles don't accidentally tumble into them (or perhaps they do... )

I am pretty sure that missiles are ships (in the code) can anyone confirm what does happen to them at wormholes? I am slightly surprised that they dont go through.

I can check tonight, but if anyone knows, Id be interested...

Stupid double posting php....

Thargoid wrote:

And onward questions (as we're at it), does normal thrust use quirium at all, or some other method/source of propulsion? Ergo if a ship doesn't have witchspace capability or fuel injectors, does it have any quirium on-board at all, and so would it cascade or just go bang?

Why do I get the feeling this debate could go on for millenia?

There's currently four ships that don't have witchdrives; The Gecko, Sidewinder, Krait Mk 1 (native), and possibly Krait Mk 2 (Griff Krait).
Although they get around witchspace by 'borrowing' wormholes left by jumping ships, they carry quirium, as evidenced by their heavy use of injectors during combat.
Thusly, they'll cascade.