Ship dimensions...

[Cmdr Wyvern]

obviously certain large lizards will require more space than us humanoids...

Yeah, that's a given. Cabin room is a bit tight for us larger Lizards, but we somehow manage to slither through and deal.

[ClymAngus]

obviously certain large lizards will require more space than us humanoids...

Yeah, that's a given. Cabin room is a bit tight for us larger Lizards, but we somehow manage to slither through and deal.

Baby oil and a tire iron ;D
Oh I've fixed the neo-dragon model so we can actually unwrap a texture for it now without it going criss-cross (the front wing planes were triple connected) . I'll email it through tonight. Sorry my scedual has been a bit hectic of late I promise I'll do my updates and send this along for your review on a day when I don't just come in from work and flop on the bed.

[Cmdr Wyvern]

obviously certain large lizards will require more space than us humanoids...

Yeah, that's a given. Cabin room is a bit tight for us larger Lizards, but we somehow manage to slither through and deal.

Baby oil and a tire iron ;D

Oh I've fixed the neo-dragon model so we can actually unwrap a texture for it now without it going criss-cross (the front wing planes were triple connected) . I'll email it through tonight. Sorry my scedual has been a bit hectic of late I promise I'll do my updates and send this along for your review on a day when I don't just come in from work and flop on the bed.

I'm glad to hear of progress, and look forward to giving it a once-over. No rush, though. Take all the time you need.

[JazHaz]

Sorry my scedual has been a bit hectic of late

Oh you mean schedule?

[Pansen]

I had a much simplier approach to the exterior dimensions and interior space problem when writing my stories.

I just ignored the problem and it went away.

Cheers,

Drew.

I've pretty much come around to that way of thinking, too - just been imagining the ships' interiors as 'fit for purpose' rather than necessarily conforming to the external measurents given on the wiki or elsewhere;-)

[Commander McLane]

What the other guys said. Please don't try to reconcile sizes and distances in Oolite, because it simply can't be done. After all, keep in mind that Oolite is a game, not a faithful space simulation. So at the end of the day we don't implement what would be correct, but what works as a game.

Which is funny, because when people complain about the long flights from end of jump to station, the response is, "but space is big, that's realistic..."

We want to see other ships from the outside, therefore we have to oversize them, and we simply don't care what their interior would look like.

It matters to people who write fiction, and anyone else with an imagination. I mean, with the game as presented, for all we know the ship commander is actually a sentient computer, when you buy a new ship the computer is just slotted into it

Your comments on visibility are interesting, though. In reality, a spacecraft will be visible in the infrared spectrum from hundreds of thousands of kilometres away - because even a ship at water's freezing point is 267K or 267C warmer than the background of space. Maybe in the Oolite universe everyone sees in infrared?

You're missing the point, I'm afraid. It's about size, not temperature-difference-detection. Would you like to see one of the wonderful Griff ships—provided it is compressed to one or two pixels? Even if those two pixels glow wonderfully in the distance, don't you think that all the beautiful work put into its textures would be kind of wasted, if the end result would never ever be displayed bigger than a few pixels? That's the point. In Oolite ships are oversized in order to make them visibly bigger. That's all.

And as for the "long" flights from the witchpoint to the planet. What makes you think that these flights are long? Even in the worst of cases (witchpoint at more than 900,000 meters away from the planet, crowded lane with no possibility of using your jumpdrive) the flight doesn't last more than a couple of minutes. Do you really think that in realistic conditions a flight from a safe entry point into a solar system (wherever that would exactly be; in most speculative fiction it tends to be placed at the outer rim of the system) until the final landing on a planet (or docking with an orbiting station) would take less than at least a couple of hours??? So, watched with reality in mind, the ride along the corridor is again a symptom of undersized distances and oversized ships.

[Pansen]

Nitpick tho, Asp, no matter what version, isn't a good craft to pick. While sizes are free to pick, other things are quite well defined in canon, and Asps are long range two-seated combat crafts, (almost) without cargo bay. Old good Cobby 3 should do better I think, after all, it's cheaper, have more missile pylons that can be used for fuel tanks (if you consider one widely-used OXP canon), and have quite roomy cargo bay (with expansion) that can be partially converted into living space for two additional persons and science lab (Cobra is originally two-seater too, but is usually piloted by just one person).

Yep - gave this some thought since my original post - think I got carried away with the 'Explorer' bit of the Asp Explorer's name;-). Going to choose a different vessel, and yeah - Cobra III's certainly on the shortlist;-)