Oolite Bulletins

Are witchpoint beacons located at Lagrange points?

Cody wrote: ↑Fri Aug 04, 2023 11:04 pm

Are witchpoint beacons located at Lagrange points?

No, lagrange points are located at witchpoint beacons

...It's a nice idea and would suit their stationary nature.
They're often placed in a (superficially) similar position to L4/L5.

I'm not the biggest fan of the beacons in themselves but they do present opportunities for other things e.g.  YAH

Home on Lagrange

Oh, give me a home where the old hermits roam
Where the rocks and the asteroids play
Where never is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not clouded all day



With apologies to Brewster M. Higley

Redspear wrote: ↑Thu Jan 06, 2022 12:01 am

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Wed Jan 05, 2022 6:06 pm

The two well-developed versions of the lore - Selezen's & Cim's - both imply that the inhabitants of the Eight came from elsewhere. Neither seem to discuss the GS's - but Selezen's views would have been historically tinged by his wish to incorporate Frontier

From what I recall of Selezen's accounts, I think you're right.

I respectfully disagree

(And again, apologies for the resurrection of an old conversation)

I honestly don't recall writing anywhere about the "human colonials" being anything other than Earth-centric humans. My "lore" was that there was a schism sometime after Lave and the Old Worlds were colonised where the Old Worlds disavowed themselves from Earth and its offshoots, including the Imperials.

You're probably spot on with thinking I would look at it through a lens of integrating history with Frontier etc, since that's where my focus was at that point (and setting ED aside, probably still is). Generation Ships were always a bit of a head scratcher in my Elite thinking - why would Earth send those ships off then completely forget about them? Why wouldn't Earth/Federation/Empire go looking for those ships along their trajectories and try to bring them back into the fold? Or did wars and technical issues erase that information? I mean by the time hyperspace was discovered, surely the GS crews/descendants weren't THAT enamoured of living in a tin can?

Selezen wrote: ↑Sun May 19, 2024 12:37 am

Redspear wrote: ↑Thu Jan 06, 2022 12:01 am

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Wed Jan 05, 2022 6:06 pm

The two well-developed versions of the lore - Selezen's & Cim's - both imply that the inhabitants of the Eight came from elsewhere. Neither seem to discuss the GS's - but Selezen's views would have been historically tinged by his wish to incorporate Frontier

From what I recall of Selezen's accounts, I think you're right.

I respectfully disagree

(And again, apologies for the resurrection of an old conversation)

I honestly don't recall writing anywhere about the "human colonials" being anything other than Earth-centric humans. My "lore" was that there was a schism sometime after Lave and the Old Worlds were colonised where the Old Worlds disavowed themselves from Earth and its offshoots, including the Imperials.

You're probably spot on with thinking I would look at it through a lens of integrating history with Frontier etc, since that's where my focus was at that point (and setting ED aside, probably still is). Generation Ships were always a bit of a head scratcher in my Elite thinking - why would Earth send those ships off then completely forget about them? Why wouldn't Earth/Federation/Empire go looking for those ships along their trajectories and try to bring them back into the fold? Or did wars and technical issues erase that information? I mean by the time hyperspace was discovered, surely the GS crews/descendants weren't THAT enamoured of living in a tin can?

Umm...

A gentleman calling himself "Selezen" edited our wiki back in February 2006 and then wrote the following:


Socio-political Outline

Lave's government is classed as a Dictatorship according to the Data on Planets service provided by GalCop. When this was first announced the planet's governor, Premier Akkady Gerant, adopted the unofficial title of 'The Tyrant' as a tongue-in-cheek comment on the status his government had acquired in the galactic community. The label has stuck since then.

Although classed as a dictatorship, the government is more accurately classed as a socialist republic, with power of veto being retained by the Premier. In this, the premier does have the power to overturn decisions made by the cabinet, but this power is only used rarely and only when it is deemed necessary. The people have a voice on Lave, and it has been used in the past to devastating effect.

In 2645, Premier Torsvald was ousted from office following a decree to demolish the surface road network to focus on the growing popularity of aircars. This decree was made against the vote of the government using the power of veto. The vast majority of commuters who still used the road network voiced thier displeasure on this and called for no confidence in Torsvald. They were successful and Torsvald lost the confidence of his government in the process. He was voted out of office by the councillors following this event.

Lave's people are probably the most diverse in the scope of GalCop's domain. The population size tends to remain static, as immigration is tightly controlled, but the constant influx of students to the flight academy and to the highly praised Lave University means that there are always a high number of offworlders around compared to other worlds. Many of them do decide to stay for work and other reasons, but then the exodus of many people to work offworld does balance the numbers out.

Lavians are generally a contented and peaceful people, although there are some radical groups. The most vociferous of them are the conservationists, who are passionate in thier defence of the natural resources of Lave. The strip forestation that was the end of the natural forests in the 28th century is a source of much protest and there are many violent conflicts originating from this group who are zealous in thier need to prevent the same happening to any other resources.

A colony of felinoid refugees occupies the smallest of Lave's continents. They originally made thier home on Lave during the unrest of the 25th century, when Federal persecution was forcing their race from its homeworld. A small fraction of the world's population sought asylum within GalCop following the Federation's sterlising of the world. This colony generally keeps itself to itself and has not spread from the island continent, although they engage in tourism across the planet.

Reference: https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Lave_(lore) - Murgh renamed the old "Lave" page when working on our wiki a year or so ago.



I'd presume that the above was the basis for Disembodied's comment in the Rough Guide (Aug 2008):

What can we say about Lave? Everyone knows Lave. We all trained there. The outlines of her continents are burned into our brains, from endless hours above them doing our jumps-and-bumps. Close your eyes and you’ll see them still: the arc of Crater Bay; the juts and jags of the Fenric coast; the curling comma Suther makes, creeping over the horizon into the short Laveian night. Many of us dropped down the well to Port Arcadia, and spent too much money, and might still have the faded Et In Arcadia Ego t-shirts to show for it. Been, seen, done: now we’re up and out and we’re never going back.

Which is a shame, because Lave is an interesting world, socially, politically, and historically. Port Arcadia can be ghastly, it’s true: heaving with trainees blundering around on ups and downs from howffs and whorehouses, sinks and stews, singing, shouting, fighting and fornicating as inclination and anatomy take them. We were never like that, oh no; we were merry, true; high-spirited, and perhaps even a little rowdy from time to time, but...

Leave them to it, is my advice, and put PA behind you. There’s a lot more to Lave than flight training and juvenile debauchery.

Reference: https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Lave_(Rough_Guide)



So where should we go from here?

Classic Elite lore seems to say one thing, traditional Oolite lore seems to say another...





As regards merging Frontier with Oolite, cim's introduction of the scenarios.plist allows refashioning the game to introduce a nascent Federation and Empire, as well as the ships and everything else - as well as excluding any oxps you don't want.

Selezen wrote: ↑Sun May 19, 2024 12:37 am

... apologies for the resurrection of an old conversation

Personally speaking, many of the old conversations here are quite fascinating and could well do with a decent resurrection.

The only person who seems to have cared muchly otherwise was dear old Smivs, who's sadly not been around for quite some time now... (but seems to have a new life serendipitously selling bugs from Borneo! Might the combination with his myriad comments about thread necromancy intimate a fascination with Deathwatch Beetles?).


But with the new singing and dancing Oolite one can do many things which would have been much harder in your active days here.

Create Raxxla! Create adventures around TOGY! Build up the various political and species systems to give them even more flavour than they currently have. Make Oresrati a base for Oresrians. Create battles. Make much more of exploration (building on cim's SOTL oxps). We now have a much better pulsar and the makings of a Black Hole. Only binary systems seem to be beyond the scope of the vanilla game code.

Possibilities calling out for further "plumbing" include many of the Brilliant but broken oxps (the page needs updating to reflect Phkb's recent work - he's fixed Lave.oxp for example)

I think you may have quoted the wrong thing to link to your reply. I still maintain that I haven't written anything about human colonials not being earth humans...but I am happy to be corrected.

Yeah, I see what i wrote. There's quite a lot of stuff I did back in those days that could do with a rethink. Twenty years ago I was convinced that GalCop was a utopia of intergalactic harmony and didn't think much about the potentially destabilising effects of thousands of offworlders plodding about on planets. Also I think I realised at some point (and I can't remember what triggered it) that GalCop facilities are all in space so it made more sense to have the academy also be in space. Logically having a space flight training facility in space is much more realistic. Offworlders having to go planetside to learn how to fly spaceships seems a bit silly.

I forgot how much fun lore can be.

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Sun May 19, 2024 6:51 am

Classic Elite lore seems to say one thing, traditional Oolite lore seems to say another...

This is a key attraction to me. Elite and oolite SHOULD have different lore. I always see oolite as a spin off parallel universe, diverging sometime around 3100. Key difference up front is the influx of garage shipbuilders that never happens in elite.

ED coming along cemented that for me. ED is one branch of storytelling and oolite is another with Elite as the common ground. Even bringing Frontier into the mix can have some cool storytelling potential as the relationship between GalCop and the other canon organisations can be divergent from what we know. I love building alternate histories and I find it fun to stay close to the "original" whilst having interesting changes and directions.

There's a big list of things there that you say are interesting to get back into. I'd love to break some of that down into little projects but I need to be careful not to overstretch. I don't have a lot of free time so I might cherry pick a couple of things to think about and see how it goes.

Until then, since I have a history of loremaking I'm more than happy to provide ideas and suggestions if The community can tolerate my nonsense.

Selezen wrote: ↑Sun May 19, 2024 9:23 am

I think you may have quoted the wrong thing to link to your reply.

It was my reply which went wrong. The quote was just fine. I was trying to nobble another of your points, one about PlanetFall - that players/Lave Academy students would not land on Lave. It all went a tad pear-shaped, I regret...

Selezen wrote: ↑Sun May 19, 2024 12:57 am

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Sat Apr 23, 2022 9:24 pm

Disembodied wrote: ↑Sat Feb 23, 2008 4:16 pm

The Galactic Co-Operative means very little to the serfs tilling the fields of a Poor Agricultural Feudal planet, or the mind-numbed drones of an Industrial Dictatorship, or the Corporate wage-slaves. We, the pilots, are the lucky ones. We're out, and free: and, shameful to admit, we don't really care about the suffering billions toiling away at the bottom of all those gravity wells. A two-line description tells us all we want to know about them, their planets and their lives.

1) Interraction with Diplomancy. Should graduates of Lave Academy be given (say) a year's visa for Lave on graduation?
2) HIMSN is not based at Lave. But maybe some sort of office at the Academy for "recruiting" students if they have a sufficient Elite ranking?
3) Recruiting offices for Galactic Navy, RRS Group, Taxi Galactica (are there any others of relevance?).

Some thoughts on the above.

The initial quite from Disembodied is crucial to what I feel is the core of the Ooniverse. That massive gap between the planetary societies and the spacefaring community. I think most worlds are probably unaware that there is a functional space society miling about above their heads. I think GalCop has used their systems for strategic and economic reasons to allow interstellar trade to flourish but hasn't bothered to let the more technoologically challenged worlds even know they are there. That's why GalCop lists members by world name rather than system name. TL10+ worlds are probably aware that GalCop exists and there are likely treaties between them that grease the wheels. Which brings me to...

1) Should graduates of Lave Academy be given a visa for Lave? No. Canon fiction (Dark Wheel, I think) states that it's very rare for spacefarers to be allowed planetside. And this makes sense to me given the economic and biological impact. Quarantine would be a necessity, and any potential biogens would need to be strongly filtered out. I imagine the process of trying to get access to a planet you weren't born on being 20 times worse than Australian Border Control.
2) Her Imperial Majesty's Space Navy - jeeez, those guys. This opens up a few theories I've had for probably about thirty years on the structure of GalCop and the member worlds. First, GalCop basically has no jurisdiction planetside - worlds govern themselves and are left to their own devices. That's why there's a label for each political type of world and not a blanket "GalCop Planetary Governance" status. As such, and with the first point in mind, HIMSN and the galactic navy are two entirely separate entities. I don't think HIMSN would be based on a GalCop station - I doubt they would have a presence due to the aforementioned potential risk of contagion. Also, Lave is a "dictatorship" run by "the tyrant" and if that name is earned rather than granted then I think there would be a strong independent vein running through LaveGov. As such I think any HIMSN presence in Lave orbitspace would be in a separate and secure facility. I have a LOT more of this stuff bouncing around in my brain...

Anyway, just some thoughts. It's been a while since I let me mind wander through Elite/Oolite lore so thanks for indulging me.

Selezen wrote: ↑Sun May 19, 2024 12:37 am

Redspear wrote: ↑Thu Jan 06, 2022 12:01 am

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Wed Jan 05, 2022 6:06 pm

The two well-developed versions of the lore - Selezen's & Cim's - both imply that the inhabitants of the Eight came from elsewhere. Neither seem to discuss the GS's - but Selezen's views would have been historically tinged by his wish to incorporate Frontier

From what I recall of Selezen's accounts, I think you're right.

I respectfully disagree

Redspear wrote: ↑Wed May 22, 2024 9:50 pm

I seem to be doing this sort of thing all the time at the moment. Rather disconcerting...

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Wed May 22, 2024 10:55 pm

Redspear wrote: ↑Wed May 22, 2024 9:50 pm

I seem to be doing this sort of thing all the time at the moment. Rather disconcerting...

FWIW, I'd blame it on the quanity that you're doing rather than the quality.