Oolite Bulletins

I see it as a clever ploy to reduce dogma. For those of us prone to this kind of thing the scale issue presents the over ordered mind with an unassailable problem. By going round and round in neat little circles this keeps the order junkie in all of us away from ordering things that could really screw stuff up.

Many solutions have been suggested, none of them are or ever will be the silver bullet that kills the conversation dead. But then it is an important life lesson to learn that sometimes things don't make total absolute sense. Just like pi sometime we have to learn to live with a touch of disorder and anarchy.

In a nut shell, if its metres things break, if it's feet other things break, if you try and go for some thing in the middle then EVERYTHING breaks (but the ships seem to be a fairly nice size.).

Lets be honest here by keeping the size an enigma, no one can compare the ship size to anything else outside the game. That way you'll never get into a trekker or jedi my ships bigger than your ship pissing match. Which is a good thing.

ClymAngus wrote:

I see it as a clever ploy to reduce dogma. For those of us prone to this kind of thing the scale issue presents the over ordered mind with an unassailable problem. By going round and round in neat little circles this keeps the order junkie in all of us away from ordering things that could really screw stuff up.

Many solutions have been suggested, none of them are or ever will be the silver bullet that kills the conversation dead. But then it is an important life lesson to learn that sometimes things don't make total absolute sense. Just like pi sometime we have to learn to live with a touch of disorder and anarchy.

In a nut shell, if its metres things break, if it's feet other things break, if you try and go for some thing in the middle then EVERYTHING breaks (but the ships seem to be a fairly nice size.).

Lets be honest here by keeping the size an enigma, no one can compare the ship size to anything else outside the game. That way you'll never get into a trekker or jedi my ships bigger than your ship pissing match. Which is a good thing.

Wise words....

I am not sure that comparing ship sizes to a space shuttle or jet plane is really much use anyway. These are inter-stellar ships, not pokey little station-to-surface shuttles! You try flying a NASA space shuttle even over the sort of teeny tiny distances from Earth to the Moon and see how far you get befort that thimble of a fuel tank runs dry.

glenalec wrote:

You try flying a NASA space shuttle even over the sort of teeny tiny distances from Earth to the Moon and see how far you get befort that thimble of a fuel tank runs dry.

That's correct. However, Oolite ships don't actually use fuel for flying from planet to sun or moon, or anywhere inside a system. They only need fuel for their witchdrives (and for injection). That's because there is no vacuum in Oolite, but the ships are actually burrowing through the semi-rigid phlogiston which fills the systems.

If you want a much longer and more precise explanation, it can be found here.

Back to the topic of feet/meters. Maybe say that the sizes are in feet, but the ship's computer (that's what generates the views, afaik) interpretes them as meters, giving us the size on the screen?

Or why not just discard 'size' as a concept all together. The key thing is that in relation to each other and the other objects in the Ooniverse they are all in scale. And that in a sense is the purpose of the Comparative Size Chart. It is to give an impression of how the ships compare with each other...nothing else...just each other.
It's to help people relate to the ships, and to realise that in relation to one another the Cobra MkIII is not quite small, and that the Anaconda is not a whale-like monster.

Smivs wrote:

Or why not just discard 'size' as a concept all together. The key thing is that in relation to each other and the other objects in the Ooniverse they are all in scale. And that in a sense is the purpose of the Comparative Size Chart. It is to give an impression of how the ships compare with each other...nothing else...just each other.
It's to help people relate to the ships, and to realise that in relation to one another the Cobra MkIII is not quite small, and that the Anaconda is not a whale-like monster.

Wholeheartedly agreed.

What a table can and should do is to compare the relative sizes of ships to each other. Full stop.

It can not indicate how big they are in relation to an average human.
It can not indicate how big they are in relation to a planet.
It can not indicate how big they are in relation to any distance in-system.

Because all those are contradictory.

@ Zireael: Replacing meters with feet doesn't help a bit. It only makes things worse with regard to planet sizes and in-system distances.

Smivs wrote:

Or why not just discard 'size' as a concept all together. The key thing is that in relation to each other and the other objects in the Ooniverse they are all in scale. And that in a sense is the purpose of the Comparative Size Chart. It is to give an impression of how the ships compare with each other...nothing else...just each other.
It's to help people relate to the ships, and to realise that in relation to one another the Cobra MkIII is not quite small, and that the Anaconda is not a whale-like monster.

A new size maybe? Blakes Seven did very well off creating it's own sizes (and only fell down on the consistency and continuity of the system it had created.

Thus creating the kind of rampant nerdary that we see here: http://www.hermit.org/blakes7/SevenCyc/ ... asure.html

If you create a sizing and weight that are mutually consistent within the game (and NOTHING else (oolian?) ) then, hopefully everyone can finally pack it in. Because short of turning the habitable planets into moons that circle much larger planets, vastly increasing the size and distance of the sun AND reducing the size of the ships (maybe increasing the speed of the ships too) your not going to be able to satisfy the physics nuts.

The one thing that they are missing is that this would make the game as boring as cardboard, maybe even completely unplayable. {sarcasm} But hey who cares? I can now get my spread sheet out with my inch accurate Constitution class Enterprise on it, with Kirk mooning out the window (limited edition) and compare it to a Cobra mk3 TOTALLY TOTALLY worth ruining the game for.{/sarcasm}

I refer the honorable gentlemen and ladies to my earlier statement;
https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... 5&start=25

On the other hand, it is conceivable that a ship capable of moving a lot more cargo than the Space Shuttle (35 tonnes vs. 26 tonnes to LEO and <4 tonnes to geostationary orbit) , to any orbit and even to another star system, might be quite a bit larger, up to 130 meters or so... You need a place to put the hyperdrive and the engines and big lasers, etc.

Unless a TC is a lot smaller than a metric tonne.

ovvldc wrote:

a ship capable of moving a lot more cargo than the Space Shuttle to any orbit

To any orbit of what? You can't compare the Oolite ships to the Space Shuttle, because you can't compare Oolite planets to Earth. Planets in Oolite are tiny.

Earth has a diameter of about 12,700 km. A typical planet in Oolite has 50(!) km. If we assume the same density that means that Earth has over 16 million(!) times more mass than any planet in Oolite. Cargo would basically float into orbit all by itself from the Oolite planets, because they don't have more gravity than an asteroid in our solar system. Breathable air and the inhabitants would float into space as well.

ovvldc wrote:

Unless a TC is a lot smaller than a metric tonne.

Here it's exactly the other way round: a TC is huge, at least by its volume. It measures roughly 9.5 x 6.2 x 6 meters, that's a whopping 353.4 cubic meters. It would take less than 50,000 cargo canisters to completely physically remove a planet, if their net volume is close to their gross volume. Do the maths.

Again: it is impossible to reconcile the sizes in Oolite with anything from the real world, even with each other. You simply can't get sense into it, no matter how hard you try.

It's a game. Don't think about physics.

A liquid water argument there from McLane (It's clear, it flows, when it hits you, it sticks).

Believe me there are some very smart people on this forum. They have tried and failed to create something that ticks all the boxes;

If you "fix" one thing it breaks something else.
If you fix two things together it will really badly break a third.
Fixing generally makes the game as boring as a pound of raw tofu.
As soon as you alter ANYTHING it is no longer technically elite (because most of the changes are fairly fundamental).
Oh and if you do manage all of that "COLLISION DETECTION" 2 words that should inspire terror and if they don't, well they soon will when your solar system spontaneously explodes.

Hope is a wonderful thing, but it is possible to spend many hours with squared paper trying to sort this out, doing some serious reprogramming and then find yourself flying around a world in which the interesting stuff is too small, too large or too far away BUT accurate damn it! There is a reason why they call it "Space" there is a lot of it.

Still that never stopped me I wasted 2 months trying to reconcile it all, I thought I was so bloody clever. Anyway don't let that stop you, for some lessons, man just has to learn things the hard way. Sometimes you've got to feel the problem and no amount of talking will convince people otherwise. Never has, never will.

Oh just did a quick calculation to see how dense an oolite planet (and it's mass) would have to be to exert the same gravity as the earth. My calculator went bang.

sticky water? :-/

Indeed, although waterlogged, soaked, splashed, drenched, inundated, impregnated, drenched, dripped on or saturated might be better ways of putting it.

ClymAngus wrote:

Oh just did a quick calculation to see how dense an oolite planet (and it's mass) would have to be to exert the same gravity as the earth. My calculator went bang.

Erm... I guess its mass would be almost exactly the same...

As for the density though... I did a similiar thing with my calculator and ended up with a pulsar! Be careful out there.

Cheers,

Drew.

drew wrote:

ClymAngus wrote:

Oh just did a quick calculation to see how dense an oolite planet (and it's mass) would have to be to exert the same gravity as the earth. My calculator went bang.

Erm... I guess its mass would be almost exactly the same...

As for the density though... I did a similiar thing with my calculator and ended up with a pulsar! Be careful out there.

What a coincidence that we happen to have one.