Oolite Bulletins

DaddyHoggy wrote:

In space (without the worry of drag) the most efficient shape for anything from a surface/volume ratio (and other things inc. natural strength) is a sphere, closely followed by a teardrop shape - fans of EE Doc Smith will know this of old...

Yeah, a sphere is by far the best shape in terms of making good use of volume. Hence the flight module of spacecraft like the Soyuz and its predecessors are generally spherical, while it's only the landing module that needs to have a specific shape to help with re-entry.

The fact is, we're so used to living with things like air resistance and gravity that the idea of working in a weightless vacuum is completely alien to most of us.

your missile motors/sensor package etc might not be spherical though. yes, spheres are best for some things like liquids but not necessarily for rockets. they'd keep rolling all over the place anyway when you fly about :-D

heck, a sphere is one of the least ergonomic designs one could use!
Unless one has no need of flat surfaces or has perfected the craft of bulging windows etc.
A shere IS the best shape for equalising surface pressures, minimising surface area to volume, etc.

At ultra high speeds, even in space one needs to considder if not aerodynamics, how to to minimise frontal surface exposed to space dust and such.
Also: most Elite ships do not go 'downside', but quite regularly are spotted diving in the solar corona. Not exactly a vacuum environment.

Haven't had a chance to do much OXP-ing recently but I have been able to update Missiles and Bombs with some equipment discussed in other threads. v0.3 includes an altered EMP missile, an advanced electronic override missile that causes all sorts of malfunctions, and a distress beacon that will bring a squadron of GalCop ships to your aid in times of trouble.

You can download the updated OXP here.

Oh and if you're wondering whatever happened to my Trident Down mission, it's not dead but I just have one more thread to finish off. Hopefully I might be able to do that this week.

I've been running through some ideas in the Suggestion Box on chaff/flare launchers and I think I've got a working solution.

How It Works

It comes in two parts: a chaff dispenser fitted permanently to the ship, and a 5-bundle refill that comes in the form of a mine. Each time you fire off a bundle of chaff the dispenser will be reloaded, with the icon popping up again on the HUD, until the stock has been exhausted. To get more, you'll need to buy another refill from your nearest friendly shipyard.

At the moment, refills can only be fitted in dock, so even if you buy say three 'mines' before setting out, the contents of only one of them can be automatically loaded into the dispenser. While I could probably do a load of complex scripting to get around this, I think this sounds like a reasonable compromise. Also it means keeping your other pylons free for missiles and fuel tanks.

At the moment, I haven't prevented a chaff refill from being used without a dispenser. Used in this way, the chaff mine reverts to being a one-shot device, which could be an option for those who can't afford all the equipment.

I didn't want people to constantly have a pylon taken up by the mine, so you're free to remove it as you would any other weapon. The chaff_count will be retained, so you need only buy another refill to start using the dispenser again.

Now there may be easier ways to implement this - some of the obvious methods I thought would work didn't seem to (e.g. using awardEquipment as a death action). However, even after adding more variables than I would like, it doesn't cause any significant slowdown. Suggestions are welcome of course. One thing I might do is to have the chaff launched directly rather than having the mine ejected first - I'll need to set up another AI for this but that should be straightforward enough.

Thanks to Commanders Maegil and McLane for their suggestions and help on this, and everyone else for their encouragement.

Missile and Bombs v0.4

I've included the remote controlled mine in here as well - watch out as I've made it insanely powerful!

Now I'm off to see some fireworks!

Last week I updated the shipdata.plist in the wiki with the accuracy key. This key is currently only used with the two mining ships in the standard ship set. Maybe this is why the only description was that it increased the accuracy of miners.

This was wrong as it does nothing with accuracy in this case, it just makes it more likely that any ship takes a shot from a greater distance. So it was just used to let miners make more long range shots while mining. But it will work for any ship, not just miners. (And shooting from longer distances gives even less accurate shots).

But the reason I put it here is that it is also used by missiles for their guidance system. In that case it needs a value between -5 and 10. When no accuracy is defined or when it is outside this range it generates a random value in this range.

As a little test I created a missile A with value -4 and an missile B with value 9. I created two ships, each equipped with one type of these missiles. Both I gave a script to fire a missile at the attacker when shot at and nothing else.

I had my masochistic day, so I shot at both and just waited for the missile to hit me. Missile A came in a spiral to me and missile B went in a straight line towards me. Stationary I could see a difference, but when I fled for the missile an looked backwards, both spiraled and I could not see a difference.

None of the system generated missiles does use this key, but I can imagine that Ramirez could do something with it for his bombs and missiles OXP although the effect of this accuracy key is small.

Hmm, I thought I’d documented this on the wiki. Guess it was just mentioned in the forum.

Hmmm... you know, when you think about it, releasing chaff could be considered to be a space hazard/littering; after all, it will drift around for a very long time, and a space ship travelling at hyperspeed through a cloud of chaff might not be too happy...

Star Gazer wrote:

Hmmm... you know, when you think about it, releasing chaff could be considered to be a space hazard/littering; after all, it will drift around for a very long time, and a space ship travelling at hyperspeed through a cloud of chaff might not be too happy...

Unless... unless it was Quantum Chaff ("quantum", of course, = "magic"). Which would, er, exist in a timelike loop and vanish in a puff of zero-point energy after it did its thing. Or it could be made up of subatomic black holes, which would decay away through Hawking radiation. Or, heck, even just particles of water ice (or trumble pee or other suitable substitute), which would eventually boil away into gas under the solar glare, within an acceptable time-frame. Probably.

Technobabble: when science isn't good enough.

Disembodied wrote:

Or, heck, even just particles of water ice (or trumble pee or other suitable substitute), which would eventually boil away into gas under the solar glare, within an acceptable time-frame. Probably.

Trumbles don't pee. WIth their incredibly fast metabolisms they simply evaporate off any waste liquids. Many a time I've accidentally got soaked by a suspended cloud of Trumble 'steam'. Yick.

Captain Hesperus
"And now I need a shower."

Or, heck, even just particles of water ice (or trumble pee or other suitable substitute), which would eventually boil away into gas under the solar glare, within an acceptable time-frame. Probably.

Ice is to light. On impact it will do little damage unless it is flying at very high speed like tiny objects that are accelerated by solar wind and hit our satellites.

I would vote for more dense material like gold bullets. Pure gold has about 19 times the weight of water. Since version 1.69 there is a density key in shipdata so it is employable to give the chaff a higher density. And the high prize of gold makes that is just disappears from space in time by greedy miners.

@ Hesperus: I bow to your greater experience.

@ Eric: an ingenious market-based solution! But then players should be able -- or at least would want -- to scoop up chaff themselves. Ice might still be enough, given that ships and missiles are travelling at a significant percentage of C. Or we could postulate a material -- "purple mercury", say -- which is dense, can be squirted as a liquid, naturally freezes to form droplets of sufficient size, and which boils away in vacuum sufficiently quickly not to be a long-term hazard to shipping.

Disembodied wrote:

"purple mercury", say -- which is dense, can be squirted as a liquid, naturally freezes to form droplets of sufficient size

And you can guess the nickname for it, from the song by Prince.

After complaints from GalCop I got my scientists to develop a special substance that vanishes without a trace so as to avoid littering the spacelanes. Nevertheless, releasing chaff near a space station will be frowned upon by any nearby police units.

Some small updates to Missiles and Bombs: I've modified the chaff implementation a bit to make less persistent and a little less effective, so you'll still need to pull some quick moves to avoid incoming missiles. Thanks to Eric for the suggestions on AI optimisation - I've included these as well to help things run a little more smoothly.

Missiles and Bombs v0.5