Oolite Bulletins

TGHC wrote:

hoqllnq wrote:

in order to get to the other
side of the galaxy fast.

The way to achieve this is to increase the ships overall fuel capacity from 7LY, I don't know wether this is possible in Oolite.

My cougar in Xelite has 14LY so you can skip across a galaxy twice as fast.

1. No 7LY is an absolute limit in Oolite - the gameplay depends upon it.

2. It wouldn't get you there twice as fast anyway because of the way longer jumps affect the universal clock. Check out the time-adjustment-effect of a 6 LY jump over a 2 or 3 LY jump and you'll see what I mean.

right.. those jumps seem instantaneous to me but for those i leave behine,
time crawls at its usual pace.

edit: ..and yes: longer jumps than 7ly would have a drastic effect on
connectivity.

selezen

I have an experimental OXP with an Imperial Courier in it...

I was just going to ask, having seen your avatar I used to love that ship in Frontier, so I really like the idea of flying one in Oolite, even if only for sentimentality's sake. I'll look forward to seeing it when it hits OoSat!

I spent last night tweaking some settings on it, and I've uploaded it to Oosat. I'll be making an announcement shortly, so check in the Expansion Packs section to see the beef.

Rather than start a new thread, I thought to ask this here: Would it be very much against the philosophy of the game to make it possible for ships to have larger than 7LY fuel tanks, even if a single jump was restricted to 7LY?

This way, you might have some special ships with, for example Fuel:90, so that they could make, for example, two consequtive jumps of 5 and 4 LY each...

Time for some technobabble, I think...

"As is widely known, there seems to be significant problems to be overcome in achieving witchdrive jumps in excess of seven light-years.

Attempts to overcome this frustrating limit have been many, and the full extent of lost ships and crews may never be really made known to the general public. Reliable sources cite over 30 known attempts to breach the barrier, all failures, with no known survivors.

It seems that jumps greater than 7 ly. have 2 inherent problems.

The first involves severe chemical degradation that occurs in the chambers of the fuel storage pod when subjected to interstellar stresses, leading to erratic operation and spontaneous ignition. No attempts to store larger quantities of fuel in separate compartments seems to improve the situation, the magnetic components of the fluid simply ignore spatial considerations of less than 1km, if more than 7 ly of fuel is present.

The second involves the calculations needed to assure the ship of exiting witch-space at its appropriate destination. Even modern (sic) computational methods with 10zettabyte storage and 150 petaflop performance can barely cope with the navigational demands required to determine the current position of the ship at any time. Extending the jump distance might seriously compromise the safety of a vessel attempting such a jump.

The combination of these two factors is seen to place an, as yet to be overcome, absolute maximum to the witch-drive jump.

No doubt future travellers will look back at this era with amusement, much as we do at the 20c. discussions of ultraluminal travel. Some elegant and simple solution will appear that forever changes our ability to roam the universe without distance constraints."

Did you just make that up? :^)

I believe I've read somewhere here on this forum that there is a variable available for OXP ships where you can enter the amount of fuel they can load. The jump range isn't affected, only how much fuel is left when you arrive.

...yep, I'm completely mad for Elite and its descendents!

I did actually miss a bit about how this was part of the reason for mass lock and dissuading people from creating spatial anomalies near stations - where large quantities of fuel are stored...

...ages ago I started to write a mission .oxp based around one of the alien races having discovered an element you could add to the fuel to extend its range, and the race to find its source before the Thargoids... ... and the twist in the tale... ...one day...

The real world reason is that increasing the 7 LY limit would alter the game balance, as has been discussed in many threads here.

Cool pseudoscience post though, SG!!

Selezen wrote:

The real world reason is that increasing the 7 LY limit would alter the game balance, as has been discussed in many threads here.

Ah, I had not realised that both extra fuel and increasing the 7LY limit were considered similarly harmful to the balance. I had thought of them as separate possibilities - one allowing for longer jumps and the other allowing for more jumps...

But I do see the point - now, I just have to re-think my Asp Explorer concept...

Star Gazer wrote:

...ages ago I started to write a mission .oxp based around one of the alien races having discovered an element you could add to the fuel to extend its range, and the race to find its source before the Thargoids... ... and the twist in the tale... ...one day...

Well, I have have a race of deep space human colonists, who have learnt to live outside Galcop controlled space by harvesting fuelable material from the surface of Brown Dwarves and other substellar or post stellar objects around the galactic fringes. By this means they have opened up new trade routes for themselves and have come to occupy isolated clusters of stars, in deep space, beyond the control of the Galcop. All without violating the 7 year lightyear rule, and (since I never need to let the player have access to this technology) without me having to write any code. Damn, it's much easier to write a sentence than to write code! 'It is thus: all you have to do, is believe'

As soon a s carriers are behaving themselves reliably again, I'll be able to chuck out an OXP to that effect, as well.

Selezen wrote:

Cool pseudoscience post though, SG!!

...fine line between that and BS - I'm in middle management so BS comes easily... !!!
@ F_C - that's actually really cool, and would give a great background to the dodgy rock hermit in my story.... ....mmmmmm... thinkssssss....

SG, there’s a hole in your fuel hypothesis: you can refuel at rock hermits, which don’t mass-lock.

"...and it is commonly held that the curious distribution of so-called 'rock hermits' is, at least, partly due to their choice of asteroids that contain large amounts of strongly dia-magnetic minerals.

These provide both some protection from high-energy particles, although some mutants are present amongst the descendants of hermits, and the essential shielding to allow witch-drive fuel to be stored."

Another possible explanation for why you can’t jump to another system near a station: If there were a lot of wormholes near a station, people would enter them by accident, so jumping is disabled by the station's traffic controls.

On the subject of extra fuel: Are there any plans to make the fuel silo from the Woma Fuel Transport scoopable?