Oolite Bulletins

phonebook wrote:

they could be in cold storage like the golgafrinchams tho couldnt they

Then it would not be a generation ship, as the generation which did launch would also arrive

Screet

yeah, they could, while the ship is on auto pilot heading to a suitable planet then crash into it, I meant land, but ship has no landing gear as such

well the golgafrinchams were allowed out every now and then for a run if you remember, perhaps between them, being unfrozen for a couple of hours a month, and if the ship was big enough, then there would always be someone unfrozen to steer the ship and navigate- no need to crash

there was always method yo douglas adams madness, a few little changes to the insanity and it makes better sense, well as much sense as anything relating to this does

but the ship couldn't be steered, or piloted, it was set on auto, with the intention of crash landing, as the rest of the society didn't want them to come back, after all those in the ship were the useless part of the society and wasn't needed, or did as the planet got wiped out by a dirty telephone or was it a goat, there was a few mixed reports on what happened to the planet, so anyway the B ark

from the wiki

The B-Ark was programmed to crash-land on a suitably remote planet on one of the outer spiral arms of the galaxy, which happened to be Earth, and the Golgafrinchan rejects gradually mingled with and usurped the native cavemen**, becoming the ancestors of humanity

and I am also a Hick hikers guide fan got the books, the tapes and the TV series, I like the main books then the radio series, mostly harmless wasn't that good, as for the new book, no idea, but probably won't get

yes but with a tiny stretch of the imagination, things could be different!

but would you want a useless third part of a society to run a ship? possible not, but who knows

I think the point is that Generation Ships are not B-Arks.

They could run along very similar principles, the core difference being that the people are real pioneers intent on colonising new worlds, and hence perfectly capable of steering, maintaining, etc the ship. It might still make sense to have a large portion of the population frozen on a rotational basis to save resources.

which is what i said originally!

I know...
I was (re)clarifying for matthewfarmery...

in that sense, yes makes sense, if they are useful, maybe if there are systems which don't have any stations in, they could colonise the planet and build a station in orbit after a while, could that be done? or maybe change a status of a planet, dictatorship to something higher or lower feudal could be random, possible?

There are no systems without any stations.

Generation Ships are relics of an ancient past. 30 Generations makes them at least 700 years old. In other words: They were manned and sent in a time when there was no witchjump technology, and the only way to get from one system to the other was to cross the interstellar space.

Since the invention of witchjump technology they are obsolete. The systems they are meant to colonise have been colonised long ago using witchjump technology. Or they have since turned out to be inhabited. Anyway, all destination systems visible in Oolite are GalCop members already.

And still the Generation Ships are on their way, completely oblivious to their superfluousness.

And that is exactly the setting of ghostsfromthepast.oxp, whose plot I have outlined a couple of posts ago. Just read there.

One point I read sometime somewhere is that the Galactic Maps only show the GalCop member systems. Ie, there are far more actual systems around, but they are not GalCop members for whatever reason and hence don't show up on the navigation maps. Reasons could be that they are uninhabitable, non-members, or possibly reserved destinations for GenShips.

That's actually the main thing I liked about FFE was that it did generate a whole galaxy which you could explore - although most of it ended up being empty, of course. But it did show all available stars, not just the colonised/member systems. I always thought it would be neat to explore on the edges of human space and find new worlds for colonisation - you get a 'finders fee' depending on how suitable the system is (habitable planets, any indigineous inhabitants, resources, etc) and the game engine would slowly add stations to the system.

Screet wrote:

Cmd. Cheyd wrote:

I'd imagine that Generation Ships wouldn't have docking slits - They were built at a time when they wouldn't expect to encounter smaller craft once they left orbit. If they had a docking slit while in orbit of Earth (or their planet of origin), that space would have been reclaimed during outbound operations to provide some other functionality. Leaving space dedicated to docking small craft that you never again expect to encounter - Nah, not likely.

What would they do if they reach their target? Land such a massive ship? I think they must have docks with some big passenger ferries aboard...

In one of the Oolite stories (IIRC from Drew) there's also a dock onboard the ship. They do even get a CM3 aboard, but their leaders do not like that the people learn about that.

That would be 'Schism' - see the link in my sig if you want to read about what (might) be going on inside a Generation ship...

Cheers,

Drew.

Micha wrote:

One point I read sometime somewhere is that the Galactic Maps only show the GalCop member systems. Ie, there are far more actual systems around, but they are not GalCop members for whatever reason and hence don't show up on the navigation maps. Reasons could be that they are uninhabitable, non-members, or possibly reserved destinations for GenShips.

That's actually the main thing I liked about FFE was that it did generate a whole galaxy which you could explore - although most of it ended up being empty, of course. But it did show all available stars, not just the colonised/member systems.

Yes, this is true. But ironically the only reason for Oolite "not showing all systems" is ... FFE.

Actually there is nothing in the Elite canon that would let you assume that there are more systems in the galaxies than the 256 we know. So, why do we need the assumption that there are? Because a couple of years after releasing Elite David Braben released FFE, another space game, that happened to have some (eleven?) of the Elite planet in its map, but surrounded by completely different planets, even Earth among them. Rumour has it that the original FFE game had nothing to do at all with Elite, but Braben included the systems around Lave, in order to be able to market the end product as a sequel to Elite. As far as Elite itself is concerned, this action was at least careless. Because it makes the original Elite map invalid, post facto. Therefore—if we accept the premises that FFE is a sequel to Elite, and both play in the same universe—we suddenly have to make amendments to the Elite map. Namely the assumption that the systems (or planets) shown on the FFE map are actually there on the Elite map, but just invisible. The whole thing is kind of an @ss-pull (if you forgive the strong language) we were forced to by the sequel-producing half of Messrs B&B.

If you want all the details, read Selezen's website. He was the one who shouldered the titanic task of reconciling what was never meant to be reconciled. And he did a damn fine job with that!

I can't recall when I read that 'justification' (pre or post Frontier) so your premise is quite likely correct. FWIW, I don't consider Frontier & FFE to be canon Elite (they were, on the whole, quite disappointing to me personally).

However, the original Elite manual at least didn't preclude this 'explanation':

The Galactic Co-operative is only one - although the largest - of several planetary federations, and maintains trade and diplomatic links with over 2000 planets spread throughout 8 galaxies.

and

GALACTIC CHART (F5). This chart shows all registered worlds within the galaxy

Not that it really matters.. but one point in which the original Elite was very strong in was alluding to more than there was by way of the Novella and Manual, which made the game itself so much richer since you could imagine all of the extras. That tends to be missing from most modern games - partially because modern games can fill most gaps, but also partially because I think the level of detail in building up the background just isn't there.