Oolite Bulletins

Kaks wrote:

However, JeffBTX comments make me wonder how many people would misunderstand the concept to begin with... I suppose it's better to wait for a few days to hear everybody's opinion first, then see if it's doable with a minimum of fuss!

Perhaps, but I think it was just caffiene poisoning.

I was experiencing temporary dementia; from staying up all night, slurping coffee (CONSTANTLY), running my RayTracer, processing images, importing the images into a HUD, cursing because I "just couldn't make it look just right"... so when the CAT starts to lecture me on my sleeping habits, I figured it was FINALLY time to shut down and get to sleep. Cats don't normally talk to "hoomin" types.

Kaks wrote:

Air? o_O

He was referring to the airspeed velocity of an unladen or a laden swallow. (Laden with coconuts from the "Moty Python's Holy Grail" movie.)

Is that an African or European Python?

For what it is worth, I generally support the idea (the idea being that an adder will be cheaper to fill up with fuel than an anaconda).

As long as it doesn't go "TOO far"...

When people start saying things like "This will encourage people to start sunskimming! Yay!", I get a little worried. And quite frankly, for passenger or cargo contracts, I DON'T WANT to be TOO concerned about fuel costs per MassOfMyShip per NumberOfJumpsRequired per DeadLines... you see? At some point it is no longer "a fun game". So IF implemented, make it a factor, sure, but not too extreme.

I would be just fine with leaving things as they are. The physics of "leaving things as they are" must be something like... it takes a certain amount of quirium to open a wormhole for a 1 LY jump. It takes more quirium to open a wormhole for a 7 LY "corridor". This is consistant regardless of the mass of the ship... it is just setting off a "reaction" and the mass of the ship has nothing to do with it... there is a consistant relationship with length of wormhole corridor to the amount of quirium used. The mass of the ship DOES affect how long it takes to move through witchspace though (do I have that right?).

My opinion is that if varying fuel prices and fuel quality and fuel consumptions are in an OXP, then that's an OXP I don't expect to be using anytime soon.

Other people are welcome to drain their credit accounts at their discretion.

To contribute to the discussion....

Why isn't fuel simply fuel? I mean all the ships are meant to run on stuff which meets standard specifications, right?

If some pilots want to pay for "premium" or even "racing" fuels, will it stop there?
Will there also be fuel additives available for purchase?
And what will they do?
Prevent fuel from gelling or freezing?
Prevent fuel from burning too hot and melting ship components?
Allow the fuel to burn more uniformly?
Detect and plug fuel leaks?
Convert Thargoid fuel to meet your ships fuel specification requirements?
Make swallows feel as though they just drank a "Red Bull" energy drink?

JeffBTX wrote:

When people start saying things like "This will encourage people to start sunskimming! Yay!", I get a little worried. And quite frankly, for passenger or cargo contracts, I DON'T WANT to be TOO concerned about fuel costs per MassOfMyShip per NumberOfJumpsRequired per DeadLines... you see? At some point it is no longer "a fun game". So IF implemented, make it a factor, sure, but not too extreme.

Nobody said that this will enourage people to start sunskimming. All I said in my earlier post is that it adds the option of sunskimming, because as it is now nobody ever worries about it. Why do it, when a top up costs 10Cr or so? In addition to that, consider that for someone who has three million Cr, for example, a possible top up of 200Cr is negligible anyway. Also, if you read the first posts carefully, we explicitly state that the situation with the Cobra MKIII will remain exactly as it is now. Smaller ships may even have less costly fuel and you would start worrying about fuel prices only from ships like Boa Class Cruiser upwards. But on the other hand, having such a ship means that you can take and fulfill trade contracts and make grand profits due to large cargo capacities anyway. Essentially, gameplay may be affected only if one uses the very large ships, which means that they have plenty Cr already, for the rest I don't see anything changing, really.

I would be just fine with leaving things as they are. The physics of "leaving things as they are" must be something like... it takes a certain amount of quirium to open a wormhole for a 1 LY jump. It takes more quirium to open a wormhole for a 7 LY "corridor". This is consistant regardless of the mass of the ship... it is just setting off a "reaction" and the mass of the ship has nothing to do with it... there is a consistant relationship with length of wormhole corridor to the amount of quirium used. The mass of the ship DOES affect how long it takes to move through witchspace though (do I have that right?).

Here are some facts about the way wormholes work in Oolite:
- The radius of the wormhole depends on the mass of the ship. This means that small ships create small wormholes and big ships create big ones. Therefore, it makes good sense to consider that a Cobra MKI generating a 1LY wormhole uses less fuel than an OSE Juggernaught generating a 1LY wormhole.
- The lifetime of the wormhole depends on the mass of the ship. You can verify this immediately if you buy a Wormhole Scanner and sample-scan a few wormholes. You will find that a Cobra MKI generates a wormhole that collapses in, say, 1.5 minutes, but an Anaconda created one collapses in 5 minutes or more (the numbers are inidicative only and not necessarily accurate). This may be interpreted as another indication that a lot more fuel was used for the creation of the Anaconda wormhole.
- The mass of the ship does not affect the time taken to travel inside the wormhole. A Mamba escort entering a wormhole opened by its mother will arrive to destination together with the mother.

All the above indicates that justifying increased fuel consumption for bigger ships is entirely possible within the game's rules as we have them now and that gameplay is not overly affected. Maybe someone trying to buy a big ship will have to wait a bit longer until they have cash to support refuels, but I do not see it as a show-stopper at all.

another_commander;

Thanks for the info/reply... I will past that into my "forum docs".

Ok!

Fill-up prices: I'm quite happy to implement changes that will

• * make it cheaper to fill up ships smaller than the cobra3
  * make it more expensive to fill up ships noticeably bigger than the cobra3

Variable fuel quality: I might find the time to implement the code to allow OXPs to create different fuels ( what Ahruman described ), but

• - I wouldn't hold my breath on me actually putting that code in anytime soon! (sorry many-fuels people)
  - we'd still need someone Thargoid to actually write a 'different fuels.oxp'

And:

Ahruman wrote:

What we really need is a finite element analysis to determine how spaceodynamic each ship is.

Ahruman wrote:

Anyone suggesting we need a more complex model for fuel blending will be summarily shot.

Kaks wrote:

I'm quite happy to implement changes that will

• * make it cheaper to fill up ships smaller than the cobra3

Just don't make it much cheaper, or maybe set some reasonable threshold below which we don't go, since the MkIII fuel pricing is low enough as it is at 2Cr/LY.

I'm not convinced that the formula should be simply tied to the size of the vessel. I think there is an argument for fuel for very expensive combat vessels (the Caddy and Imp Courier for example) costing more as well, the basis being that they use a "premium" fuel to do warping or some such.

I think some of the bigger ships (most notably the core Oolite large traders) already give up a lot in terms of speed, handling and ease of being shot at, for the sake of their extra cargo size. Some larger vessels (the PCC, Python-ET and a few others) don't make that trade off and I could see an argument for them having to pay a premium fuel price to justify their high speeds and high cargo loads.

Sendraks wrote:

I'm not convinced that the formula should be simply tied to the size of the vessel. I think there is an argument for fuel for very expensive combat vessels (the Caddy and Imp Courier for example) costing more as well, the basis being that they use a "premium" fuel to do warping or some such.

I think some of the bigger ships (most notably the core Oolite large traders) already give up a lot in terms of speed, handling and ease of being shot at, for the sake of their extra cargo size. Some larger vessels (the PCC, Python-ET and a few others) don't make that trade off and I could see an argument for them having to pay a premium fuel price to justify their high speeds and high cargo loads.

But at the moment (and ease of implementation in core code) we're only discussing the fact that a full tank of fuel 7ly fill up for a big ship - such as an Anaconda because of it's mass should cost much more than an Adder, your other points match my request for different types of fuel, which as Kaks (as the only volunteer) says is harder and more time consuming to implement. You're not buying more expensive fuel for these big ships, you just have to buy more of the normal stuff to fill your tanks right up to the point where you can jump 7ly.

And these super fuels (if they are implemented) should only affect "normal" space effects - i.e. duration/efficiency of injectors etc - although, as you say some of these sub-Uber and Uber ships could have specialist fuel requirements if such a thing was implemented - perhaps this would limit the worlds (based on Tech Level) where such fuel might be available - so unless they've bought and filled fuel tanks they might not be able to visit certain worlds - another one of those nice self balancing things that the purchaser of these ships should consider before buying?

(i.e. Can an ex-Navy Asp II only run on Military fuel? or it runs sub-perfromance on "normal" fuel... suddenly the oxp potential seems boundless!)

its ridiculous.

why should my space taxes subsidise mums with their Chelsea chariots taking the kid to school in their boa class cruiser which i bet have never even been off the space lanes and do not even know what a galactic hyperdrive is (and they cant fly!, i constantly see them scraping the walls when docking). I BET it was one of them who scraped my newly painted hull last week

i have my environmentally friendly cobra mark 3 AND i transport share when i can, my ferrying charges fall well within the government space craft share scheme, but do i get cheaper fuel....... NO!.

let the ones polluting the galaxy pay the fuel tax i say....



ps i was joking

If this is going to be done, then it should be kept simple. There is no easy way to determine what "type" a ship is (fighter etc.) and there is only 1 type of fuel (no military drives, at least not yet). I guess for injectors we could do something related to checking max speed but its all starting to look a bit much to me.

We have simple access to mass, and that is a sensible metric for fuel requirement. A ship 10 times as big needs 10 times as much fuel -- do we need to go further than that?

If you take a really superlight ship that only takes half a credit to fill up, then thats fine too (think motorbikes). I guess the minimum should be something like 0.5 credits for a fill up, with no maximum.

Cmdr James wrote:

If this is going to be done, then it should be kept simple. There is no easy way to determine what "type" a ship is (fighter etc.) and there is only 1 type of fuel (no military drives, at least not yet). I guess for injectors we could do something related to checking max speed but its all starting to look a bit much to me.

We have simple access to mass, and that is a sensible metric for fuel requirement. A ship 10 times as big needs 10 times as much fuel -- do we need to go further than that?

If you take a really superlight ship that only takes half a credit to fill up, then thats fine too (think motorbikes). I guess the minimum should be something like 0.5 credits for a fill up, with no maximum.

That's fine by me and all I would ask for at this stage. If the hooks could be put in for the other stuff (fuel types) so OXPs could play then that would be a bonus. And yes, no military drives (per Frontier), BUT like in RL where certain v. high performance cars MUST use super fuels or carry specialist additives if they can't get specialist fuels or these cars run like complete dogs then it doesn't take much of a leap does it to think that perhaps Asps in the core game might need specialist fuels for their clearly high-performance engines, or stuff like the Kirin and Cadeceus which are either military or semi-organic!

DaddyHoggy wrote:

And yes, no military drives (per Frontier), BUT like in RL where certain v. high performance cars MUST use super fuels or carry specialist additives if they can't get specialist fuels or these cars run like complete dogs then it doesn't take much of a leap does it to think that perhaps Asps in the core game might need specialist fuels for their clearly high-performance engines, or stuff like the Kirin and Cadeceus which are either military or semi-organic!

We'd have to be careful with this. We don't want to make sunskimming a non-starter for some people, as it's an interesting part of gameplay. Unless, of course, we decided that sunskimmed (fresh?) fuel was the highest grade ... that way there would be another incentive to go and get your juice straight from the star.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

But at the moment (and ease of implementation in core code) we're only discussing the fact that a full tank of fuel 7ly fill up for a big ship - such as an Anaconda because of it's mass should cost much more than an Adder, your other points match my request for different types of fuel, which as Kaks (as the only volunteer) says is harder and more time consuming to implement. You're not buying more expensive fuel for these big ships, you just have to buy more of the normal stuff to fill your tanks right up to the point where you can jump 7ly.

While this is logical, it still feels like an unnecessary "nerf" to big ships where none is needed. I would like to see there being more of a tradeoff made here, i.e. big ships need more fuel and they can also carry more fuel. That doesn't mean that a big ship can jump further than 7lyr in a single jump, but it can do multiple jumps on a single tank of fuel or some such to balance the extra fuel costs big ships will incur.

Meanwhile smaller ships are limited to 1 7lyr max range jump on a full tank .

DaddyHoggy wrote:

And these super fuels (if they are implemented) should only affect "normal" space effects - i.e. duration/efficiency of injectors etc - although, as you say some of these sub-Uber and Uber ships could have specialist fuel requirements if such a thing was implemented - perhaps this would limit the worlds (based on Tech Level) where such fuel might be available - so unless they've bought and filled fuel tanks they might not be able to visit certain worlds - another one of those nice self balancing things that the purchaser of these ships should consider before buying?

(i.e. Can an ex-Navy Asp II only run on Military fuel? or it runs sub-perfromance on "normal" fuel... suddenly the oxp potential seems boundless!)

Yes, this is the kind of thing I'm thinking of.