Oolite Bulletins

sdrubble wrote:

... so I suppose that for any stations with ONLY ONE dock, that one dock would still remain safe for a turret-bearing ship.

Yep.

Docks are supposed to have one entrance. And that side has special privileges. The main one is that you can't collide with any structure in front of it. The buoy Repair Station makes use of this feature to add a wall in front of he port were you can fly through.

Because the fuel stations have no structure at the back side of the dock, you even can fly in from that side. Only there is a bug somewhere in the code (many of the devs have searched for it, but none has found it) that makes that turret bearing ships trigger a collision when entering the bounding box. And only when entering from the right side, this is still harmless.

I once gave a fuel station a density of 0.0001 that way you collide with a small mass. Then when entering from the wrong side at low speed, you just bounce back

Many thx Eric and Thargoid for all the interesting clarifications.

It looks like a turret-loving Commander will still have plenty of exploring to do - provided he's always on the lookout over where he sticks his ship's nose.

Thargoid wrote:

... I presume you are flying a current and unmodified Caddy? I recall in the past this issue was also associated with turrets that had invalid orientations (set to 0 0 0 0 usually) in their shipdata. An older version of the Caddy had that, and kept going bang but correcting the quaternion made things better.

Nope Thargoid...

The Dark Rainbow is the ship I [used to] fly. Made it from the most recent Caddy version (at the time - Nov. 2011), added 2 more turrets and was as careful with the quaternions as I could...

As I said above, the fuel station bang became a non-issue for me, firstly when I learned about the planet-side trick, and secondly after I got fed up with the turnaround maneuvers and enabled the fuel-satellite-only switch.

It's also interesting to remark, since Eric commented about lowering the station mass: even without that trick, I had a couple of partial successes when entering the "wrong" fuel station side at veeery low speeds - no explosion, just a bounce-back with "some" scratches and a HEAVY repair bill after that.

Y'all take care !

A few observations while playing:

This is something I have not really noticed before with flying a fast ship. But with the Adder it is really noticeable. When in combat and being pursued by a faster ship (nearly everybody) once they are an my aft they all - without exception - slow down to my speed! Why is that? it is really weird to see an asp follow me at Adder speed. Shouldn't they catch up and fire when in weapon range?

Another thing:

Why is this red? (the box next to "No target) I was in combat but it is now all clear.


Also:

I helped out the Cobra Mark III Intangible Buttercup with a little bug problem and after clearing up I pressed the ` key and the Cobra III was transmitting the Thargoid death insult, as you can see.


Just a few observations from the bridge of the "Little Runt" my Adder with a BIG stick!

Fatleaf wrote:

Why is this red? (the box next to "No target) I was in combat but it is now all clear.

Well… it means your current missile status is LOCKED. This is tracked entirely separately from whether you have a current missile and whether such missile, should it exist, actually has a target. This design decision, er, was made before my time.

Fatleaf wrote:

I helped out the Cobra Mark III Intangible Buttercup with a little bug problem and after clearing up I pressed the ` key and the Cobra III was transmitting the Thargoid death insult, as you can see.

Can I? It looks like it’s still pinging from thanking you and you killed the bug really quickly. Still, I’ll take your word for it. :-)

Ahruman wrote:

Well… it means your current missile status is LOCKED. This is tracked entirely separately from whether you have a current missile and whether such missile, should it exist, actually has a target. This design decision, er, was made before my time.

Ok... But I was using the targeting system "r" not a missile "t". My single pylon doesn't carry a missile but an extra fuel tank and I don't arm it just in case I use it accidently.

Ahruman wrote:

Can I? It looks like it’s still pinging from thanking you and you killed the bug really quickly. Still, I’ll take your word for it.

Yes you can
I killed the Thargoid about five minutes earlier. That white lollipop on the scanner is a cargo container from an offending sidewinder I killed. It didn't attack the Cobra III. It was when I pressed the ` key to re-read the insult did I notice the Cobra start transmitting.
A certain old commander gave me this explanation: "... the Cobra is shown transmitting its own message, even as the comms toggle is displaying all recent messages." Sounds reasonable.

Fatleaf wrote:

This is something I have not really noticed before with flying a fast ship. But with the Adder it is really noticeable. When in combat and being pursued by a faster ship (nearly everybody) once they are an my aft they all - without exception - slow down to my speed! Why is that? it is really weird to see an asp follow me at Adder speed. Shouldn't they catch up and fire when in weapon range?

Trunk has some adjustments to this behaviour already so that they won't slow down to match speeds until they get within weapon range.

Fatleaf wrote:

This is something I have not really noticed before with flying a fast ship. But with the Adder it is really noticeable. When in combat and being pursued by a faster ship (nearly everybody) once they are an my aft they all - without exception - slow down to my speed! Why is that? it is really weird to see an asp follow me at Adder speed.

That is something that always was there since at least Oolite 1.65. The only way faster ships can slowly close the gap with you is when you keep changing speed. The desired speed of the attackers follows your speed but because most npc reduce speed slower than the player, they close the gap a bit during slowdown.

For 1.74 I was playing a long time with a build were the npc reduced speed to 5% above the target's speed. That felt almost the same as before for the player and faster ships did catch up at the end. But I never added it in the public release because that would change 1.65 behaviour.

As it was decided that we could break a few 1.65 habits after 1.76, this is now changed in trunk. I started with adding the 5% faster flying at one place and cim added it at more places. Depending on the distance will faster ships now fly 5% or 25% faster than the target to catch the target when their maximum speed allows it.

Eric Walch wrote:

Depending on the distance will faster ships now fly 5% or 25% faster than the target to catch the target when their maximum speed allows it.

This may still cause a problem I saw awhile back with Thargoids -- in a LONG chase by many enemy ships, the enemy ships could bunch up behind you and even shoot each other when they're trying to shoot you.

In case you did not notice. Another_commander put the link to a new compiled version of oolite 1.76.1 in the announcements. It is exactly the same as the current Oolite 1.76.1, but now without all the debugging features that are still in the current release.

By removing all the debugging code that is of no use for a normal player, Oolite should run a bit smoother. Because we never got a good chance to test it, this version never made it as release. But, we would appreciate it if people would start using it to get our confirmation that it works as it should. Specially when you were never using the console in the first place, you are better of with this version.

Eric Walch wrote:

In case you did not notice. Another_commander put the link to a new compiled version of oolite 1.76.1 in the announcements.

I have been using that deployment trial build, and it's fine (and a little smoother). But being old and frazzle-brained, I installed it alongside the normal Oolite 1.76.1 (albeit on a different partition), and it caused me a few problems with the normal release version (my fault, and now sorted I hope) - a small caveat!