Oolite Bulletins

Also the hunble sidewinder does city strafing

I've often landed on a planet's surface in Oolite.
If you get to the surface, you can see blue sky, and the stars disappear.

...however, there is quite a large kinetic energy transfer involved in landing, which tends to have a detrimental effect on my ship...


Meanwhile, in the on-topic part of the forest, I'm against moving the sun a realistic distance away. 2 x as far as present, at the absolute most.

Sun-skimming for fuel is an integral part of the original game.

Wiggy wrote:

Sun-skimming for fuel is an integral part of the original game.

I must admit that sun-skimming always felt to me more a curiosity than an integral part of the original game.

In my opinion the star would be well served to be further away from the planet, but we'd also need to have more of a reason to actually visit it. Such as the fuel harvesters mentioned earlier etc.

My first post, so apologies if this seems dumb...

I'm a long-time Elite player & have recently discovered the joys of OOlite - my appreciation to the developers.

For me I'm always happy to see more realism ( if not @ the expence of gameplay ) & would also like to see the sun(s) moved further away...

How to do while not causing frustration ( maybe enhancing gameplay ) & not requiring a big re-write of the game?

How about if when you hit hyperspace without selecting a destination, you get a short hop in the direction you're facing before the computer sees your 'mistake' & cuts out the hyperdrive?

The distance could then be a random ammount more-or-less equal to the distance to the local sun which may because of the lack of calculated target stuff you into an object or trouble.
( Aimed into the middle of the sun, or v. bad luck into an asteroid or thargoids for example )

This would allow worthwhile expansions such as fuel-stations etc while adding some intersting elements to the game at little coding expence or significantly changing the game.

In the long run this may also allow systems with more than one visitable planet to be practicable - with additions to the compass.

oops

Good idea realism wise, but think this has been touched on elsewhere. In building the Oniverse. Giles made the ships and stations 100 times bigger (realative to the planet / sun) than they really would be in space, if you were really there.

This was necessary as otherwise it would either take you a stupid amount of time to reach the planet or the ships and stations would be impossible to see next to the planet or sun.

Think the time to travel to the sun is about right though. A cobra moves at 0.3lm, but the J jump is meant to increase speed three times. So a cobra in J mode is moving at about the speed of light. Takes about 3 mins at J speed to be mass locked by the sun.

Should really take 8 mins, if the Oolite sun was in the same place as Earth's sun. But maybe all those frogs and rodents need a different "goldilocks zone" to us humans.

If you run daljit's branch though, you can put the sun whereever you want it by changing the value in planetinfo!