Oolite Bulletins

Stations rotate because it's a cheap way of providing a whole range of varying gravity habitats throughout the structure, from zero-G in the centre to 1G+ at the outer edges, using technology which can be used by operators from tech level 1 to tech level 15. You wouldn't trust a scutter from Qudira with a gravity generator... not more than once, anyhow.

I know this has all already been said, but here goes anyway.

Yes "NP" does allow you to do some cool things that are not possible in oolite.

People have different ideas of what NP means. Mostly we seem to be talking about inertia.

There is no interest, or possibly negativity towards this from the dev team, so it will not happen in oolite.

If anyone wants to write a different game, or fork oolite and add NP, then I dont think anyone here is likely to try and stop them.

NPlite will be nothing like oolite. It may be better, or it may be worse. But it wont be elite. It may, or may not be Frontier-like. It will probably never exist.

There are other games which have implemented various different levels of physics. We are mostly on the oolite forum because we want to play oolite, not those other games.

As for the real world, it is quite likely that ships will be subject to the laws of physics . It is possible that for some conditions, (examples such as low speed docking etc) people may fit fly-by-wire automagical oolite style controls, but that wont be practical for most flight because it is inherantly inefficient.

It is also worth pointing out that for "real world" considerations, oolite is just broken. There is no gravity, solar radiation is not inverse square power, things are all the wrong sizes, the economy makes no sense. The physics are neither newtonian, nor relativistically correct (check out the relative velocity of 2 imperial couriers flying apart).

Hear! Hear!

When I was 13 and played Elite - I wondered "If there's big engines at the back making me go fast, why aren't there big engines at the front slowing me to a stop?" - Then I realised, I didn't care and that Elite was a fantastic game and that I didn't need to go outside and look at the sky anymore...

When writing Elite fiction and fluff in my youth, I had to make some decisions on some of this stuff in order to get it straight in my head. I even wrote a "tecnical manual" of sorts to keep it all striaght in my head. The manual has, sadly, been decimated by the ravages of time but I still remember some of it so here goes...

The plumes from the main engines are not rockets - they're plasma exhausts, venting the superheated elements that keep the drive cool. Expanding it to Oolite, the purple effect when using the injector is the effect of adding a hydrogen-based product to the mix and heating the drive even further.

Newtonian physics are in effect, but the gargantuan navigation computer (which is governed by an AI) takes care of all the relativistic stuff and presents a simplified control system to the pilot and crew. The navigation controls the crew uses controls the speed relative to nearby objects rather than the true speed of the craft. The speed of a craft when in transit varies during the trip in a consistent level in the same way it does in Frontier - steadily accelerating until reaching the halfway point then steadily decelerating after that, achieving a similar speed to the stellar bodies in the vicinity at the end of the run. The crew controls change the relative speed by only a fraction of the actual speed, making it look like the ship is accelerating and decelerating in relation to nearby ships, which are also travelling at roughly the same overall speed (note that this conflicts slightly with the maximim speed as stated in the manual for each ship - the difference between 0.3c and 0.29c is a fair old whack!).

The main system propulsion is not a rocket or similar - it is a self-contained module within the ship's hull that interacts with the stellar environment. A simplified description is that the drive uses the local gravity within the system and amplifies the gravitational effects to provide thrust. This is also what makes the inertial dampening and artificial gravity work on a ship.

On that note, artificial gravity is difficult to maintain on a stationary object such as a station, since the local gravity remains constant in any given area. On a ship, where it passes through gravity fields or varying intensity, this can be used to power the artificial gravity by responding to those changes. On a station it is far easier (and cheaper) to use motion-based gravity and it also saves space (since the bulky generators are not required).

It's all just speculation... It's only a game, after all...

I like the explanation Selezen, as much as I understand it, as my brain is quickly befuddled by too much tech speak...

As I read it, ships in Elite/Oolite have a sort of inertia-less 'space drive', and a very sophisticated navigation computer.

I suppose it begs the question though.... In FE2/FFE, ships are clearly seen to emply rocket type exhausts and reverse thrusters in operation and have a relatively primitive nav computer by comparision.. so why did the ship manufacturers throw away such advanced technology a hundred years or so later on?

I have to admit I rather liked the NP in FE2/FFE, but then I'm an astronomy buff in my spare time, and had lots of fun in FE2 doing engine off gravitational slingshots around gas planets and stars!

Cheers,

Drew.

@Drew:

Elite generation pilots = dumb = very clever computers that make them easy to fly, all the difficult bits hidden from the pilot

Frontier/FE generation pilots = less dumb = allowed to play with some of the Newtonian Physics previously hidden by the computer.

It's not much of an explanation, but it is an explanation.

In some ways it's the same problem they had when they made the doomed "Enterprise" TV series - the ship always seemed more sophisticated than the ship in TOS it was meant to pre-date by 100 years.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Elite generation pilots = dumb = very clever computers that make them easy to fly, all the difficult bits hidden from the pilot

Frontier/FE generation pilots = less dumb = allowed to play with some of the Newtonian Physics previously hidden by the computer.

It's not much of an explanation, but it is an explanation.

Makes sense to me. In Elite, it seems that Lave has the only *official* Flight Training Academy in the eight galaxies, which would mean for pilots to be accredited and licenced they would have to attend Lave FTA, which would mean MASSIVE class sizes, and likely lower levels of student engagement. This would then requre the lessons to be little more than 'crash courses' in Astronavigation, Inter-species Diplomacy, Ship-to-Ship Combat, Trading in the Galactic Market and so on. In FE2/FFE, there are more flight schools, and thus the education is likely to be more comprehensive as the class sizes would be smaller.

Captain Hesperus
...failed Docking 101 forty times in a row.

I quit playing when they started applying proper physics to space travel, No longer a game, just boring. Elite commander of the BBC micro.