Oolite Bulletins

Great first post, mOOndancer. Welcome.

Welcome!
Cracking first post. Glad you liked your stay at the cloud cities in Zarece. Next tourist attraction Xexdi (city plant) I an recommend Laenin too. Then off to the Center all the way to the Pulsar worlds

Out on an experimental patrol looking for a group of bandits, I jumped from Xeabiti to nearby Vezadi... it had to be nearby as I'd need plenty of fuel for the injectors. A good system is Vezadi if you’re looking for trouble, and sure enough I'd hardly left the witchpoint when a bunch of five bandits jumped me. I hit the injectors and got right in amongst them, slowed and starting taking heavy hits, which I soon returned. Quite a tussle ensued, and I had to break-off and run briefly at one point, but I eventually splashed them all. I was especially pleased to pick the last one off at nearly 10k as he tried to run! Experiment successful!

A very satisfactory patrol, and I made it through to the station okay, as well. All done without any lasers... just a 'slightly' tweaked railgun (I blame Fatleaf), keyed to the joystick trigger. Classic dogfighting and quite exhilarating! The  railgun is an excellent weapon, but each shot costs, in energy as well as credits, and when the DU slugs run out (only 100 shots per magazine), that's it! No lasers, no back-up! You pull the trigger and nothing happens, which is an eerie feeling. Then it's time to run like hell!

El Viejo wrote:

just a 'slightly' tweaked railgun (I blame Fatleaf), keyed to the joystick trigger.

Eh! What! Who me? It wasn't me! It was a resident modeller that I happened to stumble across! It woz im!
All I did was ask him to make it and sent it to you with instructions of how to implement it. But he did ALL the work I am only the delivery boy!

On a different note, since I added randomshipsnames to my Oolite, stuff started to get a lot 'realer'...

Greetz,
Onno.

I think this one qualifies as a tale from the spacelanes. I was in Galaxy 5 marking off more checks for the explorer's club. I was using that new 'experimental', read 'illegal', Thargoid witchjump drive to help expedite my quest for that 'Elite Explorer' title. I primed it to jump across an expanse of space and when I emerged near the Beesve witchjump beacon, a generation ship filled much of my forward view screen.

Whoops! This generation ship must have got caught up in my wormhole chain turbulence and got dragged into system space with me...

Solonar wrote:

I think this one qualifies as a tale from the spacelanes. I was in Galaxy 5 marking off more checks for the explorer's club. I was using that new 'experimental', read 'illegal', Thargoid witchjump drive to help expedite my quest for that 'Elite Explorer' title. I primed it to jump across an expanse of space and when I emerged near the Beesve witchjump beacon, a generation ship filled much of my forward view screen.

Whoops! This generation ship must have got caught up in my wormhole chain turbulence and got dragged into system space with me...

That should probably be a punishable offense by GalCop Penal Code... After all, nobody is supposed to interfere with Generation Ships.

Commander McLane wrote:

That should probably be a punishable offense by GalCop Penal Code... After all, nobody is supposed to interfere with Generation Ships.

Yeah, what if they'd been dragged 7 light years back in the direction they had come from? That would put them back over an entire generation!

SandJ wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

That should probably be a punishable offense by GalCop Penal Code... After all, nobody is supposed to interfere with Generation Ships.

Yeah, what if they'd been dragged 7 light years back in the direction they had come from? That would put them back over an entire generation!

Or advanced them on their course and 'saved' a generation, maybe. I sometimes wonder about the GalCop policy of 'do not touch'! Maybe there should be a reward for dragging a generation ship into 'normal' space. It seems somewhat unfair to leave them endlessly cruising the void.

El Viejo wrote:

SandJ wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

That should probably be a punishable offense by GalCop Penal Code... After all, nobody is supposed to interfere with Generation Ships.

Yeah, what if they'd been dragged 7 light years back in the direction they had come from? That would put them back over an entire generation!

Or advanced them on their course and 'saved' a generation, maybe. I sometimes wonder about the GalCop policy of 'do not touch'! Maybe there should be a reward for dragging a generation ship into 'normal' space. It seems somewhat unfair to leave them endlessly cruising the void.

That sounds like an OXP idea El Viejo. Find a particular Gen-ship whose systems are failing. Save it by dragging to nearby system. Collect reward.

Gimi wrote:

That sounds like an OXP idea El Viejo. Find a particular Gen-ship whose systems are failing. Save it by dragging to nearby system. Collect reward.

Heh... spice it up a little with some 'complications', maybe. Summon a boffin!

A major space oddity...
A generation ship is so massive that you have to be over 15 km away from it before you can hyperspace out...and it's somewhat slow too.
I'm pretty sure it's not programmed to use other ships' wormholes.
So "forcing" it to run into a wormhole would probably require a large wormhole (to last long enough) placed in front of it.
So the sequence of events required to get a generation ship to hyperspace to a regular system is very unlikely barring some unusual OXPs.
Since it happened to you, consider it the Oolite luck equivalent of winning the lottery jackpot.

El Viejo wrote:

Or advanced them on their course and 'saved' a generation, maybe. I sometimes wonder about the GalCop policy of 'do not touch'! Maybe there should be a reward for dragging a generation ship into 'normal' space. It seems somewhat unfair to leave them endlessly cruising the void.

I suspect the GalCop reward for doing so would be to appoint you the director of the rehabilitation and reorientation foundation for them. At your own expense. For life.

The correct thing to do would have to been to intercept them as soon as humanity got the witchdrive, and transport them to their destination. It wouldn't have been easy, but the empty colony world would have been there for them, and they could have adapted to the new technology and cultures relatively quickly. They could even have been left on those worlds to gradually assimilate back into mainstream human culture, much as Galcop now deals with the various shy cultures with arms-length interaction and strictly limited planetfall. It would have been difficult, but it could have worked. Even if the generation ship itself couldn't have been retrofitted for witchspace, they could have transported people off with early freighters. It would have taken several years, but it could have been done.

Having not done that, every year that goes by it gets harder to come up with a good solution. If one reaches a populated system now, then they've been travelling for hundreds if not thousands of years - millions of deaths and sacrifices in the dark void between the stars - and their promised home - the reward for all this suffering - is inhabited by people technologically and culturally as different to them as they are to medieval peasants. How do you tell people that not only was their life's work in vain, but their entire society for several centuries has been working on the same thing in vain? (And 50:50 they reach a non-human system, too, which is even more difficult to deal with - not even a thread of common history)

You can't deal with that problem - not by any ethical means - so Galcop does what every stuck committee does, and leaves the problem to their successors, while putting extremely harsh penalties on those who might cause them to have to deal with the problem now.

cim wrote:

rehabilitation and reorientation

Hmm... is that in any way similar to the 'attitude adjustment' that GalCop occasionly force upon me?

I was greener than Cevegian ale, and eager to get my feet wet in the world of bounty hunting. Yeah, it'd be dangerous, but a man only lives once, and I had a perfectly safe save file to fall back on. If I bit off more than I could chew, why I'd only have to take my medicine, learn the lesson, and respawn at the station. I hit the jump and came out of the hole looking for trouble. With freshly mounted milspec lasers aboard, and my trusty e-bomb in the back as a worst-case-scenario, who would be dumb enough to try me on?

Well, they were, apparently. Seven loaded-for-bear vessels, and one little me. I did my best, and put up a valiant fight. The ECM was getting a workout, and I was spending a lot of time dodging and diving, taking potshots when I had one. Finally, after what seemed like a light year, I was home free. One energy bomb detonation, and I was heading home. I'd sustained major damage to fuel scoops, escape pod, and half a dozen other systems. Out of Witchie Juice, and limping to port, I finally started to breath again when I found myself within the warm fuzzy blanket around the station where the good guys would protect me. I had gotten blood on me, some of it my enemy's, some of it my own, and my trusty vessel took a beating, but I survived another day, proud of my adventures as a "someday bounty hunter".

And, with great skill and triumph, I smeared my ship all over the entrance to the Ribiara Station Docks. Press Space and buy a docking computer!