Oolite Bulletins

CommonSenseOTB wrote:

Hehe!

Just trying to find some way for what IS in the elite manual to make some sort of sense for reality. Issues of scale aside I would say it works rather well as the torus drive is 32x max throttle speed. What's 1/10 the speed of what is listed(using this method) when dealing with all the other issues of scale. If you want to make the distances and speeds 10x what they are now...no, let's not go there. I'm quite happy with it for the most part. Good work Developers!!

What IS in the Trader's Manual is the phrase "Light Mach" - what's not in the Trader's Manual is any explanation of what that is - which is good because it means it can be whatever we need it to be - and what we need it to be is NOT a percentage of the speed of light.

Yeah on the surface of my computer screen the speed of the ships appears to vary from about 2mm/sec to 20cm/sec and that includes the effects of relativity!

Selezen wrote:

Ah, well that's news indeed! Thanks for the correction. I feel another "technical paper" coming on.

I'll base it on DH's statements, since it's from the code. if the injectors can break light speed then there's a "scientific anomaly" in the logic - if the speed of light has been broken, then how come events on screen can be interpreted properly - if light speed has been exceeded then events would be seen after they had occurred.

Interesting.

My Torus drive theory still pans out, as the hyperspace barrier should warp space enough to allow some flexibility in the visual "perception".

If you're interested, here is my take on the LightMach problem from two months ago. Unfortunately it's crap, because I blew the maths. But maybe some ideas can still be used.

In your article (after your error disclaimer) you explain that a "vessel" would need to be travelling at 11.2 km/s to get off the planet - not so. An UNPOWERED object would need to travel at 11.2 km/s to get off the planet. A vessel under power only has to generate enough thrust to negate the effects of gravity until gravity is no longer a factor. Our current crop of spacecraft do that adequately and they don't travel anywhere near as fast as 11 km/s! Watching shuttle launches would be a bit boring if that was the case

Houston: "2...1...lift off...orbit achieved!"
Everyone: "Yaaaay...beers."
Me: "I travelled millions o' miles for that???"
McCoy "Thousands of miles."
Me: "Shut up."

Thing is though, that there's still an element of accuracy in the game. As I said in my first post on this thread, the travel time at full speed from planet to sun is about 15 mins, which is accurate for a ship travelling at 35% light speed travelling between Earth and the Sun. I know that we have a variable in the fact that the sun could be a different class of star (and thus have a different habitable zone) but for the sake of argument I've always classed it as "as close as dammit". Wikipedia has this to say on the matter:



Of course, it's all relative - if the rest of the scale stuff is out, then the inconsistencies meld together with everything else. It would be nice to reach some sort of theoretically accurate method in case it becomes necessary for some of the fan fiction.

I always thought the Cobra Mk 3 was way too big, when I found out that it is 130 meters wide my immediate thought was "that can't be right, that would make that cockpit window on it several meters high and at least 10 meters wide... Is it being piloted by giants?"

ADCK wrote:

I always thought the Cobra Mk 3 was way too big, when I found out that it is 130 meters wide my immediate thought was "that can't be right, that would make that cockpit window on it several meters high and at least 10 meters wide... Is it being piloted by giants?"

You are of course presuming that the "cockpit" is indeed the cockpit - and not just a sensor array - that cockpit detail was never on the original wireframe - it was added by texture later. I've always presumed (as part of the reason you state) that the pilot has very little interaction with the real world in the sense of "windows" - his vision of the outside world provided by a raft of sensors and cameras while he sits safely cocooned deep inside the ship...

Lasers + transparent panels = not great idea ...

ADCK wrote:

I always thought the Cobra Mk 3 was way too big, when I found out that it is 130 meters wide my immediate thought was "that can't be right, that would make that cockpit window on it several meters high and at least 10 meters wide... Is it being piloted by giants?"

That was one issue I addressed when I redid the textures for v3.x of Smivs's Shipset. Previously all the cockpit windows were ludicrously large, so I scaled them back. However to have a truly realistic size they would be so small you couldn't see them, so I ended up with an Oolite fudge where they are quite big but not super silly. The Cobra Mk3's cockpit is around 6 metres wide. As the actual cockpit is known to be inside the ship and 'viewing' is done via monitor, think of it as more as a panoramic window in the Captains Lounge.

Aaargh! They're NOT windows!

They're solar panels or sensor arrays or something. The Elite manual says that the viewscreen is just that - a viewSCREEN!!

<breathe...breathe...>

That's why my ships have the blue scanner/deflector array. They also have nice windows.

Hmm, I'll have to dig up some old pics, but I remember seeing a cross section of the cobra mk 3 somewhere... BRB downloading the entire internets to find it O_o.

There's a cross-section and plan cutaway diagrams of the Cobra III here, but I think they're using a different scale (or a very big pilot).

Disembodied wrote:

There's a cross-section and plan cutaway diagrams of the Cobra III here, but I think they're using a different scale (or a very big pilot).

Hmm, not the one I remember seeing, I don't think it was official or anything anyway, just some fan made thingy, so I guess it doesn't matter.

Daddyhoggy wrote:

Light Mach is just a buzzword used by the sales man to make you go "ooohhh, that's fast" and buy the ship.

Agreed. I see no reason whatsoever why we should assume light mach = light speed. Could be furlongs per fortnight for all we know! A bit like BHP on cars no longer has a great deal to do with a horse.

Selezen wrote:

Aaargh! They're NOT windows!

They're solar panels or sensor arrays or something. The Elite manual says that the viewscreen is just that - a viewSCREEN!!

<breathe...breathe...>

Yeah... sometimes I think of ships having bridge windows, and sometimes I don't. Depends on my mood. I think a 'cooler' more 31st century view of things would be for some kind of enhanced transparent aluminUm type material that could go transparent at will, or be impervious to radiation and not compromise the integrity of the vessel in anyway. Sort of 'reactolite rapide' for spaceships. Viewscreens sounds a bit too 1980s. I think we'd see something like the inside of the pod in Carl Sagan's Contact movie - transparent depending on which direction you're looking.



As for the insides of a Cobra mk3... looks like a windscreen to me...

Cheers,

Drew.

Disembodied wrote:

There's a cross-section and plan cutaway diagrams of the Cobra III here, but I think they're using a different scale (or a very big pilot).

Ah, the Berihn Files. Glad to see they finally made it online. Yeah, that's definitely non-canon. Nice ideas in there, though and I have to hand it to the artist for the level of detail (and have done on many occasions, right, J?)

There have been many ideas about what the cockpit looks like on Elite ships. Everything from basic standard "aircraft cockpit" layouts to weird and wonderful bubbles of jelly.

I think there is a need to determine what Light Mach really means then. The only issue I have with it is that (since I tend to use the game and official manuals for canon) we have to correlate the max cruising speed of 0.35 LM with a 15 minute journey between "class M" planet and its corresponding star. I feel that this is the only actual scale that's routinely measurable in the actual game. Your mileage may vary, of course...