cim wrote:Selezen wrote:The big ships in relation to a Coriolis (which is 1km in diameter)
Is it? I assumed that like every other object in Oolite it had been scaled up from feet to metres, so the Elite Coriolis would only be 1000 feet in diameter....interestingly, the Elite manual claims they're a kilometre wide. If so, then you should be able to fit a foot-scale Cobra III into the docking port sideways. Time to go back to the emulator and see how long it takes to cross the station from one side to the other, I think. (Does this mean that the Oolite Coriolis stations are around 40 times smaller than they should be, then?)
I do think that the stations in Oolite could be bigger
in relation to the ships, but
not so big as to allow a Cobra to dock sideways. On the other hand, increasing the dimensions more than threefold (foot to metre), would make them far too big
in relation to the planets, which is visually very important, because we see the station next to the planet.
Thus I think that the current station size is a good compromise between the scale of ships (which is too big) and the scale of planets (which is too small). Naturally, stations are between those two scales and therefore
have to compromise between the two opposing aberrations in scale. There is no way out of this trap. And this means, that while we can make small adjustments to their size (making them 1200m wide would work), a big change (making them 3300m wide) would break their relation to planet size.