For information and discussion about Oolite.
https://bb.oolite.space/
so they can be seen by left & right & rear views is good. you can steer on a constant tangent to the victim, spin round him/her/it & blast away.Simon B wrote:How many turrets should an anaconda have?
Would people with turret experience please advise on anything I'm likely to get wrong?
Yeah, I was trying to work out what turreted combat would look like. I probably need to play with a griff boa or something.Yodeebe wrote:so they can be seen by left & right & rear views is good. you can steer on a constant tangent to the victim, spin round him/her/it & blast away.Simon B wrote:How many turrets should an anaconda have?
Would people with turret experience please advise on anything I'm likely to get wrong?
I see you've got one on the tail already.
I saw something in wings which tells me the normal to a surface, I was planning on using that and some vector math.Griff wrote:I still have nightmares about those spacebar turret quaternions. they took a whole lot of trial and error to get correct, i almost wore out the shift key starting & re-starting oolite tweaking away at their shipdata.plist.
griff griff griff ... select the top surface of the turret in wings (using area mode) and it tells you the center coordinate. That's how I've been getting the exhaust positions.You're right, the bases that the turrets sit on are actually part of the rock model, in wings3d, i put a temorary vertex at the mid point of each base and wrote down it's co-oords so i could get the xyx co-oords for each turret subentity
That's how I've been doing quarternon rotations. And the axis thing is a serious pita.to position the turrets, i used my 3d modeller program, i put the baserock object in the background, then grabbed my turret model in it's neutral rotation position (facing down the Z axis) and using only rotations in 2 axis rotated it into place (using the info panel in the 3d modeler to make a note of what rotations i did to get the turret pointing in the correct direction) - eg 20 degees on the x axis, 45 on the Z axis etc. i then fed these rotations values into a spreadsheet i set up with the quaternion calculation stuff from the wiki typed into it to get the final quaternion.
If i remember correctly, some of the rotations didn't work out properly, it's ages ago now but i think i needed to flip the sign on either the X or Y axis rotations - this is something to do with oolite using left hand co-oords and the modeller using right hand co-oords (i think)
I'd vote for a large design because it should be a majestic view to see one. I don't know if you did test the torus oxp, it's stations also have a larger area in which witchspace is impossible.Simon B wrote:The habitat rings are 780m across ... if I scale them dawn, the dock becomes a tight fit for some craft, but that needn't matter if I can figure out how to exclude too-large ships.
Wow I like that very much. Looks like a corporation building or research complex in spaceSimon B wrote:Here's something that I'm playing with ...
... that's an anaconda shown in there, for scale. The skin is not complete. May be a bit big:
... no skin this time, but there's a coriolis for the size. The habitat rings are 780m across ... if I scale them dawn, the dock becomes a tight fit for some craft, but that needn't matter if I can figure out how to exclude too-large ships.
Main concern with the design would be that the dock faces forward ...
Code: Select all
% Manually add in the needed data
% The final center and two edge-points on the reference face.
% choose R and S so that left-hand-rule R --> S creates an outward normal
P = (input);
R = (input);
S = (input);
% computes the rotation vector and angle
u=R-P; v=S-P; n=u*v;
r = (n(2),n(1),0);
T = arccos( n(3)/length(n) );
% Resulting quaternion
Q = ( cos(t/2), r.sin(T/2) )
It can be done either way. But if you don't use a separate object then the centre of the docking radius will be the centre of the model, which wouldn't work for this one or else you'd dock when you went anywhere near it from any angle. So here I'd use a conventional sub-ent dock and cut-out.Simon B wrote:I've reduced the size of the dock so it's not so weighty though.
Experience with docks?... do I need to cut out the dock interior for a separate object or can I just use the whole front section as the dock subent?
Again correct. Simplest way is to create your sub-ent in a known orientation (e.g. pointing along Z like a normal ship design) and then use the quaternion part of the key to re-orient it along the direction you want it pointing.Simon B wrote:a sub-ent has to be at P with a new orientation
... the subentity notation requires (a,b,c,d,e,f,g) where (a,b,c) is the translation and (d,e,f,g) = Q is the quaternion rotation. Q can be derived by considering the new orientation as a rotation of angle T about vector r which is perpendicular to start and finish orientations.