Oolite Bulletins

I'm thinking on how to pull off the "personal base" OXP concept, which is a good bit bigger. My other concept is a good bit simpler (I hope).

I think it would be cool to have a tractor beam mounted to the fuel scoop, such that when triggered, it would pull all objects within a certain size range and certain proximity to the ship RIGHT INTO the fuel scoop. However, to do this, it would deplete at least one energy bank (which of course would have to recharge).

The size limitation, of course, would prevent from accidentally pulling an asteroid or boulder right into one's ship, and would rule out the issue of accidentally pulling in ships or dockables.

Any thoughts?

Not something that I personally would use - I like the thrill of manually scooping, and the cursing when you take out your shields instead. However, I can see that some may like it, and it makes sense that the technology would have been developed at some point.

You wouldn't need to do it by size - role would probably make sense. See Thargoid's Cargo Shepherd for an example of a stationary beacon that attracts pods. The activation of the tractor beam would probably be via the primable equipment N key.

One thing you might have to be careful of: different ships will have likely have different locations of the scoop. I don't think that that scoop position of a ship is a property exposed to javascript, so if even if you get it working for some ships, it may fail for others...

I figure, if I steer clear of the most of the actual visual aspects of it, I may be able to pull it off. Just, when activated, the fuel scoop is shown as active, and all the objects appear off the ISS.

Should be fairly straightforward to code. Could do it two ways - set to attract all scoopable entities within a certain range to a point just in front of the nose of your ship when activated or could require targetting of object and activating to drag individual objects to the just in front of the nose of the ship. Then gently hoover them up with the scoop.

That is an excellent idea, Capt. Murphy!

I think Thargoid had a Tractor beam demo. You might look there for code.

Actually I coded one for the mission OXP I am working on. But it is designed to pull bigger entities like hermits, asteroids or anything. But apart from the mission where it requires to use this device to move a hermit to a new location, I can not think of where it may be useful.

Mauiby de Fug wrote:

You wouldn't need to do it by size - role would probably make sense. See Thargoid's Cargo Shepherd for an example of a stationary beacon that attracts pods.

I fiddled my copy of Cargo Shepherd to do just that. Increased its range, increased the attraction, increased the radius of it stop point, and then set most everything to include a cargopod role.

To get things sucked in within a usefully short time, they need to be moving at a reasonable speed.

As the objects home in, if they bump into each other, they often shatter and disappear.

Since you want them homing in on your cargo scoop, MANY of the objects will destroy one another as they approach. So you need to code around that.

Also, if you have an ore processor, that slows down scooping. You will have things coming in and hitting you / piling into one another while the ore processor is working.

I would suggest objects need to be accelerated toward the tractor beam source, then decelerated as they approach it. But they will need collision detection. It would be a sod to code right. Unless, the tractor beam does only one object at a time, in which case you could accelerate and decelerate it as hard as you like.

By making the beam only do one object at a time, it is more realistic. Also, since it should be drawing energy, it could be draining your energy right down when left activated to suck in lots of things. Then there would be an incentive to keep flying around toward these objects to save energy.

CommonSenseOTB wrote:

I think Thargoid had a Tractor beam demo. You might look there for code.

Indeed - share and enjoy...

As noted, the two key problems are when the targtted object is above your ship (+Y direction) - they'll tend to get dragged through the ship, which isn't too good. And secondly if two objects are drawn in at the same time they may collide and destroy each other. Both of those are why cargo shepherd has a cut-off range where the items stop (although there are still collisions if a huge number of pods are attracted).

The demo is slightly different - it's designed to have a demo ship follow the player as if being "towed" by a beam, although it could equally be used as an attractor. The mechanism used is slightly different to the one in CS, but whichever is more appropriate may depend on your wishes.

Playing today found an abandoned ship. The idea of a tow is a good one. or perhaps a drone that tractors the ship and returns it to the station for you?

I like the idea of a tractor beam, but I think it would be more useful personally if it drew a cargo pod into the fuel scoop. It would make scooping multiple cargo pods quicker and easier and it would also help on certain oxp ships where the scoop is awkwardly placed. The beam could be emitted from the same place as the ship's forward weapon mounting (in other words, use the same co-ordinates) and extend out 200-500 meters or so in front of the ship. When it latched on to a cargo pod it would move it under the ship into the scoop position (also defined as a set of co-ords by the ship's .plist.)