Oolite Bulletins

first pictures of my current work in progress









the dimensions are 30x24x3m, stats are open to discussion.
what -would- be a fairly balanced ship this size?

I think 3m makes it thinner than a standard Cargo container, which would make it impossible to carry any cargo...

It's a nice looking ship, looks like a proper fighter.

Your not gonna like this. It's smaller than an adder but I assume your ship has a combat fighter type of role so it will be very inflexible to anything other than combat in order to be any good at all in combat. My best guess would be: Max Speed = 285, thrust = 36, max cargo = 0, max energy = 128, no internal missiles, pitch/roll = 1.4/2.8, recharge rate = 3, no hyperdrive but 7.0 fuel, fuel injection standard equipment, possible to have shield boosters but not military shield enhancement, forward weapon mount only, primarily an escort or pirate(npc). This ship might be a good future candidate for 1 external missile at each wingtip. The hull is just so small and even this list might be too uber for its size. This is only my opinion for a balanced ship. Another ship to look at for comparison might be the eaglemk2. Is this an escort for the Wyvern Queen?

cargo was off from the beginning, though the first sketch was about twice the size.
i thought a missle each wingtip and two or maybe three pylons under each wing. "maybe" because there could be mounts for external weapons, subbed or imagined. the important part being that there might be all sorts of equipment available, but only limited number of attachment points where it can be mounted. so the player has to make up her/his mind what to mount. (if there is a way to script that)


edit: oops, forgot to answer the question:
no, this is a standalone ship. though i haven't made up my mind where to go with it.

lovely looking ship. what's that big red thing in the last pic, i can't work it out?

As said, 3m is micro titchy : if anything, a ship this size would be like a Worm : i defense ship carried by big ships, or used by stations a la the Sidewinder. tripling the size though would make it a great bounty hunter ship : it'd be mostly powerplants to give it good defensive stats, and maybe 4 or 5 tons of cargo space for look or mark recovery.

alternatively, maybe a ship like this would be prevalent around station : training ships for learner pilots : ie, probably only a pulse laser for the shooting lessons, a ton of space for the scooping parcatice. might also be playthings for annoying rich brats who flit around near-planetary orbit and annoy traders!

Speaking of filthy rich brats who hang out annoying other spacers, check out the Hatchling Boyracers.oxp for ideas.

Killer Wolf wrote:

lovely looking ship. what's that big red thing in the last pic, i can't work it out?

the peregrin features a modeled cockpit with tandem seats. what you see is the backrest of the rear seat, the POV being just beside the backrest of the front seat, in about eye level.
i didn't have time yet to put bodies into the seats, and the cockpit glass so far withstands all my attempts to make it transparent.
the bodies themselfes shouldn't pose much of a problem, as simpose is freeware and exports to .obj format. so there's literally thousands of characters to choose from.

I don't think you can do transparent in Oolite

didn't the Star Jellies manage some kind of translucency?

Yes, they do.
They use flipped normals which sort of means in practice you're looking through the faces from the 'wrong side'. It does give a 'see-through' effect, but wouldn't be much good for mimicking glass.

You could remove the cockpit completely and use a non-flashing flasher (or flashers) to give a semi transparent glow, I think others have used textures that have every other pixel completely transparent which gives a kind of stippled transparency effect...

well, first order of business is "sims in space" (or "sims in ooniverse"), then i can think how to go bout the visual problem.

Added to the WIP section of the [wiki]OXP List[/wiki]